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‘Viscerally dedicated to social issues’: behind Lula’s drive to win final term in Brazil’s crunch election

On 1 January 2023, a few hours after being sworn in for his third stint as Brazil’s president, a ravenous Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sneaked away from a celebratory cocktail party packed with politicians and diplomats to grab a snack with one of his oldest friends. “This is your penultimate term,” that friend, the Dominican theologian and writer Frei Betto, recalls telling Lula as the pair chewed the fat in a back room of the foreign ministry in Brasília. Betto says Lula laughed off his provocation, insisting: “No, Betto! It’s the last one. I’m done!” But the theologian was unconvinced. “I’m certain that in four years’ time you’ll stand for a fourth,” he assured the leftwing veteran during their 40-minute tête-à-tête. “And sure enough, he did,” Betto added last month, as his forecast came true. On 4 October, just a few weeks shy of his 81st birthday, Lula will indeed seek to extend his legendary five-decade career in what will be the former union leader’s seventh presidential election since his first in 1989. Lula ran three unsuccessful campaigns before finally making history as Brazil’s first elected working-class president in 2002 and winning re-election in 2006. In 2022 he staged a sensational comeback, defeating the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, before thwarting a coup attempt masterminded by his rival a week into his third term. Four years later, Lula will face Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator, in October’s election, with the pair neck and neck in the polls. “I honestly don’t see how we can lose this election. I really don’t,” Lula told a podcast recently, although analysts say the vote is too close to call. During a recent rally in the country’s north-east, a region traditionally associated with Lula, who was born into rural poverty there in 1945, Bolsonaro claimed: “You’re looking at the next president of Brazil.” Betto, whose full name is Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo, remains confident his comrade of more than four decades will prevail and narrowly win one last term as president. “Politics is his calling,” he says of Lula. “He’s a political animal – he breathes it 25 hours a day.” But the social activist fears that if his latest prediction is wrong, the consequences for Brazil’s 214 million citizens will be dire. “What’s at stake is the return of a neo-fascist government that washed its hands during the pandemic and dismissed as insignificant the deaths of 700,000 people in Brazil from Covid-19,” Betto says of Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, when the president’s anti-scientific response and sabotage of vaccination efforts was widely blamed for the high death toll. Betto’s greatest fear is that a second Bolsonaro presidency would help Donald Trump to tighten his grip on Latin America, where he is trying to reassert Washington’s dominance as part of the so-called “Donroe doctrine”. The most dramatic episode of that campaign came in January, when US special forces invaded Venezuela, abducting President Nicolás Maduro and in effect capturing the government he left behind. Cuba, which Betto has visited regularly since becoming friends with Fidel Castro after they met in 1980, is also in Trump’s crosshairs. The US has been trying to topple its communist government by suffocating the economy and cutting off the country’s fuel supply. Betto, 82, believes another Bolsonaro presidency would bring “complete alignment with the US”. “We would become what Venezuela is today: an American protectorate,” he says. “There would be a devastating wave of privatisations, and social issues would get much worse. Rightwing governments are focused on the elites, focused on the financial markets, and aren’t concerned with the people.” This week Lula’s campaign accused Trump of seeking to “colonise” Brazil and trying to sway the election in Bolsonaro’s favour to capture its natural resources. The theologian also fears a Bolsonaro win would deal a body blow to the democracy he and Lula were trying to rescue when they became friends in São Paulo’s industrial heartlands in the early 1980s. While Bolsonaro’s 2023 putsch flopped, Betto believes Brazil’s failure to punish those responsible for abuses during the 1964-85 military regime has left the door open to future power grabs. “The problem is that we didn’t investigate the crimes of the dictatorship the way Chile, Argentina and Uruguay did,” he says. “So there’s a very strong dictatorial residue in the Brazilian armed forces … that could resurface at any moment.” The civilians and soldiers responsible for the failed 2023 coup were arrested, tried and jailed during Lula’s third presidency. The ringleader, Jair Bolsonaro, received a 27-year sentence – hence his oldest son seeking the presidency in his place. “All of this could be overturned with Flávio Bolsonaro’s election, because he would have the power to pardon them,” Betto says. Before the 2022 election there was a powerful outpouring of concern – in Brazil and around the world – over Bolsonaro’s overtly authoritarian plans. But Betto, who has personal experience of the dangers of authoritarian rule, does not detect the same level of alarm now at the prospect of Bolsonaro’s son winning power. Betto was jailed twice during Brazil’s dictatorship: first suffering 15 days of beatings at the navy’s secret service base in Rio, then spending nearly four years behind bars in São Paulo for helping political dissidents to flee abroad. “Honestly, the possibility of living under a dictatorship again is truly terrifying,” he says. “The only people who could possibly think a dictatorship is a good thing are those who haven’t experienced it first-hand, like I have.” Betto says part of the blame for the far-right’s advance lies with the left, which has lost ground to evangelical churches and conservative forces in poor communities, where leftwing Catholic activists such as him were once deeply embedded. “We have to go back to the favelas,” he says. “We have to go back to rural areas. We have to go back to all the places where there are marginalised or excluded people.” The bestselling writer also worries that Lula – who will be 85 by the end of his fourth term, if he wins – has failed to groom an heir. “I don’t see anyone in the Workers’ party today who has his charisma or political potential,” he says, calling possible successors too inexperienced or lacking in popular appeal. Speaking during a recent visit to Rio, Betto described his euphoria at his friend’s historic victory nearly 25 years ago. “It was a moment of immense joy for all of us – and of immense hope for Brazil,” says the activist, who recalls reading Lula a passage from Psalm 72 at his home a few hours before his election was confirmed. The psalm says: “He shall have pity on the weak and poor. He shall preserve the lives of the needy.” Betto believes Lula’s decision to seek re-election stems from his obsession with social justice – even if the theologian sometimes thinks his friend is insufficiently leftwing and missed a historic opportunity to implement agrarian reform when he first came to power. “Lula is someone who is completely, viscerally dedicated to social issues, because of his personal experience with childhood hunger and abandonment,” he says, noting how four of the 12 children Lula’s mother, Dona Lindu, had died of starvation and extreme poverty. “I hope Lula wins and I will do everything I can to make that happen,” he adds of next week’s crunch election, before admitting: “But things aren’t easy.”

