For 40 years, the Fundación Aynat, created by a private patron and chaired by the parish priest of the Basilica of the Purísima Concepción de Yecla, and the Ampy Association, of people with mental disabilities, have been working hard in this municipality in the region of Murcia, with around 36,500 inhabitants, to improve the quality of life of this collective. The former gave up his land so the latter could build and operate a special education school, day center and residence, but over the past decade the deal appears to have reached its end. The foundation refuses to convert private transfer contracts into public documents, which prevents the association from accessing grants to expand its facilities. The open war, which is currently taking place in court, has forced an entity of disabled people to return European aid worth around one million euros.
With these funds, explained the president of Ampy, Pedro Ángel Sandoval, to EL PAÍS, the association plans to expand its residence to new places, which is at 100% capacity, with 37 highly dependent people living in its facilities and a waiting list of around three hundred people.
One of the last to arrive at the square was José Luis Polo, a 39-year-old man who suffers from Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, a very common type of epilepsy that causes severe seizures, intellectual disability and behavioral problems. He has been linked to the Ampy association for four years, explains his mother, Mari Loli Navarro: he first went to school then to the day center.
The advanced age of its priests made it possible to plant this resource, but access to it was not easy. “In a municipal residence, the lifespan of the residents is more limited, there is a greater turnover on places. In this case, people with mental disabilities can spend decades in the residence, because they become young and the centers become smaller,” explains the mother, aged 83. For her, being able to keep her child close to home has been “a world”, because it allows her to visit and accompany him every day. But it was also for “the baby”, as he continues to call him, because he was kept in his environment, the center sharing some of the facilities and staff with other resources managed by Ampy. “José Luis feels that it is his home, he does not need to adapt, because his life is there,” he summarizes. Therefore, I do not understand the work that, for the first time in its history, the Fundación Aynat contributes to the growth of the association of people with disabilities.
Ocho years of difference
Sandoval, the president of Ampy, was at the beginning of the disagreements around 2017, when the association first requested the parish priest of La Purísima, José Antonio Abellán, before the patronage of the foundation, who formalized in public documents the transfers of land, which date back to 1986 in its school case, from 1990 to the day center and from 1996 to the residence.
“Until that moment, Ampy was operating without problems with these private concessions. However, we found that, if we wanted to use public aid to carry out the work, we had to formalize these documents, make them public, which is why we asked for the surface right to be recognized”, a legal figure which allows a third party to build on land that does not belong to them, he explains. Sandoval.
In the eight years since, we have only come close to a result on several occasions. In 2019, the Fundación proposed an agreement that the president of Ampy described as “unacceptable”, which significantly modified the conditions that the entity had put in place up to that point. The most controversial point, he indicates, was that relating to the land qualified as a playing field and the spacing of the centers, which fell at the free disposal of the Fundación.
Faced with the impossibility of reaching an agreement, Ampy appealed to the courts to claim the surface rights, even if this paralyzed the denunciation in 2023. The mediators on both sides seem to have found a balance and the agreement was even announced in the local press. “Everything was ready to be signed but, from evening to morning and without giving anyone an explanation, the priest rejected the agreement, we all had to negotiate and we returned to the starting point,” he laments. The case was brought to court in September 2024 and the judge ruled that Fundación Aynat was obliged to grant the surface right to the association of disabled people.
The president of Ampy recognizes that the judicial failure was a disaster for the association, which appealed the sentence before the Provincial Court of Murcia, and also denounced the situation before the Protectorado de Fundaciones de la Región de Murcia, an organization dependent on the autonomous community. Both processes are awaiting resolution.
The parish president of the Aynat Foundation, José Antonio Abellán, responded to requests for information from this periodical through communications in which he insists that the will of the entity is that Ampy maintains its activity and refuses to go so far as to reverse the transfers of land on those located in its centers. However, in the same way, it is not willing to grant the aforementioned surface right, but to maintain the allocations of use and enjoyment in precariousness, for as long as possible. The foundation, given this statement, is “within its legitimate right to give and grant according to its best criteria, because it is not obliged to give what it does not want or cannot.” “We do not understand this situation as a controversy on our part, because even if the fines for attention to disabled people are met, this foundation is not going to remove the transfers”, insists the text, which recognizes the work of Ampy professionals, but harshly accuses its board of directors, whom it accuses of having caused this “clash of trains”, which is why it considers that they have been “completely invalidated to reach anyone”.
While waiting for a solution, users are worried about the future, as explained by Mari Carmen Azorín, whose daughter, Alicia Mesa, aged 37 and suffering from an intellectual and motor disability, is a user of the day center. Even if your family can currently help you in this regime, it costs you a lot to register on the residency waiting list, because getting to a place, señala, is a “heartbreaking” process that, in many cases, ends with the transfer of applicants to centers in other municipalities, since in Yecla it is the only resource that helps people with intellectual disabilities. So ask for a solution that allows you to expand the center to give answers to those who, like your daughter, know that they will need a place which, currently, is often impossible to achieve.
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