Via: lizziesliberation

indymedia.org – Very little mainstream coverage of developments in france, so i thought i’d flag it up here. recent laws and now troop deployments on the streets have changed french society into an overtly militarised state.

The ‘vigipirate’ operation across france sees troops openly deployed at shopping malls, airports, tourist sites, and town centres as part of a supposedly anti-terrorist response to threats identified as a result of france’s involvement in libya.

The military deployment, estimated to cost many billions of euros per year, and ongoing and open-ended, follows on the recent laws banning the veil, a law allowing the state to intercept and read everyone’s emails, and also allowing phone taps without any magistrate’s warrant.

The whole campaign is a simply incredible assault on civil liberties, and so far has been met with surprising little resistance.

The concern is, that with a single false-flag event in the uk, we could see something similar happening here.

Lost liberty fears in France over “Big Brother” security boost

France’s Vigipirate system, Europe’s most expensive anti-terror program, was designed to fight what it calls the growing terrorist threat. With troops patrolling the streets it is feared that France is now just one step from a police state.

In the wake of a massive surge in immigration in Europe, as people flee the turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa, France wants to temporarily bring back border controls and has upped its security, with armed soldiers on the streets

The government claims troops make the public feel safer amid the threat of terrorism, but that is not what people think.

“They can use the force in other ways if they like,” says a concerned passersby.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon says troops are required because France bombing Libya threatens a terror attack at home. One can now find soldiers at shops, tourist sites, government buildings, train stations, airports, schools and churches. But experts say the system does not even work.

“The main feature of terrorism is that it is impossible to foresee,” believes Bertrand Badie, from Paris Institute of Political Studies.

Vigipirate’s real target is not to catch terrorists, claims one investigator, but to monitor the public.

Moe Seager, an independent journalist says it is easy to persuade people that there could be a terrorist at a metro station. It is easy then for people in France to believe: “Well, they have a right to listen to my phone calls (which they do), they have a right to monitor my emails, Facebook, because they’re only protecting us,” says Seager.

Troops are only the visible part. Authorities can now read people’s emails under a law passed quietly in February.

President Sarkozy also signed a bill for police to tap phones without getting judges’ authorization.

To justify the invasion of peoples’ privacy, says one author, Sarkozy makes France’s six million Arabs a scapegoat.

“He has to make people afraid, to think there’s an Arab with a bomb here or down the bed,” explains Michel Collon, journalist and author.

The government recently branded Muslims a “problem”, and banned the Muslim full face veil.

Some already mock the ban, and what they see as an Arab witch hunt, by going out in veils and miniskirts.

There is also the huge cost. While workers continue to be laid off in the economic crisis, Vigipirate’s estimated price is 18 billion euros each year, enough to create a million new teaching jobs. An embarrassed government, analysts say, tries to hide the amount.

“Vigipirate is very expensive. Because the executives can move resources from one area to another quite quickly, it’s very difficult to find an exact figure,” says Phil Rees, a terrorism expert.

Critics like Michel Collon have dubbed the Vigipirate system “Vichypirate”. Vichy was France’s fascist regime in World War II. It spied and informed on people, and targeted ethnic minorities. The French government today stands accused of doing the same to its own citizens.

April 22, 2011 – - MOSCOW, April 21 (Itar-Tass) — The situation in Libya is stalled. The no fly zone operation has failed, and an operation on the ground, if it begins, will trigger a large African war, Russian presidential representative for African affairs, chairman of the Federation Council’s international affairs committee, Mikhail Margelov, said on Thursday.

“That this is a stalemate situation is seen in the fact that without a ground operation attempts to oust Gaddafi have failed, and resolution 1973 of the UN Security Council the coalition has already interpreted very loosely does not permit interference by infantry or paratroops,” Margelov told Itar-Tass. “The United States, France and Britain think that bombs alone are not enough to fulfill the part of the resolution that concerns the protection of civilian population. In their opinion, as long as there is Gaddafi, there will be a risk to the lives of civilians.”

However, if a ground operation begins, then, according to Margelov, “a war of this scale will not be kept within Libya.”

