BARCELONA, Spain—After Sept. 11, security tightened at the Hewlett-Packard office in Barcelona, where 1,000 employees were told to wear a microchip badge each day to work. Now, six weeks after train bombs exploded in Madrid, those rules are being strongly reinforced – and setting some of the company’s foreign workers at ease.
“I feel very safe in Spain compared to Paris or Rome or London,” said the human resources director François Volpi.
Volpi, who is French, is one of 900 foreign employees working in Hewlett-Packard’s Spain-Portugal branch. He said foreigners here had become used to working under the threat of terrorism posed by ETA, the Basque separatist group responsible for close to 1,000 killings since the 1960s.
“This is different, but the employees will adapt,” he said. “They know that terrorists don’t make foreigners the target.”
The reactions among foreigners in Spain have been a mixture of fear, grief and optimism since the Madrid bombings on March 11 that killed 191 and injured 1,900. While most people say the event hasn’t changed their daily lives, it has left a shadow over the foreign community as a whole.
At the German School in Barcelona, attended by some 1,500 students, officials announced stricter security measures after concerns that the school could be a target for terrorism. More police now patrol the street and parents can no longer enter the school to retrieve their children after class.
Peter Reuter, a German dentist with a practice in Barcelona, has two children who attend the school. He said teachers had phoned recently asking permission to take his children on a class trip to Madrid. He and his wife approved. “We can’t lock them in the house and prohibit them to travel,” he said.
However, life has changed for Reuter and his family in other ways. “I won’t go to the Grand Prix of Catalonia,” the region’s premier Formula 1 event, this year, he said. “It’s a big event and we should avoid those things.”
For Ignacio Sanchez, a Spaniard, and his German wife, Gabriele Sanchez León, parenting has changed since March 11. “We’re more vigilant about where our kids play and with which friends,” Sanchez said. Several weeks ago, officials reported a suspicious bag at the German School, where his 13-year-old son is a student. In the past, nobody paid any attention, he said. “Now, anything suspicious gets noticed.”
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Sanchez worries not only as a parent but as an employee at the chemical-pharmaceutical giant Bayer, whose large foreign staff has felt the acute impacts of March 11 in other ways. Like its competitors Dow Chemical, Dupont and Pfizer, Bayer has upped security with the help of the Spanish Army at its facilities around Spain, especially the petrochemical plant in Tarragona, one of the largest in Europe.
For Didier Lagae, a Belgian employee at Marco de Comunicación, a small public relations agency in Barcelona, being foreign doesn’t make his situation different from anybody else’s. “We’re in the same basket. We’re exposed to the same dangers as the Spaniards, the Catalans, even the Basques,” he said, although he added that he would try to cut down on his two weekly business trips to Madrid, because “the fear is always present.”
Some companies have reduced the number of plane trips their executives take, choosing to work by teleconference instead.
For some foreigners living in Spain, the Madrid bombings had an intense personal impact. Corita Brown, 31, a yoga teacher from Boston who has lived for two years in Barcelona, said the bombings evoked vivid memories of Sept. 11, which she witnessed as a resident of Manhattan. “I had flashbacks and felt disoriented,” she said, recalling the shock of March 11. “I haven’t gotten to the place of processing Madrid. I’m still feeling sad for New York.”.
A South African expat, Mark Hinchliff, who teaches English at the American British College in Barcelona, said that March 11 reminded him of his good fortune to live in an “extraordinarily peaceful country” like Spain.
“This is still not a country dealing with the crime, murder, carjacking and rape statistics that we have to deal with in South Africa,” he said. “Compared to major cities there, or in Europe or the United States, this is a tea party.”
The day after the Madrid attack, Hewlett-Packard’s management board, made up of 20 executives from around Europe, changed is meeting from Zurich to Madrid in a corporate stand against terrorism.
From the company’s regional headquarters in Barcelona, Volpi has no reason to think business, even under the greater stresses of security, won’t continue as usual. “We get as many visitors as in the past, and we have as many applicants who want to come here to work. You cannot imagine how attractive Barcelona is to Americans especially,” he said.