61m tonnes of rubble: Gaza aid workers face delicate task of clearing ruins concealing up to 10,000 bodies

It took all day to clear a section of road in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood in Gaza City. At the end of it, Ahmed Alyan, a UN engineer, was exhausted, surrounded by mountains of rubble despite the day’s work. “I feel as if we are holding a spoon and trying to empty the sea,” Alyan said, beads of sweat trickling down his forehead after a long, hot summer day. Alyan is part of a World Food Programme (WFP) team who have been working on Beirut Street, once a busy main thoroughfare lined with shops, offices and homes and filled with traffic and people. But now it is virtually deserted. The road was blocked by piles of rubble, stones and the wreckage of destroyed shops. Nearby, a tower stood tilted after some of its concrete foundations were damaged, while displaced families continued to live inside. In some parts of the road, sewage flowed from the ground after the drainage system was damaged and blocked by Israeli bombardment. The UN estimates that removing the bulk of the rubble in the Gaza Strip could take at least seven to 10 years and cost billions of dollars. That would make the removal of war debris in Gaza one of the largest rubble-clearance operations in modern history. “The estimate of the total amount of rubble in Gaza is 61m tonnes. It is approximately 20 times the amount of rubble generated in all wars across the world over the last 18 years,” said Jaco Cilliers, the UN Development Programme’s special representative in Palestine. The task is being carried out in extremely difficult and hazardous conditions. The clearance teams are working in ruins containing countless dead bodies and unexploded bombs. So far, 580km of roads have been cleared, which has in turn made possible the movement of aid trucks, relief teams and residents. However, the reconstruction of Gaza is a huge challenge facing international and local organisations. After more than two years of work, about 907,000 tonnes of rubble have been removed and more than 300,000 tonnes recycled and reused. But this represents only about 1.5% of the total rubble. To make things more difficult, the Israeli authorities have banned the necessary equipment from entering Gaza on the grounds that almost any aid that is not food or medicine could be “dual-use” and could somehow benefit Hamas. Initially, the WFP work was limited to removing debris from the roads and pushing it to the sides to create a passage for trucks. But the sheer quantity was overwhelming, and continuing Israeli bombardment during the nearly year-old ceasefire kept adding to the gargantuan task. Some roads had to be reopened several times. Meanwhile, the so-called yellow line, a demarcation established at the start of the ceasefire last October, keeps creeping forward as Israeli troops seize more of the territory. The area still accessible to people and aid workers is barely 30% of the whole Gaza Strip, making the problem of what to do with the rubble even more acute. “One of the ways we have tried to address this problem is by recycling and reusing the rubble in different ways,” Cilliers said. The UNDP has begun managing five rubble-crushing sites across Gaza, where debris collected from roads and damaged critical infrastructure is processed for reuse. The rubble is first sorted to remove non-concrete materials, including metal and steel rods. The concrete is then crushed into smaller pieces, eventually down to roughly the size of a marble or a very small rock. UNDP relies on seven crushers across Gaza, all of which were already in the territory before the war. Two of the seven were reconstructed by local engineers in Gaza over the past year, based on models they had available, as they were unable to bring new machinery into the strip. At one of the crushing sites, a large space that had previously housed UN warehouses, piles of rubble are stacked across the yard. Trucks arriving with large amounts of debris stop on a weighbridge before tipping their cargo on to the piles. There is a constant roar in the area as the mechanism breaks the concrete into smaller pieces, and the air is thick with dust. The condition of the machinery poses a big challenge for the teams carrying out the work. Most of the equipment available in Gaza has become severely worn out. The machinery frequently breaks down during operations, partly because of the acute shortage of spare parts, engine oil and other resources needed to maintain and operate it. With major restrictions on the entry of construction materials still in place, engineers are reusing the crushed rubble for a number of essential purposes. Much of it is used to repair roads and fill potholes, while some is placed beneath tents and shelters to raise them above rainwater and sewage. Nehal Abu Hassan, a member of the WFP team, said: “These materials cannot be compared with the natural materials normally used to build roads. Their quality is lower, and they are difficult to work with. But there is no alternative. These solutions have been imposed on us by the reality we are living in.” Removing some of the rubble has already had a big impact. “The road has become wider, the problem of rodents and insects has decreased and cars can pass through more easily,” said Ibrahim Daradona, a displaced man from Jabaliya who is living in the Tel al-Hawa area of Gaza City. “The rubble was even a danger to children playing here.” More than 2.1 million displaced people are living in tents and temporary shelters, as dire humanitarian conditions persist after nearly three years. Rubble has become part of the environment in which they live every day. The removal of rubble has also helped revive Gaza’s local economy by creating space for people to start new activities and reopen shops and small businesses. “One of the things we have seen is that when we clear rubble in front of damaged shops and businesses, many of them reopen within around 20 days,” Cilliers said. Despite all the efforts to remove rubble and restore access to residential areas, the remains of homes carry a particular sensitivity. Every metre of rubble may conceal things that cannot be seen from the outside. “Rubble in some areas does not represent just debris to people; it represents their entire life and memories. In some cases, there may be bodies still under the rubble. That is why removing it is a very sensitive issue for families and communities,” said Abu Hassan. The presence of human remains still buried under the rubble remains one of the most urgent humanitarian issues in Gaza. According to estimates cited by the UNDP, between 8,000 and 10,000 bodies may still be buried. UNDP has said it is working with organisations including the International Committee of the Red Cross to identify locations where human remains may be buried and prioritise them during rubble-removal and recovery operations. “We are also working on a forensic process to identify remains, [to] ensure that they are handled properly and that religious burial rights are respected, and [to] provide the necessary documentation and certificates for families. This is extremely important for families in Gaza,” Cilliers said. Unexploded ordnance in rubble and on roads is a serious challenge for teams clearing the debris. UNDP and WFP teams coordinate with the UN mine-clearing arm, Unmas, the British charity the Halo Trust and other organisations before beginning clearance work, to identify unexploded ordnance and protect workers and returning families. Given the limited capacity to remove explosive ordnance in Gaza, these organisations cannot disarm or remove all unexploded items. But they can identify hazardous areas and mark them. Alongside the danger from explosives, rubble may contain other hazardous materials, including asbestos, which can pose a serious health risk when its fibres are inhaled. Partly standing damaged buildings pose another risk. Some families return to their homes believing they are safe, only for the structures to collapse suddenly. Assessing the safety of damaged buildings before residents return is therefore an important part of the recovery process. “The progress in early recovery is slow, we are trying to do what we can despite the limitations on bringing in the equipment and services we need,” Cilliers said.