“The area of ··the Sahel is already unstable, and the countries of that zone – Mali and Niger – are getting arms from the rebels in the theater of military operations in Libya for factions of al-Qaeda,” said the special envoy. This, he warns, “poses a threat to Algeria and Morocco, where the opposition continues to protest and demonstrate. ”

In addition, the complexity of the situation in Libya, according to Margelov, stems from the fact that “it is still not clear with whom one can negotiate a political settlement, because the rebels are a very ill-matched: there are regional tribes, Libyan Berbers, some defectors from the ruling regime and al-Qaeda militants.”

“At the same time,” Margelov added, “the insurgents and the coalition do not want any talks with Gaddafi. ”

Speaking of the impasse, Margelov remarked once again that “after the statement by the coalition command about the lack of missiles it became clear that the no fly zone operation failed. Gaddafi has been successfully advancing and his troops are well armed.”

However, some politicians have been claiming that “the rebels are being pushed back with Russian weapons.” Margelov firmly dismissed these rumors “an exaggeration”, because one can talk about only Soviet weapons of the 1980s.

“Russia,” he recalled, “in 1992 joined the UN Security Council sanctions prohibiting the supply of weapons to Libya. In addition, in the 1980s Qaddafi, according to the legislator, “scooped handfuls of weapons not only in the Warsaw Pact countries, but also in Europe.” So the supporters of Gaddafi “are fighting with weapons of mixed origin,” concluded Margelov.

BBC – The president of the World Bank has warned that the world is “one shock away from a full-blown crisis”.

Robert Zoellick cited rising food prices as the main threat to poor nations who risk “losing a generation”.

He was speaking in Washington at the end of the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Meanwhile, G20 finance chiefs, who also met in Washington, pledged financial support to help new governments in the Middle East and North Africa.

Mr Zoellick said such support was vital.

“The crisis in the Middle East and North Africa underscores how we need to put the conclusions from our latest world development report into practice. The report highlighted the importance of citizen security, justice and jobs,” he said.

He also called for the World Bank to act quickly to support reforms in the region.

“Waiting for the situation to stabilise will mean lost opportunities. In revolutionary moments the status quo is not a winning hand.”

At the Washington meetings, turmoil in the Middle East, volatile oil prices and high unemployment were also discussed.

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn raised particular concerns about high levels of unemployment among young people.

“It’s probably too much to say that it’s a jobless recovery, but it’s certainly a recovery with not enough jobs,” he said.

“Especially because of youth unemployment… there is now a risk that this will be turned into a life sentence, and that there is a possibility of a lost generation,” he said.

Parts of Ivory Coast’s main city of Abidjan resemble a “war zone”, the UN refugee agency head in the West African nation, Jacques Franquin, told the BBC.

The UNHCR has suspended plans to open a camp in the west for those fleeing the violence because of safety concerns.

“The situation is deteriorating rapidly,” Mr Franquin said.

Tensions have been rising since President Laurent Gbagbo refused to hand power to Alassane Ouattara, widely seen as the winner of November’s poll.

Mr Franquin comments come as UN peacekeepers in country say they are overstretched and cannot provide security for all civilians.

Violent clashes

On Thursday, security forces shot dead at least six women marching in support of Mr Ouattara in Abidjan’s northern Abobo neighbourhood.

“We are overstretched in terms of patrolling. We conducted over 865 patrols last week. You can’t be in every corner of the city,” UN spokesman Hamadoun Toure told the BBC.

Read the full article.

Obviously no oil there so nobody in the US really cares…

Back to Libya…

By Antonio Cesar Oliveira

March 02, 2011 “Pravda” — How can you call someone a dictator leader who overthrew a corrupt monarchy, modernized the country, won the highest HDI in Africa, and applied a direct democracy system of government?

Gaddafi has always supported revolutionary movements around the world. When the media – in the service of the U.S. – praised the apartheid regime South Africa, young Gaddafi in Libya trained and sent them back with the best weapons to win freedom in South Africa.

Suddenly the press began a daily attack on the leader Muammar Gaddafi, to distill hatred, spreading lies, forging videos for what? What does it prove? The crimes of the Libyan government? Apparently this journalistic line was caused by popular uprisings in Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt.

In fact, it is more a question of one more terrorist strategy of the government of the United States of America to recover influence in the Arab world. In Egypt, the government fell in U.S. confidence. Mubarak was merely an agent of U.S. and Israel interests in the region. With the fall of Mubarak, Iranian ships began to circulate in the vicinity of Israel, causing unease and anger in the diplomatic environments subservient to imperialism and Zionism.

