Two Demonstrations and an election

DISCLAIMER: This is a personal account that makes no claims to be objective, ect ect as before.

Sometimes living in Spain is like being in an abusive relationship that you enjoy despite yourself. Like when it’s three in the morning and you want to go home and everyone else is just getting started, mixed in with 6am starts that everyone else seems to think is acceptable, to be shrugged off with a caffeine/nicotine dose that makes me shudder to contemplate. Or navigating through mad complex public transport systems at the end of the day, massively self-conscious of how much more you are sweating than everyone else. Or when somebody in your group tells the punch line of a long joke and everybody screams with laughter and you smile politely as you didn’t understand the premise of the joke in the first place, never mind the ending.  But then somebody pronounces an interesting word just so, or somebody makes a particular gesture and I have to grin to myself as I walk by thinking “damn, that’s so Spanish.” 

Politically speaking it’s quietened down since S25. Everyone knows what’s bubbling beneath the surface, but it’s not just the politicians who would prefer to ignore the glaring reality, the whole families going through bins and the beggars with the heart-breaking placards.  It’s going to kick off and it will not be pretty – my money is on the European general strike in November. However so far I’ve only been to two demos in Bilbao, #S29 and #Global Noise and endured a local election. 

#S29, 29/09/0212

I arrived in Bilbao on a rainy Saturday at 19:00HRS, looking for a demo for which I didn’t know the starting location that had begun an hour earlier. I had caught the wrong bus in Eibar and rather than the speedy motorway one I had caught the snail-paced, visit-every-village one. So as I headed into the town centre I was counting on the demonstration’s innate obviousness – noisy, vibrant and huge, preferably with a monstrous blue light police escort and a collection of helicopters  – to find it. In this case I almost passed them by without noticing. Walking down Calle Colon de Larreategui I spotted more people than usual walking in the same direction amongst the tourist masses. Detailed scrutiny revealed a hasty placard or two. I supposed it was the protest, but it was advancing at a snail’s pace, entirely on the pavement. Only as I crossed the street did the demonstration emit a chant. 

“Que no, que no, que no nos representan”, which has been a staple since May of 2011. Think “cut back, fight back” for the British equivalent. I asked somebody on the march if this was indeed the S29 demonstration, and he confirmed that it was. As I asked, the group chanted. “Un solucion, los banqueros en la prision” I’m not a native speaker but this grated on my ears, 5 syllables for the first chant then about 9 for the second part. It was an obvious change form “un solución, revolución” taking a radical chant and changing it into a reformist one. I finally spotted the only megaphone, a “baby megaphone” – such a quiet piece of kit that I prefer to use the vocal chords alone for a better projection. 

The march moved through the main tourist drag of Bilbao, drawing non-pulsed looks from shoppers, tourists and migrant salesmen alike. One migrant cheekily clapped along with us, I hoped that they knew what was going on and why, and I tried to explain in broken Arabic with no discernible result. Moving out of the shopping area across the river Nervión, we approached the town hall, which was guarded by a handful of coppers. When mutterings began of moving towards the town hall, it was met by many with a stentorian disapproval. When cries of “!a la ayuntamiento!”  Went up, half the crowd broke away, crossing the street and refusing to take part in any action around the town hall. Astonishing. The remainder sat down on the hall steps and clapped for 5 minutes “No hay pan para tanto chorizo” (there isn’t enough bread for this much sausage / theft) before moving on towards the old town. As I engaged with more demonstrators, I saw I wasn’t the only person who was feeling massively underwhelmed. As we wound down the closely packed streets somebody at the back started chanted “esto no es mani, nos vamos de compras” “this isn’t a demo, were going shopping”. That got a few laughs. The group only really viscerally went for one call – “violencia es no llegar a fin de mes” “violence is not having any money left over at the end of the month”

Finally we made it the demo end point, a plaza on the outskirts of Casco Viejo, where the indignados automatically formed a circle to finish off the action. First, a round of applause that nobody seemed to want to stop. Then some thankyous, a few updates about S29 in the rest of Spain – where it was announced that the fire-fighters had walked out spontaneously in the south with the indignados – and finally an announcement that this demonstration would be repeated the next Saturday. After this the circle broke up into smaller circles. I wandered over to one to eavesdrop. “Next time we do a demo we need to remember the fucking megaphone.” I smiled at this; good to know that our Spanish brethren can be equally forgetful. 

