December 20, 2013
ADA COLAU was sitting in a cafe here on a recent evening when another customer, heading for the door, recognized her and veered toward her table.
He leaned in for a quick word.
“Don’t you stop what you are doing,” he whispered in her ear. “Don’t you ever stop.”
Ms. Colau, her hands on her teacup, looked up and smiled. But the middle-aged man kept moving.
A few years ago, Ms. Colau was an unknown in Spain. But these days, her work defending homeowners who have fallen behind on their mortgages has made her a household name, and she is often stopped on the street by strangers offering encouragement.
“It’s nice,” she says, looking a bit embarrassed. “It’s nice that people associate me with these values.”
For many government officials, Ms. Colau is a strident, difficult character who had the nerve to call a representative of the Spanish Banking Association “a criminal” during a parliamentary hearing this year and encouraged protesters to embarrass officials by haranguing them outside their homes.
But for thousands of frightened Spaniards who have fallen on hard times and cannot keep up with their house payments, Ms. Colau is something of an angel. Her group, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, known as the PAH, has organized sit-in after sit-in, blocking hundreds of evictions and pressing for changes in Spain’s hard-line mortgage laws.
After the parliamentary hearing, Ms. Colau’s Twitter following grew to 100,000 from 8,000 and her name started showing up in popularity polls as someone Spaniards might like to vote for as an alternative to current politicians.
She says she feels the tide turning. Already, the banks have become more reluctant to evict and have shown a willingness to negotiate and, sometimes, to accept the keys to the property as settlement of foreclosure proceedings.
That kind of settlement is what Ms. Colau is pushing for. Right now under Spanish law, defaulters are personally liable for the full amount of the loan. After penalty interest charges and tens of thousands of dollars in court fees, former homeowners can end up without their homes and owing more than they originally borrowed when foreclosure proceedings are finished.
Bankruptcy is not the answer, either. Mortgage debt is specifically excluded in those proceedings here. It is a debt that people can never escape.
“We have not changed the law yet,” Ms. Colau said. “But there is progress. The banks are talking to people now, and they were not before.”
MS. COLAU’S recent fame does not seem to have touched her. Arguing with politicians on television, she can sound hard edged and feisty. But answering questions on a recent evening she seems motherly and laughs easily. She is wearing a bulky, worn sweater, stretched out at the sleeves. Around her neck is a hand-knit scarf, a gift from an elderly woman who approached her after she spoke at a neighborhood meeting one night.
She laughs at the uproar over her parliamentary testimony, saying the use of the word “criminal” was entirely spontaneous. “I had no idea that he would be testifying before me and he would say all those things,” she said. “It just came to me. I really did not plan it.”
Ms. Colau, 39, has been an activist since she was a student studying philosophy. Working for one cause or another (antiwar, antiglobalization, pro-housing for the poor) she has often barely made ends meet. She lived as a squatter for a while, and has had more than 20 odd jobs, she said. “I survived precariously at times,” she said. “Somehow, we just always got by.”
She now has a 2-year-old son with her partner, Adria Alemany, an economist who shares her passion for social struggles.
“No romantic dinners, no movies,” she said with a shrug. “Activism has been our life.”
Ms. Colau was one of the early organizers of the PAH, which was founded just four years ago, as Spain’s economic crisis began taking its toll and thousands of newly unemployed Spaniards started to fall behind on their mortgage payments. Ms. Colau said the need for the PAH, which now has 200 centers across Spain, was immediately obvious.
“People came to us and they couldn’t even speak,” she said. “They couldn’t even explain what had happened to them. They thought that nothing good would ever happen to them again.”
Despite Ms. Colau’s name recognition, the offices of the PAH hardly have the feel of an up-and-coming nonprofit. The furnishings are minimal: a few metal bookcases, a few posters taped to the walls. It is an all-volunteer operation, except for four people who, like she does, receive salaries from other nonprofits.
But on this evening, like many others, Ms. Colau was in the cafe because her office had been taken over by a meeting of families eager to exchange tips on how to handle the bankers who want to evict them.
These meetings, Ms. Colau says, still are the best part of what the PAH does. “People receive all this support and information,” she said. “It gives them hope again. It empowers them.”
“Each week you cry after these meetings with the homeowners, but not just with their pain. There is joy, too, because every week there are problems that get resolved. It is a very beautiful thing.”
It has not all been smooth sailing. After a wave of eviction-related suicides, the group collected 1.4 million signatures to force the government to consider changes in the mortgage laws and took its protests to politician’s homes. That prompted some members of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s party to begin attacking her, calling the PAH “Nazis” and “terrorist sympathizers.”
Ms. Colau dismissed the accusations, but the episode worried her. “Being called a terrorist?” she said. “That is scary.”
It worried her mother, too, she said. Ms. Colau grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Barcelona. Her mother sold real estate, but often took her to protests she was interested in. Her father worked his way up the ladder in an ad agency, starting out getting coffee. Both are proud of her, she said, and go to her protests whenever they can.
THREE months ago, Ms. Colau accepted a European Citizens’ Prize for the PAH given by the European Parliament. Mr. Rajoy’s party promptly called the award a scandal and asked that it be withdrawn.
Shortly after, the government drafted a set of strict new laws against public protests, laws that many believe are aimed at her initiatives. The laws introduce steep fines for those who take part in unauthorized protests, publish pictures of police officers or interrupt public events. Demonstrating near Parliament without permission, for instance, could draw a fine of 600,000 euros, or about $820,000.
Ms. Colau seems unperturbed. She responded on Twitter, calling on her followers to stage a day of general disobedience if the law is passed. “Either we disobey,” she wrote, “or we accept slavery.”
Source: The New York Times
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