After losing Egypt, the U.S. government tries to divide and weaken Libya, and this effort receives support from the supporters of Bin Laden, and thousands of Egyptian refugees that over the years have taken refuge in eastern Libya, fleeing the repression in Egypt. After the Egyptians came Algerians, Tunisians and Somalis, followers of Al Qaeda. They enjoyed the hospitality of the Libyans and then the next thing they stabbed them in the back, triggering a revolt that has left tens of victims, through sabotage, terrorism and destruction of public property.

But who is this Qaddafi that the media suddenly started to attack in all forms, and even in a most cowardly form? Gaddafi led a revolution to overthrow King Idris, a puppet of Italian and American interests in the region. At the time, the largest U.S. military base abroad was in Libya, Qaddafi and his supporters surrounded the base and gave 24 hours for all invading foreigners to leave the country.

In power, Gaddafi did not like the Arab monarchs, did not build palaces with gold, not buy luxury yachts or collections of imported cars. He devoted himself to rebuilding the country, ensuring better living conditions for the people. Today Qaddafi is not president or prime minister of Libya, but the media wants him to resign a post which does not exist.

The lies of the media cannot hide the fact that Gaddafi has supported the struggles of peoples for liberation in Nicaragua, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa and many other countries, specifically concretely helping the people who fought for liberation. In practice, Gaddafi has always been a benefactor of mankind, but for the mercenary media, a benefactor is one who creates wars in search of profits for the arms industry or to dominate the world, as were the wars created by the U.S. in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua and many other countries.

This utterly ridiculous gossip of wealth and strange customs have always been exploited by the media, it was with Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez and etc. It is enough to be a serious ruler that does not seriously kneel down and cower in fear before the United States and is not intimidated to be demonised and disparaged by the mercenary media.

Another fact that the media cannot falsify is the HDI (Human Development Index) measured by UN officials. These data indicate, for example, that Libya had in 1970, a situation a little worse than Brazil (HDI of 0.541, against 0.551 of Brazil.) The Libyan index surpassed the Brazilian years later, and in 2008 was well ahead: 0.810 (ranked 43rd), compared to 0.764 (ranking 59th). All three sub-indices that comprise the HDI is higher in the African country: income, longevity and education.

In the HDI recast the difference remains. Libya is ranked the 53rd (0.755) and Brazil 73rd (.699). Libya is the country with the highest HDI in Africa. Therefore, the best distribution of income, and health and public education are free. And almost 10% of Libyan students receive scholarships to study in foreign countries.

So what kind of dictatorship is this? A dictatorship would never allow this kind of policy for the benefit of the people.

Gadhafi wrote the Green Book, the Third Universal Theory, which deals with controversial and real issues. He complains, for example, about the falsification of democracy through parliamentary assemblies. In most countries that consider themselves democratic, including the United States of America, political parties are organized criminal gangs to loot the people’s money in legislative assemblies, City Councils, House of Representatives, etc.

This observation – and a book in publication – certainly irritate and anger them? The defenders of parliamentary democracy? The Green Book, written by Gaddafi, says that workers should be involved and self-employed, and that the land must be of those who work it and those who live in the house. And power shall be exercised by the people directly, without intermediaries, without politicians, through popular congresses and committees, where the whole population decides the fundamental issues of the district, city and country. These words, which everyone knows are true, revolt and irritate those few who benefit from the falsification of democracy, especially the capitalist regimes.

But the press will keep on on forging the news, boiling hatred by spreading lies, because it is following orders from the U.S. government, very interested in the large oil reserves of Libya.

Major newspapers and television channels in the world use news agencies from the United States, all biased, misleading and deceptive. The lies that the news agencies sell buy public opinion, and most people? By naivete or misinformation they behave like puppets, repeating whatever the U.S. government determines and imposes.

This is not the first nor will it be the last, the Libyan Arab people face powerful foreign powers. Again the Libyan people will win, because they have the leadership of Muammar Qaddafi, an effective, strong and honorable guide.

