Maricarmen, the woman who ignited the fight against evictions in Spain, dies

Maricarmen Abascal, the woman who ignited the fight against evictions in Spain, died this Wednesday at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital at the age of 87, as confirmed by the Tenants' Union in a statement. On September 23, she was evicted from her retirement home, where she lived for seven decades. Six years earlier, a company bought her apartment for a ridiculous price for the area precisely because she lived in it. With a pension of 1,400 euros, the woman never stopped paying rent, old income, and bills: about 500 euros a month in total. In 2020, the owners told her that she had to leave the apartment, because the contract had already been subrogated twice, first to her mother - who was not listed as the owner due to a Franco law - and then to her. And since then they have tried to evict her four times and they did not accept any of the proposals they received to either pay the difference in rent (they asked for 1,600 euros) or buy the apartment.

In that statement, also signed by her family and her lawyer, they recall that she had remained hospitalized since the eviction. “Although a historic agreement was reached that would have allowed him to return to his home, this solution has come too late,” they lament. The signatories consider that what happened after their eviction – massive demonstrations, camping in the squares, early elections and the call for a general strike – represents “a before and after in the history of this country”, but they warn that “the cost to get here has been too high.” And they say goodbye with the request that she repeated to them: “Fight, keep fighting for what is yours.”

Thanks to social pressure, for the first time in Spain an evicted person returned to their home, after the company that owned it agreed to make a new rental contract. Even so, the eviction and the previous attempts took their toll on Maricarmen's body, who in her last years could only get around in a wheelchair and needed help with daily tasks. The good thing is that he was at home. Behind him, almost seven years of legal proceedings to stay in his home. In recent months, his physical condition had worsened. He had lost muscle mass, had difficulty eating and said that even his voice had changed. He also needed a wheelchair to get around. "It has affected me in everything. I am not me now," he said two days before leaving his house.

The woman is already a symbol, in Spain and other parts of the world. Even outside his home, he encouraged citizens to defend their rights. "I would like to be there with you, accompany you in your camping, in your fight, but I don't have that luck. Therefore, from here I ask you all for courage. Fight, defend what is yours and, please, be careful. Continue camping until your body can take it," she appealed to the protesters from the hospital where she spent several days, exhausted after the eviction. The thousands of people who, outraged and driven by his story, protested in Madrid, and later in other Spanish cities, shared and treasured his videos. The person who started it all asked them to hold on. And they did it.

Everyone called her and calls her Maricarmen, but her full name is María del Carmen Abascal. In 1956 her father bought the apartment in the Ibiza neighborhood and she has spent practically her entire life there, with her mother and brother. She studied shorthand typing and secretarial writing, worked for 34 years as secretary of the board of directors of a pharmaceutical company and retired in 1998.

When he stopped working, he said, his routine didn't change much. He got up at nine, he liked to walk around the neighborhood, shop at the butcher shop on the corner and take care of the objects that cluttered his house: paintings, collectible pieces from his tea table, porcelain. “I've worked all my life,” he said proudly. The same pride with which she showed the black and white photographs of her family, one of the few things she took to the hospital when she was terminally ill.

Maricarmen was a woman of strong character. “I'm going to fight until the end,” he said over and over again in all the interviews. Tenacious, sometimes tough. She was always convinced to fight and until her last days, when she no longer had the strength, she asked her family from the Tenants' Union - that's what she called them - to fight for her. The last time this newspaper visited her at her home, two days before her eviction, she said with tears in her eyes that she only hoped she had been a light in the fight so that everyone has decent housing.

It wasn't just a light. It became an icon that has filled squares throughout Spain. The slogan “We are all Maricarmen” was read on posters and t-shirts. He always repeated that his dream was to die in the room where he had seen his father and mother die, where he lived for the last 71 years.

Before leaving her house, among boxes, Maricarmen remembered every corner of her apartment as if it were an extension of herself. "Here I have all my memories. My father died very young, in the year 60, at the age of 51. And my mother died in 2005, in this house. I have lived here from the year 56 to this day." Every painting and collectible on his tea table brought back memories of an experience he didn't want to say goodbye to.

Then she also confessed that she was not religious. "Those at the bottom are all the same, but he does believe in the one at the top. And every night, before going to sleep, he says good night, in this order: to God, to his parents, to Pope Francis and to the family he has lost. I laugh at the idea that he puts the pope before his brother," he stated. At the end of his life, he had two dreams: to die at home and rest in the Cantabrian Sea.