Overall this demonstration came across as agonizingly passive and pacifist. The choice by many to not even sit on the steps of the town hall, pacifist modifications to the chants, the ironic self-criticism towards the end that showed others wanted to escalate the tempo somewhat. This was the first demonstration in Spain when I didn’t sense palpable anger coming from the demonstrators. The reaction from the majority of the public was lukewarm, resigned to having demonstrators marching up and down their streets. It was more like a guided walking tour than a demo.

On the other hand, the turnout of approximately 200 people at short notice (S29 was called after the police brutality of S25) was very promising, and if this kind of demonstration could be pulled off every Saturday with similar turnout, it would have an impact. Again the age range and diversity of those attending was extremely varied; this movement cannot be written off as a sectional interest group – it’s definitely ticking the “people from all walks of life” box. This is of course helped by Spain having a massively militant generation of senior citizens who, having lived through a dictatorship, know what they have to loose.  

I finish the day at a radical bar, with a TV set to live feeds of demonstrations instead of football, with a group of indignados. Over pintxos and wine we discuss the respective situations in Spain and Britain. I learn dismayed, but not really surprised to hear that Fracking is being introduced in the Basque country. They are all gobsmacked when I lay down the numbers of the tuition fee hike. Before I stagger off to bed I scrawl down an email address and type in somebodies mobile number; the indignados have many more actions coming up in the near future. 

#Global Noise, 13/10/2012

The march started at 18:00 in Plaza Moyua, the geographic centre of the new town. There were only about 50 people, dwarfed by the large space they were in, the Norman Foster Metro entrances and the group of two riots vans and two police riders that watched them from different exits of the roundabout. I waited until they left the roundabout before I joined them, setting off on the same route as last time to Casco Viejo.  Again the diversity of people is awesome. The march had its complement of raging grannies and granddads - one of whom apologetically explained to me, as we symbolically closed a road for a few minutes, that he was too reliant on his Zimmer frame to sit down, otherwise he would do so. Militant mums with kids in prams we also in strong attendance. As the 20 something student, I felt in the minority. A middle aged professional in trekking shoes and a plaid shirt calmly blew a diaphragm shaking Basque horn as he marched. A beggar who was knelling prostrate on the ground holding up a begging bowl slowly looked up, watched us and then bowed his head again. 

The same people who had led the demo and the baby megaphone last time were doing the same again (tut tut) although at least they had brought a decent sized meg this time. We stopped to sit down and block junctions twice, while the chap up front denounced the illegal debt and the exploitation of southern Europe by the northern powers. (My German friends are too scared to park their Deutsh number plated cars in city centres) The municipal police re-directed traffic around us, led by a sour faced major who turned up at both demos. The local cops wear their Basque hats on duty – like berets but totally flat, like black head pancakes. The major wears a bright red one which makes him impossible to take seriously, but I know that with one word on his radio, those two wagons full of riot officers will turn up and be downright unsociable.  

Fortunately the demo passed peacefully, with an end assemblea in the same place as last time, followed by the demonstrators organically moving from a big circle assemblea to clusters of friends moving off to their favourite bars. 

Local Election

Right now I don’t know who has won and frankly I’m not bothered what colour of neo-liberalism they are imposing here. However if I appear to be worried about the sometimes lacklustre indignados, bear in mind that the levels of apathy towards the government are staggering. Most of the election promotion consists of cars with monster sound systems driving round town terrorising people with Basque “ethnic music” mixed with booming election promises. I saw PSOE set up their mobile election hustings in Eibar, where they were ignored while giant speakers squirted and belched horrible electronic feedback until they gave up, packed up and drove off. The reaction of the people is like watching a donkey look at a sepia picture of an empty bus shelter. The vacantness of the campaign phrases could not be greater of they set out with such an intent. The PSOE (labour) have gone for:

 “estamos a lo que hay estar ” - “We are what there is to be”

 How existential. However, the PP (Tories) have outdone them in their fiendish complexity with:

“Si tu no votas, ellos ganan” - “If you don’t vote, they win.” 

So, extra points for guess of who “they” are. Two identikit white middle aged men, with identikit grey-brushed hair and identikit steel rimmed glasses gaze down at you, the only difference being that the labour chap has rolled up the sleeves of his razor creased shirt (working class or what eh?)  Their faces are plastered across the over ground trams and the Bilbao graffiti community appear to have competed with each other to see who could deface the most Tory images, usually with “fascista” hastily scrawled across the giant face. Trams are moving targets, after all.

Despatch from Madrid – An Account of the S25 demonstration PART TWO

DISCLAIMER: This is a personal account that makes no claims to be objective, the conclusions I have drawn are not necessarily correct. Furthermore, the events I am recording were chaotic and there has yet to be a single factual history that everybody agrees one. Here you will only find my side of the story. 