Trump rejects Iran’s seven-day peace deal to reopen strait of Hormuz

Donald Trump has said he has rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the strait of Hormuz within a week and resume nuclear talks in return for the lifting of the US naval blockade of Iranian ports. “They made a proposal but I reject it,” the US president told reporters at the White House. The president was earlier said to be privately sceptical Iran would meet his demands to dismantle its nuclear programme, according to unnamed US officials cited by the Wall Street Journal. Trump has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms in the US, the newspaper reported. Meanwhile, on Friday evening, he published a post on his Truth Social platform with a graphic showing a map with the strait of Hormuz renamed as the “Trump Strait”. During a three-hour meeting at the UN general assembly in New York earlier this week, Iran had proposed reopening the strait, which would relieve pressure on global energy markets, and restart talks on its nuclear programme within seven days. In return, as well as lifting its naval blockade, Iran wants the US to permit the release of some of Iran’s frozen assets, restore the waiver that lifted sanctions on Iran’s oil exports and observe a “ceasefire on all fronts”. That would involve the US president convincing Israel to end its attacks on Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, a tall order, and allowing the strait to reopen largely on Iran’s terms, with the new route predominantly going through Iranian waters. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, on Sunday said “our conditions are clear and any move toward reopening the strait of Hormuz is contingent upon these conditions being fulfilled”. “We will not back down from them,” Araghchi said, state broadcaster IRIB reported. “We have never closed the door to diplomacy or negotiations, but at the same time, we have never backed down from our rights.” Reports of the rejection came as Iranian state media reported on Saturday morning that the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was on his way back to Tehran from New York. After a meeting with UN secretary general, António Guterres, Pezeshkian said: “Iran has not walked away from the negotiating table, but given past experiences, it no longer trusts the United States.” Araghchi said on Sunday that the Iranians “saw the first reaction from the US president, but so far, nothing has been conveyed to us by the mediators”. “We are waiting for the mediators to convey the definitive positions to us, and we will make a decision based on them,” the foreign minister added. Earlier, a US official had ⁠said discussions with Iran through mediators were “positive and constructive” and, on Friday, Araghchi, had detailed the proposal to reporters outside the UN security council. He said the seven-day timeline to open the strait and resume talks could start as soon as the US accepts Iran’s proposal. The initial steps would take about four to five days to complete, the strait would be opened on the sixth day and talks on the nuclear programme would start on the seventh day, he said. This would include a protocol to allow UN nuclear inspectors back in to look at Iran’s damaged sites and the stockpile of highly enriched uranium. The US naval blockade is putting intense pressure on the Iranian economy, while the seven-month-old conflict in the region has disrupted oil flows through one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes and is increasing the cost of living around the globe. Pezeshkian, in an interview with the CBS show Face the Nation, said Tehran was ready for talks on its nuclear programme and other issues, but would not accept “bullying or coercion”. “Iran is not seeking war, but will defend itself against pressure, threats and attacks,” Pezeshkian said, adding that it had already agreed that “we’re not supposed to develop nuclear weapons”. Previous attempts at diplomacy have failed ‌to end the war, which began on 28 February with US and Israeli attacks. Since then the conflict has alternated between pauses and renewed strikes, killing thousands while degrading Iran’s conventional forces and damaging its already ailing economy. Iran and its allies have retaliated by extending the conflict throughout the region. Iran has struck US allies in the Gulf with drones and missiles while its Houthi allies in Yemen have targeted Saudi interests. Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq were blamed for a pipeline attack that temporarily took more Saudi oil off the market. The violence in Yemen has prompted a new humanitarian crisis, the UN children’s agency said on Friday, reporting a rise in acute malnutrition among children. Trump has previously said he was in no rush to reach a deal, even as high oil prices fuel inflation. On the Iranian side, there are questions as to whether the hardliners who dominate the security forces would accept compromises championed by moderates such as Pezeshkian. Diplomatic efforts surrounding the UN general assembly underscored the global stakes in the conflict. Marina Dunbar contributed. With Reuters and AP

