"You to Morocco, Desokupa to Moncloa," Daniel Esteve, founder of the Desokupa company, shouts to Pedro Sánchez, on a huge canvas unfurled this week in the center of Madrid. He also mocks the leaders of Podemos and ERC: "We will miss you all."
It is quite a show of force by Esteve, a character who has already broken into the municipal councils in Barcelona by calling a march, on account of two occupied houses in Bonanova, which attracted hundreds of ultra-rightists and during which serious insults were uttered against Ada Colau.
Formally, Desokupa is a company dedicated to extrajudicial evictions, a legal activity although its methods have been the subject of complaints and at least one recent conviction in a Barcelona court. Formally it is just a company. But for law enforcement experts tasked with monitoring violent extremism and its potential threat to security, Desokupa is already much more than that: it has become "an ultra-right lobby" and its leader, an actor promoting violent radicalization, they affirm from the General Information Commissioner of the Mossos d'Esquadra.
Born in Barcelona in 1970, Esteve is an old police acquaintance. When the Mossos deployed in the Catalan capital, in 2005, they already identified him as a sympathizer of the Casuals, an ultra group from Barça. He has a police record for injuries, threats, extortion, illegal detention, breaking and entering, robbery with violence and intimidation, and misappropriation and fraud, among others.
As a businessman, he has a long career in private security. A fan of boxing and martial arts, he started out as a nightclub bouncer. One of his first jobs was at Jimmy'z, on the ground floor of the Hotel Princesa Sofía.
He came to have a small agency that supplied bouncers to entertainment venues and bodyguards for VIPs. From there she went into the debt collection business. In 2007 she founded Morososbcn. His methods were similar to Desokupa's: he sent burly thugs to intimidate the debtor, sometimes reaching terror. “Two victims recounted how a knife was placed in their necks and they were taken to a sinister parking lot in Castelldefels. With loud music to silence their screams, they were forced to strip naked and get on all fours while one of the criminals, who sported a swastika tattoo on his chest, masturbated and threatened to rape them. They paid ”, recounted a press report in 2008, after his second arrest.
That arrest, by the Mossos kidnapping and extortion unit, ended badly. Given the dangerousness of the subjects, they sent the GEI (Special Intervention Group) and an agent threw a stun grenade at Esteve's Porsche Cayenne and seriously injured the young employee who was co-pilot in the testicles. The mosso was sentenced.
Esteve escaped with a lesser sentence for injuries in a trial that ended in conformity. He has had no further convictions.
He was forced to reinvent himself. He entered Arsenal as a boxing trainer, an exclusive gym in Barcelona whose members pay 350 euros a month. His style, "tough, with his tattoos and that threatening tone, it was even scary to look at his face," recalls a veteran partner, initially disconcerted the clientele. But he didn't take long to win her over. “He was very successful, people got hooked on his classes. First they gave him a small space, but so many signed up that the owner set up a ring for him, ”he adds. He began to organize boxing evenings, in which he himself sometimes fought, with a dinner afterwards. For this, in 2014 he founded La Isla Fighting Championship S.L. In those meetings, Esteve was known as "the security guard." “Until one day I found him lying in the pool, sunbathing. He told me that he was no longer a coach, that he had become a partner. That what interested him was business ”, recalls that member.
It was at the Arsenal where the idea of creating Desokupa came up, when a client came to ask for help with an eviction. It went so well that together they decided to start a company, which they registered in 2016 as Conciencia y Respeto 1970 S.L. and from which the partner parted ways a year later, advised by a legal firm. Desokupa charges a minimum of 3,000 euros, which can be multiplied depending on the complexity of the intervention.
“Esteve is very well advised, and always goes with a lawyer. He travels the limits of the law but does not cross them, ”say Catalan police sources. "He is very clever, and he has known how to spread a discourse on security that now many want to hear," adds a source who has known Esteve for three decades.
The Mossos have opened proceedings against Desokupa workers at least 35 times, according to judicial sources, for threats, coercion, damage or injury.
On the other hand, his method is based on intimidation, and intimidated people do not denounce. Nor do squatters with an anti-system ideology turn to the police, and Desokupa knows it.