I distinctly remember the conversation that I was having when the police began their assault. I was talking to two other people, a dreadlocked young guy and a girl who had to break off the conversation every other minute to justify wearing a face mask to rabid pacifists jabbering about “bad press”. We were speculating about how many people in the crowd would camp in the plaza, and how many would demonstrate the next day. Already, small numbers of people who had chanted and marched enough for one day were drifting away, fatigued after 8 hours on their feet. “We need a demonstration every Friday, like in Egypt” said the dreadlocked man. “That will bring the government down.” I opened my mouth to agree with him but my voice was drowned out by a rising collective scream of alarm. 

Trawling through the videos later, I figured that the catalyst for the police charge was a militant bloc pushing forward into the police lines with flagpoles. The jury still isn’t out yet as to whether they were plainclothes, acting to give the police a casus belli to wade in. I don’t know, but it seems certain that there were some plainclothes at work amongst the crowds. The police immediately responded with massive and overwhelming violence, beating everybody in sight to clear out the plaza. After the crowd began to scream and shout, like a shoal of minnows they surged away from the cops, who then exploited this to keep up the pressure. Moving in such a large crowd is highly dangerous, with the risk of people trampling each other and getting pulled under. People began to call out “!suave!” (smoothly) and for people not to run, and within a few moments the panicked rout became an orderly withdrawal. Still it was very hard to move, as I could barely pick my feet up for the press of bodies and sometimes by body was being carried without actually taking steps. I twisted around to look behind me and I could see the cops getting closer, an image of Robocop visors and falling truncheons. Finally the crowd made it out of the plaza into the relative safety of the green space that divided the two traffic lanes of the Paseo Del Prado. Here the tree trunks, park benches and low fences gave us some respite from the assault and the police checked their advance. 

Assessing the situation, I saw that the police had driven everybody out of the plaza into the surrounding green spaces. The mood had obviously shifted completely. People were hurling abuse at the police officers. Lots more people were masking up, and beginning to throw missiles. Mostly empty bottles, but some rocks were also coming in, as well as the occasional firework. Until now they were being used recreationally, now they were being employed as weapons. This is also the first time I saw and heard the police fire rubber bullets. The Spanish National Police issue an attachment that goes into the barrel of a standard shotgun, which looked to similar to a Mossberg 500 and they fire rubber bullets through these, rather than using a dedicated rubber bullet gun. I suppose this makes a certain tactical sense, since if they want to they can unscrew the rubber bullet launchers and start firing live ammunition. When these things fire they boom like a thunderclap and a lot of sparks emit from the launcher barrel.However despite the police violence the people were undaunted. The chanting continued, albeit with different, more militant chants.  

“asesinos” – “murderers”

“hijos de puta” – “sons of bitches”

 “que no, que no, que no tenemos miedo” – “we are not afraid”

“ahorras son azules, antes eran grises” – “now you are blue, before you were grey”

The last chant was a reference to the grey uniforms that the police wore during Franco’s dictatorship, implying that the police are still a fascist force in society today. I threw in a few renditions of “No Justice, No Peace, Fuck the Police!” for old times’ sake, but it was received with bafflement. Militant tactics were now being used more. Whereas before the pacifists had dominated the mood and execution of the demonstration, they now found themselves in the minority.

 After a brief respite, the police advanced again, firing salvo after salvo of rubber bullets, driving people in all directions. As I ran towards the Prada museum, I heard a sickening wet slapping sound and a guy next to me went down like a sack of potatoes. It took me a while to realise what had happened, and in a short space of time he was surrounded by a hoard of camera toting journalists. Eventually protesters fought their way through the journalists and dragged the casualty to safety. This took us up the side steps of the Prada Museum, where a middle aged woman was used to work as a nurse took over until the ambulance could arrive. The casualty had taken a round to the stomach, not life threatening but highly painful. 

The police advanced again, and at this point both the crowd and the police lost all coherence, shooting off in all directions. After a very stressful run down the Paseo del Prado with a spiked high wall – utterly devoid of escape routes - on one side of me and vans of riot police on the other, I arrived at the large roundabout of Atocha, where a couple of hundred demonstrators had mobbed up after running from the police. In spontaneous move, groups began flooding off the pavements and into the main road, blocking traffic and chanting “vamos piqueteros!”  (Picketers). The piqueteros tactic – blocking the arteries of capitalism for progressive social change – originated in Argentina during their struggles against IMF imposed neo-liberalism. The tactic was first employed in Spain en masse in 2011 with autonomous groups supporting strikers by blocking roads. Now it is commonly employed and has been used by Austrian miners and Madrilenian public sector workers to name a few. Some drivers honked their horns in exasperation, some slouched into their seats, resigned to waiting. A handful wound down their windows and raised their fists to wild applause. Some motorcyclists tried to creep forward and we had to physically block them from passing, although we also had to restrain some of the more enthusiastic piqueteros from getting in fights with angry drivers. We held this position for some time, dragging dustbins into the road, until the police returned to dislodge us. 