Poland is racing ahead with military spending – but will it help or damage its economic growth story?

A short distance north from Warsaw along the Vistula river, camouflaged missile launchers roll through the quiet village of Czosnów. As recently as two years ago, their destination – a hi-tech weapons facility opened this month – had been a cornfield. Now, as Poland drives up defence investment at one of the fastest rates in the developed world, this rural spot has been transformed amid Europe’s response to Russian aggression and US disengagement. “Everyone has had to move twice as fast to meet the Polish needs,” says Jim Price, the managing director of MBDA Polska, the local subsidiary of the European multinational arms group. Based in the UK, the former Royal Marine says Poland is shifting from importing its weapons to manufacturing them at home. “When it became clear there is a need to defend Nato’s eastern flank, in the event of a war itself, they needed to be able to do things in the blink of an eye. So we decided to invest in-the country to create a facility. We had to build up our Polish subsidiary – and that means Polish jobs.” Poland’s defence budget has grown at a blistering pace. Since Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine almost five years ago, spending as a share of Polish gross domestic product (GDP) has more than doubled from 2.2% to 4.8% this year. In cash terms, this equates to $53bn (£39.8bn), the fourth-highest in the EU after Germany, France and Italy. Attention in Warsaw is clearly focused on the risk of an imminent Russian test of Nato resolve. However, there is also another motive: growing the economy. Inside the soundproofed, airlock-style doors enclosing his office in Warsaw, Marcin Bosacki, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, says Russian aggression is heavily influencing the Polish government’s plans for economic development and cooperation with EU and Nato allies. “[It] is clearly benefiting Polish security; Polish defence, and the Polish economy as well,” he says. Strengthening economic ties in the pursuit of military readiness would discourage Putin (“a traditional Russian imperialist”) from attacking Nato, Bosacki adds. “The only thing which Putin understands is solidarity and power. And so the more we are united and strong, the less likely the outcome of more aggressive Russian provocations against Nato member states is.” Hope remains for a diplomatic solution. This month, Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held talks in Moscow with Putin and in Kyiv with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Next month, further negotiations are scheduled in Abu Dhabi. However, diplomatic sources believe Russia is unlikely to cede ground – rendering Nato’s demonstrations of military readiness critical. History shows defence and economics are closely intertwined. Statisticians first devised GDP as a metric in response to the 1930s Great Depression and needs of wartime planning to gauge the capacity of an economy. Poland has been through an economic miracle since the Solidarność (solidarity) movement that arose from the Gdańsk shipyard strikes paved the way for its transition from communism almost four decades ago. Living standards have shot up from 40% of the EU average in the mid-1990s to 81% last year. Joining the EU in 2004 and securing catch-up funds from Brussels – which was spent on new roads, railways, and other productivity-enhancing infrastructure – also helped. Annual output surpassed $1tn (£755bn) last year, with Poland among the fastest-growing EU countries at an annualised rate of 3.9% in the second quarter despite the global headwinds caused by the Iran war. However, Poland’s defence boom is not cost-free. Nor has economic development helped it avoid political polarisation. The rising military budget is among the reasons why Poland is predicted to run the biggest fiscal deficit in the EU next year, at 7.1% of GDP. Last week, Moody’s downgraded the country’s long-term sovereign credit rating to the lowest level since 2002, amid an apparent lack of willingness to rebuild fiscal buffers. Leszek Kąsek, a Warsaw-based economist at ING Bank, said: “This path is not sustainable. You should ask people if Poland can maintain its growth story and whether politicians will be ready to adjust?” Wedged between larger neighbours it has been subjugated twice within living memory, Poles are uneasy about national security. But despite its economic turnaround under EU membership, and as it secures billions of euros in defence funds from Brussels, support for Eurosceptic politics remains. In the run-up to the general election next year, the defence of the country, support for Ukraine and EU relations will be highly politically charged. Outside the foreign ministry in Warsaw, protesters wave placards in a “Poles for peace” nationalist rally, organised by rightwing politicians opposed to the EU and its support for Ukraine. Inside the building’s marble halls, where the Polish flag appears to be positioned next to those of Nato and the EU at almost every opportunity, Bosacki says divisions over the benefits to Poland of membership to both institutions has emerged for the first time. This year, Poland’s president, Karol Nawrocki, who has backing from the rightwing Peace and Justice party, attempted to block the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk’s liberal, pro-EU government from accessing €44bn (£38bn) of defence investment loans approved under the bloc’s security action for Europe (Safe) programme. “I think our right is so eager to regain power they will use anything,” Bosacki says. “Here for the first time, the opposition was [against doing] something which, in my opinion – and the opinion of the majority of Poles – is clearly benefiting Polish security, Polish defence and the Polish economy as well.” Through Safe, Warsaw secured the largest single disbursement in the loan programme. The government has pledged to channel almost 90% of it to domestic industry – led by Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa (PGZ), the state-owned defence conglomerate. However, in the race to build up capacity, the tills are ringing for US-arms manufacturers supplying Patriot missiles, Abrams tanks and F-35 fighter jets. In March, the International Monetary Fund cautioned that the positive economic spillovers from EU defence investment would not necessarily flow for the governments taking out their chequebooks. However, Warsaw is doing defence deals with international partners, including the UK, to help develop its domestic manufacturing base at the same time as building military readiness. The British defence group Babcock is working with PGZ to help build a fleet of new frigates. Known as the Miecznik, or swordfish, programme, the company has a shipyard at Gdynia on the Baltic coast. The first ship was launched this summer by Tusk. “It’s a must for Poland, basically, to invest more. But they want to do it in a smart way,” says Andrzej Maciejewski, Babcock’s country director for Poland, who is based in Warsaw. “We’re addressing this ambition – that these great investments in defence will bring greater value for money and, in the longer run, these capabilities.” BAE Systems is partnering with the PGZ subsidiary Mesko, which makes ammunition and rockets, to build an artillery plant in Poland’s old southern industrial heartlands near Katowice. By 2028, Poland plans three new munition factories. During a visit to the Mesko facility in August, Tusk said figures for 2023 showed Poland was capable of producing only 5,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition – a Nato-standard artillery shells. “More is used in one day on the Russian-Ukrainian front,” he said. This year, Poland will have increased production to 30,000 rounds, with a goal of 200,000 a year in the next two years. This month, Luke Pollard, the UK minister for defence readiness, visited Czosnów for the opening of the MBDA facility. Pollard said it would help support jobs in both countries, including in Bristol, Stevenage and Bolton. Despite this, Britain is increasing defence investment at a slower pace. The government has committed to increase spending from 2.3% of GDP last year to 3%, but has not spelled out precisely how or when this will be achieved. In Poland, there are signs its investment spree is beginning to pay off for local contractors. Maciej Klemm, the co-founder of Advanced Protection Systems (APS), which builds counter-drone systems in Gdynia, has increased its headcount from about 150 staff to 200 this year. Amid growing Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace, APS is playing a role in the Warsaw’s $4bn San programme to build an “anti-drone wall” to protect the country’s eastern flank. “We are spending a lot of money as a nation, and we are almost a poster child for it,” Klemm says. Splitting his time between Poland and the UK, where he still lives with his family after graduating from the University of Bristol in the 2000s, Klemm also sums up Poland’s recent economic history. “I was moving to Britain at the time there was a big wave of Poles coming over here. Now after Brexit, that wave partly receded and went the other way. Now, companies like ourselves and others are showing we have technical talent; we can build on this, and grow companies in Poland.”