The lawyer Solange Hilbert, from Iacta Coop, has litigated three times against Desokupa: once it was archived, in another the company was acquitted and a third is in the appeal phase before the Court of Barcelona. “You never get to the bottom of the matter – she explains – and due to details such as the fact that the defendant is not located, the cases fall. For us it is absolutely obvious and flagrant that Desokupa commits the crime of improper use of the right in his actions but the judges never get to enter into the analysis of that end”.
“In 8 years we have recovered the houses of 7,600 families. Zero convictions ”, boasts the company on the canvas in Madrid.
This same week, a sentence against Desokupa for violating the right to the image of a man on social networks, who was recorded during an intervention in Cornellà de Llobregat, in 2022, has emerged. It is a blow to one of the pillars of the strategy of Desokupa, which disseminates photographs and personal data of the squatters on the Internet as a pressure mechanism. The judge does not sentence them for damage to honor, but because he considers that the company uses the image of third parties to advertise and attract customers.
On his website, Esteve sells clothing with the company logo. He claims that he is just looking for publicity. Police experts don't believe him.
Since the municipal elections, Desokupa's challenge has gone on to another scale, turning Esteve into a character with a clear political agenda. He is already a catalyst for the extreme right, experts from the Mossos and the National Police agree.
It is worrying about its growing capacity for convocation, although it is greater in the networks than in real life. Esteve has managed to become a pole of attraction for ultra influencers, such as Alvise Pérez or Vito Quiles. The great fear is that his speech ends up radicalizing young people with little critical capacity. Among his networks, Esteve and Desokupa have more than 375,000 followers.
He does not hide that he wants a Vox government with PP, in this order, although he has said that he is throwing stones at himself because if that comes true his business "could end."
Esteve denies belonging to any party but, coincidentally or not, when Desokupa was unfurling its banner in Madrid last Monday, at the Vox headquarters in the north of the city, the ultra formation dedicated the start of its Monday press conference to the insecurity that supposedly plagues Spain.
Taking advantage of the riots in France, spokesman Ignacio Garriga threw immigration, religion and crime into the same cocktail shaker to warn that "Spain will be France within ten years". The same combination that Esteve warns about on his networks. "In France, neighborhood patrols are being organized because they are getting into packs to rape their women (...) If this comes here to Spain, God forbid, I will be one of the leaders of the street army, of the neighbors, call him as you wish. And I'm not going out with a stick. If I have to die, I will die in the street defending my country, ”he proclaimed in a video.
His speech traces the classic narrative of the European extreme right. Squatting is an autochthonous theme (especially in Catalonia) but from there it jumps to more traditional causes such as immigration, which he addresses as a problem of cultural fit. In his videos, he often refers to Muslim immigrants as "anchovies who don't eat ham."
In recent days, for example, he has posted a multitude of videos on his social networks about the riots in France over the death of a boy at the hands of the police.
His strategy also seems to come out of the manual of the modern extreme right. For example, in the systematic use of false news, distortions of reality, when not inventions, that seek to inflame public opinion, often against immigrants. Also in the dichotomous vision of reality in which there is no room for nuances: either with me or against me. Or in the anti-system narrative, in which he stands as a defender of the ordinary citizen, unprotected against the abuses of the elites. Desokupa boasts of never working for banks. It has also tried to establish itself as a defender of the police, as if it were a party in a conflict between good and bad, and not a mediator, established by the country's structural order, in the conflicts that exist in society. In 2020, in full confinement, he dedicated himself to visiting police stations of all the police forces to distribute medical supplies: everything, opportunely narrated on his social networks, of course.
Desokupa's aesthetic is powerfully reminiscent of that of the ultra-Greek Golden Dawn party, now outlawed. His boys, muscular guys with shaved heads, became famous for patrolling Athens in black T-shirts, hunting down leftists and immigrants. The General Information Commissioner has been able to verify direct links between the Greeks and supporters of Desokupa.
In high levels of the National Police, the Madrid canvas arouses concern. The experts see a veiled message to "unvacate Moncloa" if the result of the general elections on July 23 does not please them. It would not be the first time this has been attempted: Trump supporters stormed the Capitol after his defeat in 2021 and those of Jair Bolsonaro did the same in Brazil in 2023.