The police tactics were puzzling. They advanced everywhere in small squads of about 10 agents, with riot shields to the front and rubber bullet firing marksmen behind. When they got close to demonstrators they would break out of their tight formation in order to easily beat people, but they quickly formed up again. When they needed to shift position they would call up the riot vans for hops across town. These small units would fan out across the city chasing demonstrators, beating and shooting people indiscriminately. Thus a situation that was confined to a reasonably small part of the urban fabric became generalised throughout central Madrid. If the London Met had been policing that protest, they would have kettled the largest possible amount of people for 8 hours, denied them food, toilets or water, squeezing them into a smaller and smaller space, strangling the protest, whilst dispersing the rest. The Spanish National Police swapped one big protest outside Congress for hours of running battles in multiple locations. 

By this point I was losing the ability to run well, as I had been no-stop on my feet from 14:00HRS of the 25th until 01:00HRS of the 26^th. I lost track of the running battles, and headed for the Atocha metro station. This was also surrounded by police vans, and when I went inside I saw people running away from riot squads, who were being assisted by the truncheon wielding private security guards of the metro. I finally made it back to my hostel early in the morning, my feet in agony and my trousers in pieces, and feel asleep straight away.

Since the S25 demonstration there have been more and more clashes over the preceding days, although on a smaller scale. Rumours are flying like wildfire, as they tend to do, that large numbers of riot cops are calling in sick and that live rounds were fired into the air on the 27^th. On the 29^th another demonstration has been called, with marches gathering across all the cities of Spain to besiege their centres of government, rather than a single convergence in Madrid. I plan on attending the one in Bilbao. Lisbon and Paris are also answering the call out, I don’t know about Athens, but knowing the Greeks I suspect they too will be one the streets. I will try and post an update after the S29 demonstration as soon as possible.

Despatch from Madrid – An Account of the S25 demonstration PART ONE

DISCLAIMER: This is a personal account that makes no claims to be objective, the conclusions I have drawn are not necessarily correct. 

I arrived in the Plaza de España at approximately 14:00HRS, after following some indignados activists whom I met in the Lavapies district. In the plaza de España were hundreds of people sitting around in circles, eating, drinking, smoking and discussing the day ahead. I understand that the Plaza de Espana was one of multiple convergence points from which the demo started. Almost everybody I spoke to said they believed that they would be attacked by the police. I shared lunch with two teenage boys who had travelled into Madrid from Castilla y Leon to participate in the demonstration. They told me that they had lied to their parents about where they were going, and one of them shyly admitted that his father was a Guardia Civil police officer. When I asked them if they considered themselves anti-capitalists they replied without hesitation. “Yes man, until death.”

There were a plethora of different groups present. Primarily los Indignados, the Spanish occupy movement. There were also regional autonomists, especially of Andalusia and Castilla, as well as anarchists, republicans, Communists, various anti-capitalist left parties and Constitutionalists who were handing out petitions for Spanish citizens to hand in at the Parliament. Most of the constitutionalists seemed to be old; in general the young have no faith in the constitution or representative democracy. There were many Icelandic flags present – not because there were any Icelandic people, but because the demonstrators hoped to repeat the feat of the Icelandic people, who besieged their parliament – the Althing – from October 2008 until January 2009 to bring down their neo-liberal government and rewrite their constitution. At 16:00 HRS the assemblea, or general assembly, began, firstly discussing the practicalities of demonstration before finding consensus on them, then becoming a forum for passionate speakers to rally the crowd. The consensus part of the assemblea only attracted the die-hard indignados, most people around the edges continued to drink, eat and prepare for the day ahead. I spent this time checking my kit and lamenting not bringing some armour, or at least a helmet. The police had killed a boy in Bilbao some months ago with a rubber bullet; I didn’t want to be the next martyr!

 People were also distributing maps and information sheets. These documents showed a high level of organisation, laying out the day’s timetable, intentions and means of communication. The communication section was especially good, recommending good apps for communicating as well as which twitter hash tags to follow. There was also useful advice on not panicking, mastering collective fear, walking not running during police charges etc. The only part that was lacking in my opinion was the section on kettling – “en caso de kettling” the organisers had recommended either sitting down, holding up empty hands or linking arms then taking a powerful photo. This emphasis on passive resistance relied on the belief that if there were many people who remained calm, then it would be impossible for the police to move us on. 