Eviction of 87-year-old puts Spain’s deepening housing crisis in the spotlight

Images of an octogenarian being evicted from the home she had lived in for seven decades on a stretcher, flanked by protesters and police officers, sparked indignation across Spain. Hours later, people began taking to the streets. In Madrid, an estimated 10,000 people turned up on Wednesday, wielding signs that read “Shame” and “Out with the vulture funds”, to protest against the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal. From the northern tip of Spain to the south, people poured into plazas calling for a nationwide reckoning over access to housing. The catalyst was the eviction of Abascal, now known across the country by her first name, Maricarmen. The 87-year-old woman with a disability said she had been forced to leave her home after she was unable to afford the 230% rent hike demanded by the investment fund that bought her apartment. “This eviction is the canary in the coalmine,” said political scientist Cristina Monge. “It’s become a symbol, seen as the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the issue of housing.” It was, as newspaper El País said in an editorial, a glimpse of a housing market that had become completely unmoored from the average income in Spain, as rents rose 80% in a decade, while the cost of homes had climbed by 63%. “The law was upheld, and the market worked. But it is the law of the jungle in a broken market, and it is a failure.” The investment fund linked to the eviction of Maricarmen did not reply to a request for comment from the Guardian. Saturday saw around 25,000 people, according to government figures, take to the streets of Madrid, rattling keys as they called for measures to curb rising housing costs and make evictions more difficult. Some brought tents and sleeping bags, announcing plans to set up a protest camp in Madrid’s central Sol plaza. The eviction had left many in Spain grappling with a sense of “powerlessness”, said Monge, given that the issue of housing had also been at the forefront of the Spanish Indignados movement, or 15-M, the years-long anti-austerity and anti-corruption protest movement that involved millions of Spaniards and reshaped the country’s politics. “Now, 15 years later, housing is still the number one concern of Spaniards. And there are still evictions every day, to the order of about 25,000 per year,” she said. “But the paradox is that the country’s government includes some of the same people who led the 15-M protests. And still, housing remains an enormous challenge.” As anger mounted this week, politicians laid the blame on each other for the eviction. Rights campaigners and researchers weighed in with potential solutions, citing the more than 3m homes believed to be sitting empty across the country or government figures that suggest social housing makes up just 2.5% of the total stock in Spain, compared to 14% in France and 34% in the Netherlands. The head of one of the country’s biggest labour unions called for investment funds to be “kicked out” of the housing market. “Homes are for living in, not for large corporations to do business,” said Unai Sordo of the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO) as he called for a tax system that would make “the business of hoarding homes unprofitable”. The UN’s special rapporteur on the right to housing, Koldo Casla, called on Spain to amend the laws governing its legal system, describing it as “impossible to understand” how the profitability of a real estate company had been prioritised over Maricarmen’s right to housing. The leftwing coalition Sumar, the junior partner in the government, said it would push the socialist-led government to greenlight the expropriation of Maricarmen’s former home as well as put forward a package of rent freezes. The widespread demand for change has cast a spotlight on the deep divisions that exist among Spain’s political parties when it comes to the issue of housing. These divisions were laid bare earlier this year when the conservative People’s party, the far-right Vox and the hardline Catalan pro-independence party Junts voted to end a moratorium on evictions that for six years had managed to shield some vulnerable tenants from eviction. On Wednesday, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, who is under fire for not doing more to ensure his government had carried through on its promises of making housing a priority, promised to swiftly introduce a raft of measures. “Maricarmen’s eviction is a social tragedy that we cannot accept,” he said. While his government had in 2023 managed to pass legislation that strengthened tenant protection and widened access to rent control, regions led by the People’s party had wielded their powers over housing to avoid implementing parts of the legislation. Among those who had ignored parts of the legislation was the rightwing leader of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who in recent weeks has faced questions over her administration’s decision to allegedly spend €6.3m (£5.4m) of public funds on a residential penthouse to use as a temporary office. The striking contrast between the allegations against Ayuso and the eviction of Maricarmen has repeatedly cropped up this week, from the decision to hold Wednesday’s protest in Madrid on a boulevard next to the penthouse, to the chants urging “Ayuso’s penthouse for Maricarmen”. The regional leader has so far sought to downplay the significance of Maricarmen’s eviction, describing it as “one out of the 25,500 that take place every year in Spain” and noting that it had been authorised by the country’s courts. While the story of Maricarmen had dominated headlines, turning the octogenarian into the poster woman for those bearing the brunt of Spain’s soaring real estate market, many pointed to her plight as a glimpse of a wider reality. “Maricarmen’s case is not an isolated incident; it is just one more example of the suffering endured by thousands of households in Spain,” Amnesty International Spain said in a statement. “Bold measures must be taken immediately. Institutions must go beyond simply expressing regret in the press, they must take action.”

Ukraine war briefing: German foreign minister urges Russia to abandon dangerous escalation in rare meeting

The foreign ministers of Russia and Germany met in New York on the sidelines of the ⁠UN general assembly, ⁠in the first such talks since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But Russia’s top diplomat dismissed Germany’s calls to ease off its “dangerous path of escalation” toward Europe, instead accusing Germany of being Ukraine’s main sponsor and seeking to be a leading military power in Europe. “Does Berlin understand what this could lead to?” the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, asked in his speech at the gathering of world leaders on Saturday. “Didn’t they learn the lessons of world war two?” German foreign minister, Johann ‌Wadephul, used the talks to call on Russia “to abandon the dangerous path of escalation vis-a-vis Germany, Europe, and Nato”, according to a delegation source. Wadephul said incidents such as the attempted drone attack in Leipzig would not shake Germany’s resolve to support Ukraine, according to sources. Relations between Moscow and Berlin have been frozen since the Russian invasion, and tensions escalated further after the drone incident at Leipzig airport. In a sign of the continued frostiness, Lavrov told a press conference on Saturday “nothing new” came from the talks with his German counterpart. “I told him that frankly … you could just have called me and said: ‘read my statement’,” Lavrov said. “He simply reiterated his official public position condemning Russia … you can judge for yourself whether that counts as dialogue or not.” Still, the ministers discussed bilateral ties and the war in Ukraine, officials from ‌both sides said. Wadephul urged Lavrov to do “everything possible to reach an agreement on grain exports via the Black Sea”, a German ‌delegation source said. In a sign of the sensitivities around meeting the Russian foreign minister, Wadephul notified his European allies of the meeting afterwards in a message seen by Reuters. “I used this opportunity to reiterate our position on Russia’s war of aggression ⁠against Ukraine and to call for an immediate and complete ceasefire, most pressingly with a focus on grain exports, and the energy infrastructure,” he wrote. After the meeting Lavrov addressed world leaders at the assembly, where he defended Russia’s war in Ukraine and lobbed barbs at the west — including Germany – and criticised the militarisation of Japan. He made clear that Russia will veto any attempt by Germany and Japan for permanent seats on the UN security council. The two nations fought Russia, Britain and the US in the second world war. Writing on her personal Telegram channel, Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for Russia’s foreign ministry, said that “tens of diplomats” had come to meet Lavrov to “shake his hand and thank Russia”. An overwhelming majority of general assembly member nations have repeatedly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as Wadephul noted in his own address to the assembly Saturday. “Russia’s war targets the lives of millions of innocent people, the existence of the Ukrainian state and culture and the European peace order,” he said, urging Russia to negotiating toward ending the fighting. The talks came amid an intensifying aerial war and as Donald Trump said he hoped the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would “settle” with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. With frontline positions largely unchanged since last year, Russia has hammered Ukraine with cruise and ballistic missiles, powerful glide bombs and jet-powered drones in recent months, while Ukraine’s long-range drones have targeted Russian oil refineries and businesses. “It is essential that our partners not forget: Russia is escalating every single day,” Zelenskyy wrote on Saturday. “If the Russians have chosen to make their strikes even more brutal, the world must choose stronger responses to keep the war from spreading further.” Ukrainian officials said Russian attacks killed four people on Saturday, as Russian authorities said a Ukrainian drone attack killed three. Residents of Kyiv are preparing for power cuts, drone attacks and a bitter cold winter by stocking up on generators, food and “dry showers”, as the Ukrainian capital becomes a frontline city. And Russia has opened a new front in its campaign against Ukraine, hitting several datacentres and internet providers in Kyiv this week in an apparent attempt to weaken the digital backbone of the economy.