*In a rare interview with Western journalists in January 1986, only months before the U.S. terrorist bombing of Libya, the Leader of the Revolution spoke frankly about his life and how he had been misunderstood by the West. Meeting the journalists in his tent he told of how he admired former US Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and of other world leaders he admires like “Egypt’s late Gamal Abdul Nasser, India’s Mahatma Gandhi, Sun Yat-Sen of China and Italy’s Garibaldi and Mazzini.” (Really, I’m a Nice Guy, Kate Dourian, Tripoli, Libya.)

He spoke of his favourite book The Outsider by British author Colin Wilson and others he likes such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Roots. Throughout this interview the profound thinking and innate humanity of Muammar Qadhafi shone through.

He also stated in another interview: “I see the press as being the messengers between me and the world to tell them the truth.”

U.S. imposes sanctions as oil companies salivate over prospect of ‘regime change’

By Deirdre Griswold – Workers World
Published Feb 27, 2011 5:37 PM

Feb. 27 — As fighting continues between government forces and an opposition that is increasingly carrying out military attacks and has taken control of much of Libya’s oil-producing regions, tens of thousands of foreign nationals are leaving the country.

The vast majority are workers who have left on civilian vessels — ferry boats, commercial ships and chartered planes. Other thousands have left by road.

However, the NATO countries — particularly Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy — have sent warships and warplanes to Libya, ostensibly to rescue a few hundred of their nationals. The most complete tally of the evacuations is being provided by Reuters.

China has already evacuated more than 20,000 of its nationals. Turkey has evacuated more than 7,000. These tens of thousands of workers have left on civilian ships and planes and by road.

The Philippine government plans to lease commercial planes to repatriate about half of the 26,000 Filipinos working in Libya’s medical and oil industries.

But Germany sent three warships and 600 troops to evacuate a few hundred of its nationals. It also sent two military transport planes to a desert oil site to fly out 132 Germans and other European Union citizens.

Britain sent the warship HMS Cumberland and the destroyer York to do the same. It also sent a plane of the Royal Air Force, which left Tripoli with 65 aboard even as the British government called a meeting of its Cobra security cabinet and said sending in special forces was not being ruled out.

France sent a squadron of transport military aircraft to land directly at oil fields south of Benghazi and pick up its people. Spain also used an armed forces plane to evacuate 124 people from Tripoli.

Britain, France, Germany and Spain — the four countries to mobilize their militaries — are all members of NATO.

The U.S., also a NATO member, has not ruled out military force against Libya. On Feb. 25 the White House announced it would unilaterally impose sanctions on Libya, which includes freezing billions of dollars in Libyan government assets. The next day, the U.N. Security Council also imposed sanctions. These moves will punish the Libyan people as well as the government headed by Moammar Gadhafi.

All of this is in stark contrast to the response of the imperialist governments to the mass rebellions going on elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East.

All along, the U.S. in particular has given lip service to the unarmed demonstrators while calling for a “transition to democracy” that would keep the ruling classes and their state structures in place.

But with Libya it is different. The U.S. and the other imperialists are cheering on the armed rebellion and predicting the downfall of the government. Those in the opposition given the greatest prominence by the corporate media are spokespeople for the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, a group with a 31-year history of working with the U.S. CIA and which has launched military attacks and assassination attempts against Gadhafi before.

Hard, cold economic facts show why the U.S. ruling class wants the overthrow of Gadhafi, and it has nothing to do with democracy.

Recent discoveries show that Libya has the largest proven oil reserves on the continent of Africa — 47 billion barrels, according to the CIA World Factbook. This is the ninth largest in the world, and the largest supply close to European markets. At the present time, however, Libya is only Africa’s third-largest producer of oil, behind Nigeria and Angola. With the price of crude oil at around $100 a barrel and rising, this means that Libya’s small population of 6 million people is sitting on a potential king’s ransom.

Gadhafi had nationalized the oil, then largely in British hands, after leading a military coup in 1969 that ousted a pro-British monarchy. Social programs enacted then, including subsidizing most necessities with proceeds from the oil, quickly raised the standard of living of the people. But in recent years Gadhafi has made many concessions to the imperialists. In 2003, after enormous threats and pressures, he agreed to IMF-imposed “structural adjustment” measures that eliminated most subsidies and also let in European oil companies. This clearly angered many Libyans.

