BARCELONA — Daniel Esteve led several lives before making a name for himself in Spain as head of controversial Desokupa company, which specializes in the forcible eviction of squatters. He was once a boxer, a promoter of sporting events, a debt collector and a nightclub doorman.
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His most recent transformation, into anti-squatter vigilante, began more than a decade ago at an exclusive sports center in Barcelona, where he worked as a personal trainer and gave boxing classes. Businessmen, lawyers and politicians with power in the Catalan capital were regular clients at the sport center’s luxurious facilities, which also serve as a men-only social club.
Between hand-to-hand combat, sparring sessions and dodge training, the idea that would give birth to Desokupa was born. A businessman, who later distanced himself from the company, sources say, was one of Esteve’s boxing students and was looking for someone to help him evict squatters from a building in the Raval neighborhood. He teamed up with Esteve. “And it worked. Boy, did it work,” Esteve said in a 2016 interview on Radio Intereconomía in which he detailed how their first eviction operation came about.
The Desokupa method
Desokupa’s first operations consisted of “access control,” where a “team of concierges” with the “list of all the neighbors” checked “who entered and who left” the block or the apartment, Esteve told Intereconomía. Desokupa first tried to reach an agreement with the tenants. If that didn’t work, they set up access control so that if squatters leave the apartment, they can’t get back in.
The Catalan businessman had good legal advice and knew the limits, sources said. And those affected by his work — people at risk of social exclusion or members of squatter groups — tend not to report incidents due to a lack of resources, fear or because they are aware that where they are living is not their property.
Desokupa has another peculiarity, which attracted attention from the beginning: the corpulence and intimidating appearance of its employees. They are muscular men, many with “martial arts certifications,” say sources who have worked for the company.
Journalistic investigations, such as those carried out by the Barcelona-based Catalan language magazine La Directa, identified, identified a young man of neo-Nazi ideology in the company’s operations. Esteve distanced himself from those accusations, insisting, in an interview with the Spanish YouTuber RickyEdit, that the young man was not part of the company but worked on the building property.
Violent practices
Violence is common in the videos that Desokupa publishes of its operations. In them, Esteve and his employees mostly restrain men they identify as squatters, accusing them of being armed or aggressive. In one of these images, circulated by the tabloid Estado de Alarma, two employees are seen holding a man by the neck, while another records him and is heard asking him “What is this, faggot?” while showing him a knife.
On his platforms, Esteve openly threatens his targets, warning them that they will leave the house “through the door or through the window.”
Lawyer Diego Redondo came across Desokupa in 2017, when they were trying to evict the La Yaya social center in Madrid. Redondo recalls the “cocky treatment” of Desokupa’s workers, as well as a climate of “physical and verbal intimidation.”
One lawyer says he suffered “intimidation” when entering “a building full of thugs.”
Another lawyer, Andrés García Berrio, now a Catalan regional deputy for Comuns Sumar political party, describes his encounter with Desokupa as one of the situations in which he has been “most afraid” in his career. Five years ago, he helped a family that was going to be evicted and affirms that, although Catalan police officers were present, he suffered “intimidation” when entering “a building full of thugs.”
The State Security Forces are also aware of the eviction company’s practices. Police sources consulted by La Marea question the methods used by the company to carry out evictions.
In May 2023, Spanish daily El País reported that Catalonia’s Mossos d’Esquadra autonomous police force has acted against the company on 28 occasions. La Marea has tried to verify this information with the press office of the Catalan police, which has said that it “does not have this information.”
Also a YouTuber
In recent months, Esteve has had a daily appointment with his social network followers. Before many of them start their day, the leader of Desokupa has already published his morning sermon, baptized “Desokupa News.” In this five-minute video, he addresses and comments on issues that set the agenda of the extreme right — similar to what Alvise Pérez of the far right The Party’s Over (SALF) party does on his Telegram channel.
In “Desokupa News,” Esteve is usually wearing a black T-shirt, sometimes belonging to police or military bodies and backward cap, and is surrounded by Spanish flags and shields of different units of State Security Forces.
The event gave Esteve the perfect ingredients to whip up hatred against foreigners.
This content, which on TikTok (when his account was active) exceeded half a million views in a few days, includes racist comments, fake news and insults to representatives of a large part of the parliamentary arc — sparing only the right-wing president of the Community of Madrid Isabel Díaz Ayuso, members of the far-right Vox party and SALF’s Pérez. Among the main targets is Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Esteve praises those who insult him, calls him a “rat” and accuses him and his wife, Begoña Gómez (whom he refers to as “Begoño”), of criminal activities.
Immersing oneself for months in Esteve’s content involves exposing oneself to conspiracy theories, sexist and transphobic comments, as well as hatred against immigrants.