The crowd swelled and the chants rose. By approximately 16:30 HRS the march had begun. The police blocked off two thirds of Calle Gran Via for the march, leaving a small area open for one way traffic. The march was enormous. The Gran Via is a slight slope, and as we rope and I looked back, the grand procession stretched beyond my visual horizon. Numerical estimates have been bandied about so much as to lose all value, but from a trusted source I would say that 50,000 is a conservative estimate. I have not seen such a big crowd since the 26th of March 2011. This was a national demonstration; people had come from across the country to express their rage. A transit van mounting a hefty sound system thumped out Keny Arkana, and the chants of the people bounced off the high buildings around us, becoming one single roar. The demographic of the protestors is very mixed. The majority were young, but there were people of all ages including old people, who regularly remonstrated with the police, begging them not to act like the fascist police of old.

The Spanish chants are very strong. Maybe this just appears so to me as a linguist and Spanish student, but I believe that you can feel the memory recent poverty and dictatorship in the voices. I will translate some chants here, although I feel that a lot is lost in translation.

“Esta crisis no la pagamos” - “We will not pay for this crisis”

“Eso Eso Eso, nos vamos a congreso” - “This This This, we go to Congress”

“Ole Ole Ole, les llaman democracia y no lo es” - “Ole Ole Ole, they call it democracy but it’s not”

“Ole Ole Ole, se llama dictadura y eso es” – “Ole Ole Ole, this is a dictatorship for sure”

“Menos policía y mas educación” – “Less pólice and more education”

“Vive la clase obrera” – “Long live the working class”

“Del norte al sur, del este al oeste, la lucha sigue, cueste lo que cueste” – “From north to south, from east to west, the struggle continues, cost what it may”

“Por este gobierno, nos vamos de culo” – “For this government, we march showing them our arses” (chanted whilst walking backwards)

“No nos mires, unite” – “Don’t watch us, join us”

“Una solucion, revolucion” - “ One solution revolution”

“Cuando tu nos mires, la gente estan robado” – “Whilst you watch us, the people are being robbed.”

“El pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido” – “The people, united will never be defeated”

“Que no que no que no nos representan” “They don’t, they don’t, they do not represent us”

The level of class consciousness and anger that I witnessed is massive. When we passed the headquarters of the PSOE – the Spanish labour party that is currently in opposition, people chanted “Conservative and Labour, it’s the same shit.” And also “don’t just watch us, jump” to the PSOE apparatchiks watching from the high windows. Soon the march was leaving the large main street and approaching the Plaza del Sol. The demonstration spread across several small streets as people raced each other to be the first in the Plaza del Sol. After taking a minute to form up in Sol the march again moved off towards congress. Passing banks and government buildings, people pointed and chanted “Estos son los culpables” “They are the guilty ones.”

We arrived at the Plaza de Neptuno, outside congress, at roughly 19:00HRS. To say that the atmosphere was electric is a gigantic understatement. The noise was a constant roar. People had to shout in each other’s ears to be heard. The crowd was making collective movements such as hand clapping, mass cheering and jumping up and down, truly incredible to see. I climbed up a high window guard for a better view, and I could see people in every direction, to the limit of my visual horizon down straight streets. After some time I moved closer into the middle of the Plaza de Neptuno for a better view. By now the press of people was very dense, you had to move people around you and have them move you, but this was done with smiles and friendship. About 30 meters away from the from police barriers that closed of Congress, I climbed to the top of a bus shelter for a better view. During this shaky climb I ripped my trousers open from crotch to knee, but what I saw was well worth it. 

A sea of people chanting in unison. Friends and strangers embracing. People dancing, people raising their fists, laughing, love and rage and solidarity and resistance as deeds rather than empty words on a facebook page. By some prearranged signal around 100 people all began throwing multi-coloured Frisbees across the plaza, creating a further level of spectacle. I tried to balance on the bus shelter and film as Frisbees zipped past my face. An elderly man with a grin like a Cheshire cat called out to me and passed me a republican flag. After about 15 minutes of enthusiastic flag waving and crowd filming I slowly climbed down to let someone else take my place.   

  

This peaceful plaza occupation continued until approximately 21:00 HRS. I had just bought a drink from a street vendor when the police began their assault. This marked the end of the peaceful demo and the beginning of the running battle. 

END OF PART 1