Greek authorities seek answers after six killed in Athens apartment block explosion

Greek authorities say they are trying to discover what caused a two-storey apartment block in the heart of ancient Athens to collapse “in a matter of seconds”, killing six people. Emergency teams found the victims, including four American tourists, on Saturday, more than 24 hours after the early morning explosion in the historic Plaka district. The fire service said the bodies of three women and three men had been found, but stopped short of identifying them. A Briton and his Greek wife, 77 and 78, who lived in a flat on the building’s upper floor, were among those killed, the Guardian was told. “The bodies have been taken to the morgue where postmortems will be conducted,” the city’s vice-mayor, Paris Charlaftis, said in a telephone interview from the blast scene. “Our focus now is on the explosion’s cause. What could have happened to bring the building down in a matter of seconds?” Rescuers had deployed thermal cameras and geophones, used to detect deep subsonic frequencies, in the hope of finding survivors. Earth-moving machines and specially trained search dogs were brought in to move and comb mounds of rubble through the night. Before the bodies were pulled from the ruins on Saturday, police put the missing at six, saying four were Americans staying in a short-term rental on the building’s first floor. Two brothers and their wives, all four were due to fly to the US on Friday, just hours after the explosion. “When they failed to turn up for the flight they had checked into only a day earlier, that gave us a further lead,” a source said. “It became clearer that they must have been there when the blast occurred.” The Briton, a talented artist, who lived with his wife on the second floor, was described by Charlaftis as being partially disabled. “He had kinetic issues, and it was thought likely they, too, were in the building [at the time of the blast].” Nestled around the foot of the fifth-century BC Acropolis, Plaka is especially popular with tourists. The picturesque district draws thousands of visitors daily, with many staying overnight in the hotels and short-term rentals in neoclassical houses and small apartment blocks along its alleyways and narrow streets. The mayor of Athens, Haris Doukas, who rushed to 15 Lysikratous, where the mid-20th-century building had once stood, was quick to describe the incident as an “unprecedented disaster”. At least three people were known to have been injured when the explosion occurred at 7.30am, shattering the windows of nearby buildings and scattering debris far and wide. A motorist driving down Lysikratous described how his car was lifted into the air by the sheer force of a blast that some in the neighbourhood likened to an earthquake, others to a bomb. Emergency workers could be seen hastily removing two women on stretchers from a building next door who had been wounded by flying debris. Speculation is rife that a gas leak triggered the collapse but officials said there were many “cogent theories” at play. Fears of the leak emanating from the first-floor short-term rental was among them. As part of efforts to address a burgeoning housing crisis, Greece’s centre-right government has sought to ban short-term rentals in Plaka – clamping down on permits and tightening regulations. On Saturday, as speculation mounted over the cause of the blast, criticism grew over the ability to “properly control” establishments that were often unregulated. “This awful incident will fuel further debate over who inspects short-term rentals that no one who lives in Plaka wants anyway,” said Giorgos Zafeiriou, an architect who heads the local residents’ committee. “Hotels have chambers that regulate them but who inspects and controls Airbnb and serviced apartments that often may not be up to par?” Civil protection crews and emergency disaster management teams have been ordered to remain on site until the cause of the explosion is found, officials said. “It was a huge explosion, so getting to the bottom of it must now be the priority,” added Zafeiriou. “Six people have lost their lives.”

US strikes on Ecuadorian fishing boats raise humanitarian concerns but Trump admin not wavering

