Speculation killed Maricarmen Abascal and Spain must pay
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
After predatory landlords forced Maricarmen Abascal from her home and into the grave, Spain's working class must take to the streets and dismantle the deadly machinery of housing speculation.
Speculation costs lives and rentierism has killed our grandmother
Maricarmen Abascal did not die of old age. She died of exhaustion, of trauma, and of the cold, calculated violence of a system that views a human home as nothing more than a ticker symbol on a spreadsheet. BBC reports that the pensioner passed away in a Madrid hospital after being forcibly removed on a stretcher from her apartment. CNN notes that she had lived in that exact home since her father first rented the property. Then Urbagestión bought the building. The private investment fund did what capital always does when it gets its hooks into the working class: it tried to bleed her dry.
Urbagestión hiked her rent from €500 per month to an impossible €2,650, an astronomical demand that far eclipsed her monthly pension. Even their later reduced offer was more than her entire monthly income. Courts blocked previous eviction attempts, but the cruelty of the market is relentless. When the bailiffs finally came, they hauled the disabled woman out on a stretcher, sending her straight to the hospital. She fought for her life there until her death on Wednesday. Alicia del Río, spokesperson for the Madrid Tenants' Union, named the killer with absolute moral clarity: "Speculation costs lives, and today rentierism has finished killing our colleague Maricarmen."
We have read this ledger before. This is the 2008 foreclosure crisis playing out in real time across the Atlantic. Big banks and predatory lenders treated working families as collateral damage while the rest of us watched our blocks empty out. Back then, it was subprime mortgages and foreclosure-gate. Today, corporate landlords and vulture funds treat affordable housing like a casino. The mechanism is identical. Concentrated wealth buys concentrated power, and the costs always land on the zip codes and the grandmothers who cannot fight back. The Sindicato de Inquilinos knows this fight intimately, organizing tenants collectively to smash the structural violence of rentierism and predatory pricing by corporate landlords. The Madrid Tenants' Union declared that Abascal's tragic fate marked "a turning point in the history of this country."
The street will not tolerate a single eviction more
The response to Maricarmen's murder by market was not submission. It was an explosion of righteous fury. France 24 reports that her eviction sparked massive nationwide protests and thrust Spain's chronic housing shortage into the center of a roaring political crisis. Thousands of people have been camping in Puerta del Sol, Madrid, for 12 nights. They set up an improvised vigil and an altar to honor the woman banners rightly call "Mari Carmen, the grandmother of the whole country." In nationwide demonstrations over the weekend, people chanted "it's not a death, it's a killing" and "we will not tolerate a single eviction more."
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez offered his condolences. He called a snap general election for 29 November after emergency housing legislation was rejected in Congress by conservative and right-wing opponents. Sánchez stated that he needs a broader progressive majority to "overcome the resistance of the elites." But let us be clear about who blocked the emergency relief. The conservative People's Party, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, alongside the hard-right Vox party, opposed the proposed housing reforms. They argued the crisis should be solved by building more homes rather than regulating the predators. Feijóo had the gall to post on X that "in the face of a person's death, only respect is in order." He attempted to sanitize the political culpability of the right. This is the oldest trick in the book: demand quiet when your policies cause a coffin to be lowered into the ground.
The opposition's defense of the market is a cowardly shield for corporate greed. They tell us that regulation stifles supply, as if building luxury units will somehow rescue a pensioner paying a crushing rent hike to an investment fund. That is the strongest opposing case the right can muster, and it collapses the moment it hits reality. Deregulation does not build homes for grandmothers. It builds profit margins for Urbagestión. Yet the right wing votes down every eviction restriction put before parliament. They protect the landlords, not the people.
Fight and keep fighting for what is yours
Maricarmen left us a final directive from her hospital bed, captured in a video that will echo through every union hall and protest march. "I haven't managed to defend my home, but I have fought so that others can learn to fight for what's theirs," she said. The Madrid Tenants' Union has promised to honor that legacy. It stated that while a historic agreement was reached to let her return home, the solution came "too late" after a "torturing process." The cost to get to this point has been entirely too high, but the working people of Spain are answering her call. Unions have called a general strike for 11 November, and the tent encampments at Puerta del Sol are refusing to pack up.
We know what is coming next in this political theater. The snap election called for November will be a fierce battleground. Polls show the conservative right waiting in the wings, potentially needing the fascist-adjacent Vox party to seize power. If the right wins, they will dismantle rent controls, accelerate tenant displacement, and turn the housing market into an even more lethal playground for vulture funds. But elections alone will not save the vulnerable when the state has coddled the landlords for decades. The historic general strike must paralyze the economy until every predatory eviction is halted. Housing must be treated as a fundamental human right rather than a speculative asset class.
Government is the only counterweight ordinary people have against the landlords and the banks. When politicians fail to wield it, the streets must take over. Maricarmen Abascal gave her life to expose the rot at the heart of Spain's housing economy. Her memory now fuels a movement that cannot be legislated away or tear-gassed out of the public square. The elites who profit from human misery must learn a lesson. You cannot price human beings out of existence without facing the collective wrath of a nation standing up to say enough is enough.
Sources
- BBC: Spanish pensioner whose eviction sparked nationwide protests dies, union says
- CNN: Maricarmen: Evicted 87-year-old who became a symbol of Spain’s housing crisis has died
- BBC: Spanish pensioner whose eviction sparked nationwide protests dies, union says
- France 24: Evicted pensioner who sparked Spain housing protests dies: tenant union
- CNA: Evicted pensioner who sparked Spain housing protests dies: Tenant union