However, Gadhafi did not open up Libya to U.S. oil companies, which are now salivating over the vast profits that “regime change” could bring them.

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By Agence France-Presse - Monday, February 21st, 2011 – A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an “unrecognizable” world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.

The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, “with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia,” said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.

To feed all those mouths, “we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000,” said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

“By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable” if current trends continue, Clay said.

The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.

But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years — tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations — and add more strain to global food supplies.

People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.

It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.

“More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet,” Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.

Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations.

“For 20 years, there’s been very little investment in family planning, but there’s a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices,” said Bongaarts.

“We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning,” said Casterline.

Spain’s salad growers are modern-day slaves, say charities
Investigation uncovers plight of migrant workers who live in appalling conditions and are paid half of legal minimum wage

guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 February 2011

The exploitation of tens of thousands of migrants used to grow salad vegetables for British supermarkets has been uncovered by a Guardian investigation into the €2bn-a-year (£1.6bn) hothouse industry in southern Spain.

Charities working with illegal workers during this year’s harvest claim the abuses meet the UN’s official definition of modern-day slavery, with some workers having their pay withheld for complaining. Conditions appear to have deteriorated further as the collapse of the Spanish property boom has driven thousands of migrants from construction to horticulture to look for work.

The Guardian’s findings include:

• Migrant workers from Africa living in shacks made of old boxes and plastic sheeting, without sanitation or access to drinking water.

• Wages that are routinely less than half the legal minimum wage.

• Workers without papers being told they will be reported to the police if they complain.

• Allegations of segregation enforced by police harassment when African workers stray outside the hothouse areas into tourist areas.

The situation of migrants working in the tomato, pepper, cucumber and courgette farms of Almeria is so desperate that the Red Cross has been handing out free food to thousands of them. Its local co-ordinator described conditions as “inhuman”. Anti-Slavery International said the Guardian’s evidence was “deeply disturbing”, and raised the “spectre of de facto state sanctioning of slavery in 21st century Europe”.

Mohammed’s story is typical of thousands of Africans working under the sweltering heat of plastic greenhouses.

He arrived illegally in southern Spain from Morocco in 2004 to work in the hothouses, having paid €1,000 to smugglers to bring him in a fishing boat. He said back then he could earn €30 for an eight-hour day. Now he’s lucky to get €20 a day.

The legal minimum wage for a day’s work is currently more than €44, but the economic crisis has created a newly enlarged surplus of migrants desperate for work, enabling farmers to slash wages.

Mohammed’s home is a shack in the hothouse area that runs into the tourist town of Roquetas de Mar on the Costa del Sol. It is crudely knocked together from the wooden pallets used to transport the crops and covered with a layer of old agricultural plastic. There is no drinking water or sanitation.

There are 100 or so shacks like this next to Mohammed’s. Jobs are sporadic, and come not with contracts but by the day or even by the hour. Sometimes, when he and his compatriots have been without work for weeks, there is no food, unless the Red Cross makes one of its food parcel deliveries. “We live like animals scavenging. No work, no money, no food,” he said.

Jawara came from Gambia in 2008 with 85 others who were packed like cargo on a small fishing boat. He felt lucky to have survived the trauma of the journey; some of those with him drowned or died on the boat. Released from detention after 40 days to go and find work, he now lives with 10 others from Sub-Saharan Africa in an abandoned farm building among the hothouses near the Almerian market town San Isidro.

The men sleep in the part that still has the semblance of a roof. They are crammed into three small rooms that are sour with the smell of dampness and stale food, the walls blackened by the camping stove they use to cook. The bathroom is the outbuilding next door, its roof long gone and its bricks reduced to rubble. The sitting room is a salvaged sofa leaning against broken walls. There is no sanitation here either and the men live in between the farm jobs they find on the tomato crop, charity handouts and Red Cross parcels.

Jawara came to San Isidroto to join his brother and had just three months of reunion with him before his brother died from kidney problems. Without papers, they had been too frightened to go to the doctor and they couldn’t afford medicines. His father died too while he has been away. Like many of those we interviewed Jawerea spoke of his shame at the conditions, the racism he encountered everywhere and how little they are now paid. He did not want to be filmed in case his family back home saw how he lived.

