Costa Cálida Chronicle - Costa Calida Chronicle

In association with Costa Cálida International Radio and www.angloINFO.com
Calls for King’s Abdication over Elephant
Hunting Row
Calls for King Juan Carlos of Spain to abdicate
over his recent hunting trip scandal are growing
ever louder, with criticism of the monarch
by the Spanish media and social networks
reaching previously unrecorded levels.
An online petition on the actuable.es website
said more than 46,000 people had backed a
petition calling for the King’s resignation from
WWF. The Spanish branch of the World Wildlife
Fund has begun the process of removing
King Juan Carlos as its ‘honorary president’.
Spanish TV has debated whether the 72-yearold
king should have been hunting in Africa
at all while his people are struggling through
one of the most precarious moments in the
country’s economic crisis. Many newspaper
editorials have suggested that it was deeply
inappropriate to spend 45,000€ shooting elephants,
whilst the people of Spain were having
to swallow austerity measures.
Such biting, public criticism of the Spanish
monarch is uncommon, and other senior opposition
politicians and members of Spain’s
government have not passed judgement
when asked to comment. Although the royal
household has not confirmed the elephanthunting
allegations, they have also not denied
them. Botswana, the country is well known
as a destination for elephant-hunting and it is
well known that the king shot elephants there
back in 2006.
It is not the first time that King Juan Carlos’s
taste for hunting has landed him in trouble.
In 2006, an official in the Vologda region in
north-eastern Russia alleged that he had shot
dead a tame bear that had been plied with
vodka, although royal officials said the claim
was ridiculous. The Spanish Royals are already
under intense scrutiny, with the King’s
son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin currently embroiled
in a high-profile corruption scandal,
and his 13-year-old grandson, Froilan, having
to be treated in hospital last week after
shooting himself in the foot while doing target
practice outside a family home at the end of
his Easter holiday.
Uproar over government plans to abolish
free prescriptions for pensioners
The government’s latest plans to make pensioners
pay between 10 and 20% of their prescription
charges has been met with alarm by
support groups and associations across the
country.
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The draft bill will mean that all pensioners
will have to pay a minimum of 10% of their
prescription charges, rising to 20% for those
with greater income. The government will debate
a formula to help the chronically ill, by
capping the charges at a monthly maximum
of between 10€ and 20€.
Bailout fears for Spain as cost of Borrowing
Jumps to over 6%
Spain’s cost of borrowing has risen to over
6%, again, prompting talk of an EU bailout.
The country’s cost of borrowing has been rising
steadily over the past four months and if it
wanted to borrow for ten years today, it would
pay 6.1%, considerably more than the 1.73%
Germany would pay.
The Bank of Spain said recently that the
county’s economy contracted in the first quarter
of the year - but it did not say by how
much. The economy shrank by 0.3% in the
three months to December, so this additional
contraction implies that Spain’s economy is in
recession. The Economy Minister said that in
the first three months of the year the country
had probably contracted by as much as the
last quarter of 2011 again, but added this was
actually better than expected.
Investors, however, are concerned that
Spain’s banks are relying too heavily on
cheap, emergency loans from the European
Central Bank, raising fears of an imminent
bailout. Since 2010, Greece has needed two
bailouts, and the Republic of Ireland and Portugal
also needed bailouts to stay afloat.
Postal Worker Jailed for a Year for
Throwing 7,100 Letters Away
A 28-year-old Valencian man has been fined
630€ and sentenced to a year in prison after
being found guilty of throwing away 7,100
letters when he was working for Correos, the
Spanish postal service, in the town of Arganda
del Rey (Madrid) back in 2006.
Sergio A.P. was found guilty of “negligence in
his custody of documents”, but the prosecution
reduced its original demand for a twoand-a-half-year
custodial sentence and a fine
of 4,500€. Since the events in question took
place six years ago, extenuating circumstances
and unnecessary delays were take into account
when sentencing.
Human Trafficking and Low Rates make
Spain Top for ‘Sex Tourism’
Trafficking of women and prostitution have
become rife in Spain and parts of the country
are beginning to
rival Thailand for their
fame as ‘sex tourism’
destinations, according
to the New York Times
and 9 in 10 of the
women who provide
these services are being
held against their
will and threatened.
La Jonquera (Girona),
one of the first towns
in Spain as you cross
the French border
heading south, used to
be famous for its home-made arts and crafts,
but now sees most of its tourism come from
brothels or women working in apartments
and on the streets. This is partly due to the
fact that French law is much tighter on prostitution
and women’s services are more expensive,
says the report. Most of the women are
foreigners and many have been either kidnapped
in their home countries or duped into
travelling to Spain, believing lucrative work in
hotels awaits them.
This is what happened to Valentina, a Romanian
girl who told NYT reporters, through
tears, that the person she believed to be her
boyfriend convinced her to travel to Spain
with him to start a new life. Upon arrival, she
found out that the hotel job did not exist, and
she had to work as a sex slave for between
20€ and 30€ per client, handing over all her
money to her ‘boyfriend’, who turned out to
be a pimp. He threatened her with violence
and with killing her children if she did not cooperate.
Described as ‘hanging around a roundabout
all day’ with ‘her greasy hair tied back in a ponytail’,
Valentina said in the article: “My life is
over. I’ll never be able to forget that I ended
up in this.”
Police recently rescued a 19-year-old Romanian
girl who had been under the control of
two clans of pimps. They had tattooed a barcode
on her wrist, which indicated the 2,000€
‘debt’ she had with the traffickers and which
she had to pay back out of her earnings before
she was able to see a single cent of them
for herself.
The report says that the majority of prostitutes’
clients used to be middle-aged men,
but are now mainly young men who go off
in crowds of friends and weekends ‘for a bit
of fun’.
“Young people used to go to nightclubs, but
now they go to brothels – it’s just another
way of having a good time, for them,” says
Francina Vila i Valls, councillor for women and
civil rights in Barcelona.
Police say the number of prostitutes working
in Spain, in brothels, private flats, industrial
estates and on streets is close to 400,000 and
rising by the thousand. At least 90 per cent
are victims of human trafficking.
The problem of trafficking became rife in Europe
in the 1990s, when hundreds of women
came over from the then USSR, but since
then EU member states have been working
hard on regulations to deal with prostitution
and human trafficking. The problem has
worsened since the EU became a reality and
free movement between countries was made
possible.
A survey by the United Nations found that
39 per cent of Spaniards admitted to having
been with a prostitute, and that it was even
becoming socially-acceptable for business
meetings to end with an evening meal in a
restaurant followed by a trip to a brothel.
La Jonquera has set up a brothel next to a
24-hour petrol station, with 101 rooms, making
it one of the largest in Europe. Most of its
clients are from French border towns.
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