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 26th. 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 27th. On the 29th 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.
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