While the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was being decorated in Quito by Ecuador’s president for “helping to promote peace in the region”, 10 Ecuadorian fishers whose boat had been blown up by US forces were adrift in the eastern Pacific. On 8 September, a day before Rubio arrived, a US patrol vessel intercepted the fishing boat Don Rufo in international waters near Ecuador. “The gringos were all armed as if they were going to war,” said the boat’s captain, Mero Calderón, 50. “I tried to show them our catch to prove that we were there working, but they wouldn’t listen,” he added. “They brought two huge bombs aboard, took us to their ship, handcuffed and blindfolded us, and blew our boat to pieces,” said Calderón, who along with five other fishers, was handed over to local authorities. But another 10 crew members were fishing farther out to sea in a smaller boat that was not equipped to make it back to shore. The Ecuadorian navy only rescued them on 10 September, when Rubio was already in Peru preparing to return to the US. US Southern Command posted an edited 14-second video of the operation and said “intelligence confirmed” that the vessel was being used by a gang as a “floating refuelling station” for speedboats allegedly carrying drugs – which the fishers deny. It was one of eight operations involving Ecuadorian boats in just more than two weeks – the latest on 16 September – to follow the same pattern. Unlike the nearly 70 US airstrikes in the Pacific and Caribbean that have killed 234 people since last year, crews were removed before the vessels were sunk. Also, rather than unilateral US attacks, the new wave of operations has the open support of Ecuador’s far-right president, Daniel Noboa, who is calling them “joint operations”. Donald Trump has compared the drug trafficking operations to the campaign against the Islamic state. “Like ISIS, they should be killed, exiled or detained as enemy combatants without the possibility of release, which is what we’re doing,” Trump said on Tuesday. Some analysts see the shift as an indication that the US’s military strategy against drug trafficking in Latin America has entered a new phase. “Noboa has offered Ecuador as a ‘laboratory’ for the implementation of this new phase,” said Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Although Ecuador does not produce cocaine like neighbouring Colombia and Peru, over the past decade it has become a major trafficking hub because of its access to the Pacific, including the area where the attacks on boats have been taking place. Noboa has responded with a controversial “iron-fist” approach to the gangs, issuing repeated states of emergency and expanding the role of the armed forces. This crackdown however has done little to reduce violence, and instead has eroded human rights. The most notable example of human rights abuse came last year in the case of the “Guayaquil Four”, the forced disappearance of four Afro-Ecuadorian boys between the age of 11 and 15. All four boys were found dead, there bodies charred and dismembered. Despite pushback from voters, Noboa signed an agreement with the White House authorising joint operations and granting US military personnel involved in counter-narcotics operations immunity from criminal prosecution. The operations have also extended to land, with US troops taking part in raids last Thursday. “Noboa is interested in the optics of a very lethal crackdown and in making Ecuador a place where the Trump administration can refine those methods and show them off,” said Freeman, who has also reported on the boat attacks in Ecuador for the New Yorker magazine. Trump has pressured Latin American presidents to join an anti-drug cartel coalition he created called Shield of the Americas. With Peru and Colombia recently joining, the group now includes all but the few countries still governed by the left, such as Mexico and Brazil – where a far-right senator is a serious contender in October’s election. So far, the coalition’s primary goal appears to have been increasing joint operations against alleged drug traffickers. Adam Isacson, director for defence oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, expects joint operations to expand across the region. Isacson stressed that though more people are being turned over to local authorities instead of killed, the US is “still doing the bad old stuff”. On 19 September, four people were killed in the Caribbean. As with the other airstrikes, the US has not disclosed their identities or any of the alleged evidence linking them to criminal activity. During his trip to Ecuador, Rubio said the decision on what approach to take was “a strike-by-strike or operation-by-operation determination” that depended on the threat and location of the boat, but that the US would “still blow up ships if need be”. Human rights organisations have described the airstrikes as extrajudicial killings, and a special rapporteur for the UN human rights council has concluded that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that they constitute “crimes against humanity”. Despite Trump’s claims, available data show they have had no impact on the volume of cocaine entering the country. Journalists and human rights groups have managed to identify some of the victims, who in many cases were innocent or, when suspected of involvement in criminal activity, poor people at the bottom of trafficking networks. In Ecuador, the local NGO Permanent Committee for the Defence of Human Rights estimates that more than 220 fishers have been subjected to “violent boardings, arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture and the destruction of vessels” in this year’s US operations. None of the fishers remains in custody and, while some are still facing prosecution, many have already been acquitted for lack of evidence. “Fishers are losing their livelihoods when the US destroys the boats. Besides, if the US says the vessels were being used to refuel drug boats, why destroy the evidence?” said the committee’s lawyer, Fernando Bastías. A US Southern Command spokesperson said it conducts operations “in compliance with US and international law” and that leaving boats “intact could permit their reuse by criminal networks”. Although the US and Ecuador have celebrated the recent operations on social media, three cases from earlier this year remain unclaimed. The first was on 20 January, when the fishing vessel Fiorella disappeared with eight crew members on board; days earlier, some of them had told relatives they were being monitored by drones and by a vessel on which they said they had seen a US flag. Human rights organisations and journalists identified two more cases with similar patterns in late March, although the fishers survived. The Washington Post reported that the three cases were part of a covert CIA programme, and the agency declined to comment. A US Southern Command spokesperson said it had no knowledge of, nor were its forces “involved in the incidents described in reports involving the Fiorella”. Both the husband and brother of María Mero, 43, were aboard the Fiorella: Gabriel Aladino Mero Delgado, 44, and Jefferson Ariel Mero Cueva, 25. “Where did they take them? Do they have them in the US, in a prison somewhere? We don’t want any trouble; we just want them to send them back to us,” she told the Guardian. The families say they have spent months trying to get answers from the Ecuadorian government, so far without success. “They were fishers, not criminals. Let the great president come here to my house and see whether I have luxuries, anything that would show I’m a drug trafficker. No, because all of us here are poor, and we just want our loved ones back,” added Mero.