Rabat – A 27-year-old Moroccan national has died in a fire in a shack in the village of Lepe, in Huelva province, the Spanish Association of New Citizens for Interculturality (ASNUCI) said in a tweet on April 21.
Andalusia Emergency service said it received several phone calls, around 7:05 AM, of a fire in an isolated shack next to the Lepe cemetery.
Spanish firefighters reported the discovery of the burnt body of Mohamed Alam. The fire did not spread to any other shacks in the area after attending the scene.
According to ASNUCI, there were five other people living with Alam in the shack, three Moroccans and two Senegalese. One of the residents, a young Moroccan, suffered slight burns on one hand.
Spanish Federal police have opened up an investigation to identify the cause of the incident.
Spain’s Minister of Equality, Social Policies and Reconciliation Rocio Ruiz Dominguez sent her condolences to the deceased’s family.
Ruiz noted the major problem that the Lepe slum settlement suffers from, is “decades of abandonment.”
This is not the first time a fire has broken out in the Lepe slums. According to Euro Weekly News, a fire of “unknown origin” destroyed 60 shacks in October 2021.
Slums of Lepe
The affluent village of Lepe, which produces strawberries for European customers, has long shown a bleak contrast between comfortable housing for locals and the abhorrent living conditions of migrant workers living in temporary slums.
Several Spanish activists spoke out on Twitter against the exclusion and terrible working and living conditions that immigrants working in Huelva’s strawberry farms suffer from.
Every year, hundreds of migrants move to the slum camps in Lepe and other places around Huelva, Spain, to harvest strawberries. Many of these migrants are forced to live in shanty-houses, with living conditions that are in violation of the most fundamental human rights standards.
During strawberry harvest season, approximately 2,500 people live in shanty towns in the province of Huelva (February to June). A significant number of these people, nearly 1,000, live in these conditions all year, reported ElDiario in 2016.
The same journal reported that the area near the Lepe cemetery was only a few shacks in 2008; and in 2016, it grew into a “small city of cardboard and plastic.”
According to a 2016 report from the NGO Caritas, most of the permanent residents of these slums are sub-Saharan immigrants, with the number of families from Eastern Europe and Morocco slowly increasing.
Caritas has been denouncing, for years, the “total violation of human rights” that thousands of immigrants have been suffering from in these slums.
Read also: MPs Summon Mohamed Yatim Amid Sexual Assaults of Moroccan Farmers in Huelva
According to France24, Moroccan women have expressed dissatisfaction with their working conditions in 2018, “with some even reporting cases of sexual assault.”
Ruiz said yesterday that her ministry will sign an agreement next week with the Ministry of Inclusion and the municipalities in Huelva region that will seek to provide housing solutions in order to replace these slums and substandard housing.
