Almost 10 months on, Ricardo García Carmona still shudders at the way he spoke to his mother when she appeared on his doorstep with an urgent warning a little after 9am on Sunday 17 July last year. “She said: ‘Let’s go! We need to get out!’”
A few hours earlier, his mother told him, a young doorman called Álvaro Soto had been stabbed to death after an argument at the pub where he worked in the small Andalucían town of Peal de Becerro. The alleged killers, like García Carmona’s family, were members of Peal’s Gypsy community, and his mother could not shake the feeling that something terrible was about to happen.
“I started laughing at her and told her she was mad,” says the 34-year-old security guard. “Then I started to yell at her. ‘Where are we going to go?’ I told her it would be worse if we went because they’d think we were part of the same family as the guy who’d done it – ‘If we run away, the people in town will say we were involved.’”
By then, his mother was on her knees, begging her son to listen. “They’re going to come and they’re going to burn us out,” she said.
A little later, a crowd of people surged down the steps from the church and headed for García Carmona’s house. They chanted “Gypsies out!” and began kicking his car. A nearby civil guard officer told him that things “had got a bit out of hand” and warned him and his family to stay indoors.
“Do you get it now?” his mother asked. “They haven’t even buried [Soto] yet, and when they do the whole town will come to burn the Gypsies out. Let’s go.”
This time, García Carmona heeded her advice and the family packed up and fled to a hotel in the nearby town of Úbeda. He was in his room there the following night when friends in Peal began sending him photos of the anti-Gypsy violence that had followed a peaceful demonstration calling for justice for Soto.
In his absence, his home was ransacked, its white goods dragged out on to the street and the word “Murderer” sprayed on one wall. Other Gypsy property in Peal suffered similar fates: houses were looted and damaged; one was burned; cars were tipped over and walls disfigured with graffiti that read “Gypsies out”, “killer Gypsies” and “death to Gypsies”.
“I looked at those pictures in the hotel,” says García Carmona. “I’m not going to lie. I cried like a baby. I didn’t know what to do. I asked myself what I’d done to deserve this. Was all this just because I was a Gypsy?”
Four men were arrested in connection with the murder, two of whom were subsequently released pending trial. Police have recently begun questioning people over the anti-Gypsy attacks that followed the murder, while Spain’s public ombudsman is investigating the violence and the authorities’ response to it.
Peal’s mayor, David Rodríguez, called the events the “blackest and saddest” in the town’s history, and Spain’s social rights ministry said the attacks on the Gypsy families “should have no place in a plural, diverse and democratic society such as ours”.
Eight families – some 40 people, including elderly people and children – fled Peal in the wake of the violence, leaving behind them their homes and whatever could not be easily transported. Most have never been back. Despite the outrage that met the violence at the time, the families feel abandoned by the authorities who, they say, have done little more than refer them to social services in the areas to which they have moved.
García Carmona recently took the difficult decision to leave Andalucía for the small town of Polop de la Marina, near Benidorm, where he works 10-hour days picking loquats. Although he can support his family, and has relatives in the town, it is not Peal, the place where his family has lived for four generations, working the land and raising livestock.
While the security guard was always aware of a latent racism in his home town, he could never have imagined having to live through last year’s events – which carry echoes of the anti-Gypsy violence of the 1980s.
In July 1986, Gypsy families living in the Andalucían town of Martos – which, like Peal de Becerro, sits in Jaén province – were forced to flee after their homes were torched. Two years earlier, five Gypsies, including three children, were badly burned after a mob doused their house in another Jaén town, Torredonjimeno, with petrol in retaliation for an earlier assault.
A spokesperson for the mayor told the Observer: “When it comes to coexistence, there’s no problem here – neither before, nor now.”
A spokesperson for the Andalucían regional government said the central government was responsible for guaranteeing coexistence in the town, but the regional department of social inclusion and equality had been “working intensely” with different authorities and Gypsy associations to coordinate a response to the needs of the affected families. He also pointed out that the regional government had set up the Andalucían Council for the Gypsy People last year as part of its efforts to “achieve complete inclusion and fight the intolerance, discrimination and hatred that the Gypsy people suffer today”.
However, Marcos Santiago Cortés, a lawyer, columnist and writer from Córdoba who is also a Gypsy, says the authorities have been too slow to help the victims, and too reticent to call out what happened in Peal last July.
“I’m very proud to be Spanish and I never like criticising my country – it’s an advanced democracy and it has a lot of good things,” he says. “But I think there’s still a resistance when it comes to recognising that there was an outbreak of racism following an understandable outbreak of anger.”
As a lawyer, he adds, he has seen how terrible crimes can elicit outpourings of anger on courthouse steps. “But a whole town rising up to attack the homes of eight families isn’t normal, especially if they’re Gypsy families. But it happened. And I think the authorities should have stepped in and shown their indignation publicly.”
That said, Santiago is keen to point out that anti-Gypsy racism is hardly a uniquely Spanish problem.
“Europe has an unsettled debt when it comes to the Gypsy people, who are the very definition of a European people,” he says. “We’re present in every country and we’ve been here since Europe was conceived.”
While Spain has taken steps to address the problem – congress approved an anti-discrimination law classing antigitanismo as a hate crime in May last year – Gypsies continue to suffer marginalisation. After a fact-finding visit to Spain at the beginning of 2020, the former UN poverty expert Philip Alston called on the Spanish government to carry out a review to ensure Roma children were “not doomed to repeat the cycle of poverty and exclusion”.
Meanwhile, thousands of Gypsy and north African people living in the sprawling Cañada Real shantytown near Madrid have been without power for two-and-a-half years.
Even after everything that has happened, García Carmona would still like to go back to Peal, but he worries about the toll that would take on his family. His two-year-old son, who was beginning to talk at the time of the attacks, is suffering speech problems. “If he wants water now, he doesn’t say: ‘Daddy, water!’ He just points.”
His wife, who is pregnant with their second child, was left too traumatised to sleep. “She didn’t eat,” he says. “She just drank coffee after coffee so that she didn’t have to fall asleep and see people coming towards the house again in her head.”
Most of the exiled families are too scared to speak out publicly, but García Carmona is tired of feeling angry and powerless. While he is disgusted by Soto’s murder – “may the full weight of the law come down on the person who did that” – he wants justice for Peal’s Gypsies.
“If you’re in your own house in your own town, where you get along with everyone – and you’ve committed no crime and never been involved in any trouble – how would you feel if all this happened to you?” he asks. “This is the 21st century. Why should an entire community have to pay for what one person did?”