On April 1, Esteve first mentioned José Manuel Lomas on his networks. Lomas made the news in 2021, when, at the age of 80, he shot and killed Nelson David Ramírez, a 35-year-old Hondruran, who had entered his property. Lomas was accused of murder, and far-right parties came out in his defense.
In an episode of “Desokupa News,” Esteve said he was shocked that Lomos was facing a possible 12 and a half year prison sentence for “confronting an immigrant who entered his house with a saw” — “A chainsaw!” Esteve exclaimed, encouraging his audience to imagine “the intruder’s intentions.”
The event gave Esteve the perfect ingredients to whip up hatred against foreigners — whom he calls “anchovies who don’t eat ham”: an old man to victimize and a migrant to single out with decontextualized information.
Popularity and financial success
Esteve has successfully capitalized on this political content. Although Desokupa has been active for nearly a decade, his digital popularity skyrocketed in May and July 2023, coinciding with two election campaigns.
His popularity began with the television coverage he received during his first years evicting squatters. Spain‘s morning shows were the first platform to air his views widely. Now that his brand is popular on social networks, he no longer needs the shows and does not hesitate to criticise them.
Desokupa not only found a niche in the media, but also in the market, and has known how to exploit it, billing annually around 1 million euros and reaching its peak business in 2019 with 1.7 million euro. The company operated by Esteve, called Conciencia y Respeto 1970 SL, took off a few months after starting up, recording profits that went from 88,337 euro in 2017 to 171,463 euro in 2022, although in 2021 it recorded negative figures. Esteve received a total of 689,000 euro between 2019 and 2022, according to the company’s accounts.
It is a discourse that has been imposing itself, which has not been in line with the statistics.
Generally, property owners resort to eviction companies such as Desokupa to avoid bringing the conflict to court. “They feel the need to find a quick answer,” says Rafael Estévez, chief judge of Cáceres, adding that “justice always comes, but it is slow and there are people who resort to other ways.”
Data from the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) confirm that there is a problem. In six years, the time to obtain a ruling has more than doubled. If in 2018 the procedures for illegal occupation of real estate were resolved in almost five months, in 2023 they took a year to be solved.
Housing crisis
The irruption of Desokupa coincided with an increase in complaints of squatting and convictions for property usurpations. After the burst of the real estate bubble, “mortgage evictions reached a very high number… many people found themselves without a housing alternative” and ended up squatting, says Victor Palomo, a lawyer specializing in the right to housing.
In recent years, the problem of squatting has been a central theme in the discourse of the three main right-wing parties: Ciudadanos, People’s Party and Vox, who have proposed laws to combat it and have promoted anti-squatting offices and telephone lines in the Autonomous Communities in which they govern.
Official statistics and the demand for these services show the gap between such speech and reality. In 2022, the last year for which there is data, 4,292 occupancy convictions were issued, while the number of evictions was significantly higher (38,266) — in a country with a population of more than 48 million.
Desokupa was one of the actors, together with political parties and the media, that managed to foment the “fear of the occupation of private housing” after the bubble burst, says Eduard Sala, professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and analyst of the housing crisis.
“Basically, it is a discourse that has been imposing itself, which has not been in line with the statistics,” Sala says, adding that this social alarm was raised to hide a larger problem: difficulties in accessing housing.
A first conviction
After Desokupa, dozens of other companies have been set up with the same objective. In the trademark registry alone, there are 20 results when searching for the word “desokupa”. In the commercial register, another 20. The proliferation of these companies has shaken up the courts. The chief judge of Cáceres confirms that “some” of these companies act “at the limit of the law and others, directly transgressing it.”
Recent convictions for crimes of coercion or injury have begun to highlight the practices of these companies. In mid-May, the Mossos d’Esquadra dismantled a “criminal organization” — according to the Catalan police — which operated as an extrajudicial eviction company, under the name of Antiokupa Tarraco, and which used violent methods. The investigation also detected racist behavior, as they were targeting “groups of certain national origins.”
That’s what really pisses off these rats who call us Nazi [or] ultra-right.
In this context, Esteve has boasted of not having “a single judicial conviction.” “That’s what really pisses off these rats who call us Nazi [or] ultra-right,” he told YouTuber RickyEdit.
But that zero conviction record ended last year, when his company was convicted of unlawful interference with the right to self-image of Shervin Mansouri, a housing rights activist, after broadcasting a video without his consent in which his image appeared. The content, accompanied by a message in which Esteve said that they were carrying out an “operation” against “a group of hippies” in January 2022, reached more than 300,000 views on the company’s profiles.
This groundbreaking ruling targeted the core of Desokupa’s strategy: social networks. The court found — in a ruling that has been appealed — that this type of publication has commercial purposes, contributes to promoting the brand, and attracts new customers.
This story was produced with support from the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) Disarming Disinformation program, a three-year global effort funded by the Scripps Howard Fund.
