"You in Morocco, Desokupa in Moncloa", calls Daniel Esteve, founder of the company Desokupa, to Pedro Sánchez, in a huge canvas deployed this week in the center of Madrid. He also makes fun of the leaders of Podemos and ERC: "We will miss you all".
It is quite a demonstration of strength by Esteve, a character who already broke into the municipal halls in Barcelona by calling a march, on the occasion of two occupied houses in La Bonanova, which attracted hundreds of ultra-rightists and during which they shouted insults against Ada Colau.
Formally, Desokupa is a company dedicated to extrajudicial evictions, a legal activity, even if 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 police experts tasked with monitoring violent extremism and its potential threat to security, Desokupa is already much more than that: he has become "a far-right lobby" and its leader, an actor of promoting violent radicalization, say the General Information Office of the Mossos d'Esquadra.
Born in Barcelona in 1970, Esteve is an old acquaintance of the police. When the Mossos were deployed in the Catalan capital, in 2005, they already identified him as a supporter of the Casuals, a Barça ultra group. He has a police record for injuries, threats, extortion, illegal detention, home invasion, robbery with violence, 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, downstairs from the Princesa Sofia hotel.
He went on to own a small agency that supplied security personnel to entertainment venues and bodyguards for VIPs. From there he went into the debt collection business. In 2007 he founded Morososbcn. His methods were similar to those of Desokupa: he sent burly skewers to intimidate the debtor, sometimes to the point of terror. "Two victims explained how a knife was put to their necks and they were taken to a sinister car park in Castelldefels. With loud music playing to drown out the screams, they were forced to strip and stand in handcuffs while one of the criminals, who had a swastika tattooed on his chest, masturbated and threatened to rape them. They paid", explained a press chronicle in 2008, after his second arrest.
That arrest, by the kidnapping and extortion unit of the Mossos, ended badly. Faced with the danger 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 testicles of the young employee who was co-pilot. The cop was convicted. Esteve escaped with a lesser sentence for injuries in a trial that ended in compliance. He has had no further convictions.
for a crime of injuries.
He was forced to reinvent himself. He joined Arsenal as a boxing coach, an exclusive gym in Barcelona, whose members pay 350 euros a month. His style, “macarón, with tattoos and that menacing tone, it was scary to even look at his face”, recalls a veteran partner, baffled the clientele at first. But it didn't take long to win her over. "It was very successful, people were hooked on his classes. At first they gave him a small space, but so many people 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. That is why in 2014 he founded La Isla Fighting Championship S.L. In those meetings, Esteve was known as "el segurata". "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 he was interested in was business", recalls that member.
It was at Arsenal that the idea of creating Desokupa came about, when a customer came to ask for help with an eviction. It went so well that together they decided to set up a company, which they registered in 2016 as Conciencia y Respeto 1970 S.L. and from which the partner dissociated himself a year later, advised by a legal firm. Desokupa charges a minimum of 3,000 euros, which can be multiplied according to the complexity of the intervention.
"Esteve is very well advised, and always goes with a lawyer. He goes by the limits of the law, but he doesn't cross them", say Catalan police sources. "He is very clever, and he has been able to spread a discourse on security that many now want to hear", adds a source who has known Esteve for three decades.
The Mossos have opened proceedings against Desokupa workers at least thirty-five times, according to judicial sources, for threats, coercion, damage or injury.
On the other hand, their method is based on intimidation, and intimidated people do not report. Nor do squatters with anti-system ideology turn to the police, and Desokupa knows it.
The lawyer Solange Hilbert, of Iacta Coop, has litigated three times against Desokupa: one was filed, 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 - he explains - and because of details such as the accused not being located, the cases are dropped. For us it is absolutely obvious and flagrant that Desokupa commits the crime of improper use of the right to his actions, but the judges never get to enter into the analysis of this end".
"In eight years we have recovered the houses of 7,600 families. Zero convictions", boasts the company on the canvas of Madrid.
This same week there was a conviction 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. It is a blow to one of the pillars of the Desokupa's strategy, which disseminates photographs and personal data of squatters on the internet as a pressure mechanism. The judge does not condemn them for damage to honor, but because he considers that the company uses the image of third parties to advertise itself and attract customers.
On his website, Esteve sells clothes with the company logo. He claims he's just looking for publicity. Police experts don't believe him.
From the municipal elections, Desokupa's challenge has gone to another level, and has turned Esteve into a character with a clear political agenda. It is already a catalytic force for the ultra-right, experts from the Mossos and the National Police agree.
His growing summoning capacity is a concern, although it is greater in 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 will end up radicalizing young people with little critical capacity. Between their networks, Esteve and Desokupa have more than 375,000 followers.
He does not hide that he wants a government of Vox with the PP, in that order, although he has said that he throws stones at himself, because if this comes true his business "could end".
Esteve denies belonging to any party but, coincidence or not, when Desokupa was rolling out his tarp in Madrid on Monday, at Vox's headquarters in the north of the city, the ultra formation dedicated the start of its Monday press conference to the insecurity that Spain supposedly suffers from.
Taking advantage of the riots in France, the spokesman Ignacio Garriga put immigration, religion and crime in the same shaker to warn that "Spain will be France in ten years". The same combination that Esteve warns about in his networks. "In France, neighborhood patrols are being organized because they are getting into gangs to rape their women (...) If this happens here in Spain, God forbid, I will be one of the leaders of the street army, of neighbors, call him what you will. And I won't go out with a stick. If I have to die I will die in the street defending my country", he proclaims in a video.
His speech follows the classic narrative of the European far-right. Squatting is an indigenous issue (especially in Catalonia), but from there it jumps to more traditional causes such as immigration, which it addresses as a problem of cultural fit. In his videos, he often refers to Muslim immigrants as "anchovies who don't eat ham."
In the last few days, for example, he has uploaded a multitude of videos on his social networks about the riots in France due to the death of a boy at the hands of the police.
His strategy also seems right out of the modern ultra-right handbook. For example in the systematic use of fake news, distortions of reality, if not inventions, which seek to inflame public opinion, often against immigrants. Also in the dichotomous vision of reality in which nuances do not fit: 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 that he never worked for the banks. He has also tried to stand up as a defender of the police, as if they were a party in a conflict between good and bad, and not a mediator, established by the structural arrangement of the country, 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 equipment: everything, opportunely narrated on his social networks, of course.
Desokupa's aesthetic is strongly reminiscent of the ultra Greek party Alba Daurada, now illegal. Its militants, muscular and clean-shaven men, became famous for patrolling Athens dressed in black T-shirts hunting left-wing militants and immigrants. The General Information Commissioner has been able to verify direct links between the Greeks and supporters of Desokupa.
At the highest levels of the National Police, the Madrid tarpaulin is causing concern. Experts see a hidden message to "vacate Moncloa" if the result of the July 23 general elections does not please them. It wouldn't be the first time it's been tried: Trump supporters stormed the Capitol after his defeat in 2021, and Jair Bolsonaro's supporters did the same in Brazil this year.