Sang, also from Gambia, considers himself relatively well off sharing an abandoned farmhouse with about 40 others from west Africa. A local farmer rents it to them illegally, as although it has a roof and electricity, it has no running water.

In addition to rent, the migrants must pay €600 a month to have a tanker deliver water to an old borehole in the yard. Sang, who has been supporting about 30 family members in Gambia with his wages, has also been reduced to working a few hours at a time on the salad harvest in the past year, as the recession hit.

Almeria used to be Spain’s poorest region but the boom in horticulture since the late 1980s has helped transform the area, which sits just behind the Costa del Sol. Although British holidaymakers rarely see it, less than a mile from the tourist hotels on the beach a vast industrial landscape of plastic hothouses has taken over 400 square km of the coastal plain.

The trade in vegetables grown in the region meets UK demand for all year-round fresh salad. It is worth €2bn a year to the Spanish economy, according to José Ángel Aznar, professor of applied economics at the university of Almeria. Nearly all the leading retailers across northern Europe, including British supermarkets, source salad crops from the region when their own season ends. They buy at auction from the co-operatives to which the farmers belong.

But the boom has only been possible thanks to migrants. The hothouses have needed a large supply of cheap labour that can be turned on and off at a moment’s notice. The work is irregular and arduous, and with temperatures reaching 40C-45C is unattractive to the local population. So it has sucked in thousands of illegal workers, first from Morocco, then from eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.

Estimates of the total number working in the hothouses vary, but Juan Carlos Checa, researcher in social anthropology at the university, put the number of migrant workers in April 2010 at 80,000-90,000.

Spitou Mendy, who was himself an illegal migrant from Senegal until he gained his papers in an amnesty, now helps run Sindicato de Obreros del Campo (SOC), a small union for migrants. He thinks the numbers have swollen to more than 100,000 due to the recession.

The Spanish government allows those who can prove they have worked for more than three years to apply to become regularised and many have done so, but tens of thousands are still in Almeria illegally, making them easy to exploit. Conditions that were already appalling have deteriorated further in the past two years, according to Mendy.

Farmers argue that the supermarkets have squeezed their margins even harder during the downturn, while costs for fuel and fertiliser have gone up. They have no choice but to cut wages, which is the one element of their production costs they can control. Farmers trying to employ people legally and at the proper rate find it hard to compete or make a profit.

In Mendy’s eyes the conditions are slavery. “You don’t find the sons of Spain in the hothouses, only the blacks and people from former colonies,” he says. “The farmers only want an unqualified, malleable workforce, which costs absolutely nothing. Only one part of the business is benefiting from this. It’s the big agribusiness that wins. It’s the capitalists that win. And humanity is killed that way. This is slavery in Europe. At the door to Europe, there is slavery as if we were in the 16th century.”

Cherif, who used to be a teacher of French and German in Senegal but now supports two children on what he earns picking tomatoes a few days a month, has found farmers only too happy to take advantage of illegal workers. “You have to shut your mouth about the conditions. It’s very, very hot; there’s no water to drink and it’s back-breaking. They pay me only €20-€25 a day and I don’t feel free. The police watch me if I go to the wrong places.”

Like many we spoke to, Cherif had experience of farmers refusing to pay for work that had been done. “One farmer didn’t want to pay me and another African. He owed me €200. The other man had a fight with him and got his money but I didn’t want to fight. So I walked to his house every day for two months until he gave it to me, but even then he shortchanged me by €5.”

Tensions between migrants and local communities have been growing in recent months. SOC fears a repeat of the violence and rioting that occurred in 2000, in the horticultural town of El Ejido. Mendy explained that they had seen the warning signs in San Isidro last October when a farmer was murdered in his hothouse store and locals immediately pointed the finger at migrants. Thousands protested in the streets following his funeral, brandishing racist placards picturing Africans as black sheep and saying: “Immigrants: behave or get out”. It later transpired that the police were investigating the farmer’s links to organised crime.

Most of the time the two communities are completely segregated, however. The only black people seen in tourist areas are a few hawkers selling trinkets on the beaches, while Africans and Moroccans live hidden away in slums among the hothouses. They come into the agricultural towns at daybreak to queue by main roads for casual work, but are expected to melt away afterwards. Several of those we interviewed described being harassed by police if they strayed outside the hothouse areas at other times.

