Early on Tuesday, Palma and National Police entered the Son Banya shanty town in Palma to prepare the way for municipal workers being sent with heavy machinery to demolish recent illegal constructions.
At around 9.30am, the convoy of machines appeared. The concrete road and a roundabout with a boat on it, which were created some weeks ago, were among the targets for demolition. Five shanties used as drugs sales points and replete with a Las Vegas neon sign will also be demolished along with metal fences.
When the illegal work became evident at the start of March, Palma's mayor, Jaime Martínez, said that had it been up to him, the bulldozers would have been sent in immediately. As it is, the process for demolition and the planning for Tuesday's demolitions have taken several weeks. Planning infringements have to be processed, while the town hall and the police have been trying to establish if they can hold any individuals responsible.
The police set up a cordon to ensure that workers were not harassed by residents, this procedure having been like ones in the past for the demolition of dwellings in Son Banya, a process that has been very slow and impeded by the fact that the drugs clans simply erect new ones.
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JamesGreat idea . Lock up all the gitanos and the problem will go away. No more dealers. No more buyers. Problem solved. Have you any idea how ridiculous that sounds. The whole idea of keeping Son Banya where it is means its away from "normal" people and houses, all the bad eggs are in one location and police can at least monitor the comings and goings. The only way to remove the gitanos main source of income is to legalise and control the sale of drugs . Around the world some countries are finally waking up to this, for some, unpalatable fact. By definition governments cannot control demand for drugs, only societal changes can do that - look how smoking is now unfashionable amongst the young. The government has to control supply and wait for society to catch up on the demand side.
They've always been selling drugs there so what is the anger about, that they got too good at marketing? If the government wants to really fix the problem then they should come up with a real solution, but the feigned emotional reaction of 'how dare they have a neon sign' is a bit lost on me. We take the sign and the boat down and then what, an aircraft carrier and a drone show go up tomorrow? They want to really take action then flatten then whole area, lock them up and put up proper public housing.
That'll make them stop.