Sister Purification, or Puri, as she is known, is one of four Catholic nuns from the order of the Merciful Sisters of Charity who live in San Isidro. She recalled how the first black Africans had come to the town in 2002.

The detention centres in the Canaries that received migrants arriving illegally in boats from Africa were full. In order to process new arrivals, the Spanish authorities began flying those already there out to mainland airports to disperse them to areas where labour was needed. They hired a coach to take about 30 Africans from Madrid airport to the centre of San Isidro, where the driver was instructed to open the doors in Plaza Colonización, the main square, and simply release them. “That was the first time black people came here.

“The government gave them absolutely nothing; no money, no papers, nothing, just told them, off you go. No one here knew they were coming. The local authorities washed their hands of them. The people in the town didn’t want anything to do with them. We had no idea what to do,” Puri explained.

In the end, the nuns took the African men to a disused hothouse. Others began arriving and started building cardboard hovels under its dilapidated structure, until more than 300 people were living there in a makeshift slum without sanitation. “The conditions were terrible, horrible, not human,” Puri recalled.

As more and more people came, the nuns began to worry about health problems. They found TB, Aids and hepatitis among the migrants, but knew they couldn’t get proper medical help. They began taking those who were ill to abandoned farmhouses nearby to isolate them from the rest. “We didn’t have the means to provide more. The government was doing next to nothing.”

Then in September 2005 a huge fire broke out. Hundreds of Africans were driven out of the slum as the plastic burned. The fire brigade and police arrived, but once the fire was out they just left again and refused to help, according to Puri.

The nuns used their own small cars to begin distributing about 300 plus men, to places they knew migrants were already sheltering in the area – in old farm buildings and underground wells. But by 2am, there were still 120 men with nowhere to go and it was decided that they should sleep in the main square, with the nuns accompanying them for solidarity. “We were there three days. The town did nothing. The government did nothing. I was crying with rage, with impotence and with indignation,” says Puri.

Today the nuns run a feeding centre where they hand out food and clothes to migrants. They have more than 4,000 recipients registered on their computer in this one small agricultural community of 7,000 inhabitants alone.

“There have been five deaths of migrants in the last year here from traffic accidents at night,” Puri added. “About 18 months ago an African worker died in one of the hothouses – he had fallen into the water tank and couldn’t get out. There was no punishment for the farmer, no police questions,” Puri told us. “I am very conscious what we are doing is not a real solution. But they know that at least if they are sick or desperate, we are here to hold their hand.”

The conditions are not just confined to Almeria. As the olive harvest was about to begin just before last Christmas in the region of Jaén, thousands of migrants moved there desperately trying to find work. With no money and no shelter, most were being fed once a day at a centre run by the Red Cross. They were allowed to stay at the centre for three days but then had to leave. Most were sleeping rough. Those with papers could apply for a free bus pass at the Red Cross centre each morning to get themselves to the olive groves to tout for work.

The Red Cross in Jaen did not return our calls but its co-ordinator in Almeria, Francisco Vicente, said it estimates that there are between 15,000 and 20,000 homeless migrants in his province alone, of which some 5,000 live in abandoned houses and shacks without running water or electricity. “These are more ‘established’ communities, which the Red Cross can at least reach. But the others are spread throughout town, sleeping near bank cash machines, or just on the streets. This is not human,” he added.

Mendy told us there was a conspiracy of silence about the conditions. “Everyone knows this system exists, this is untamed neoliberalism. But people have closed their ears to it.”

Vincente agreed: “This is being hidden, people are not interested in making this public. I am not referring to only politicians. Sometimes it’s the society itself – the people – who don’t stand up,” he told us.

The Spanish government’s ministry of interior was asked for comment but failed to respond.

Anti-Slavery International’s director, Aidan McQuade, said: “The evidence obtained by the Guardian suggests we could be seeing the emergence of a new form of slavery, which is deeply disturbing.

“The fact that the Spanish authorities have moved irregular migrants to areas of the country where labour is needed and also where migrant workers are routinely paid half the legal minimum wage and threatened with deportation for complaining about their working conditions, establishes a prima facie case of official collusion in the trafficking of migrant workers to the agricultural farms of southern Spain.

“This raises the spectre of de facto state sanctioning of slavery in 21st century Europe.”