How easily a demonstration becomes a riot.
And city authorities mismanaging the affairs in Chicago,
Watts, Washington DC since way back in 1968. And Paris in May that same year.
I landed in Washington DC on June 26, 1968 as a rookie doctor on a Fulbright scholarship to get training in the US. That
very evening we went downtown to see the riots. The National Guard was deployed
and kept us from driving to the east of the Capitol hot zone.
Burn, baby, burn!
Almost five decades later the Sants quarter of Barcelona burst
in flames, alas! only some trash containers and a couple of vehicles, in the
riots that followed the eviction of CanVies,
an “okupa” building. This squatter’s stronghold belonging to the city Public
Transportation Authority had been occupied for some 17 years. It has been harbouring
multiple activities, workshops, “alternative” conferences and courses, and
hundreds of youths and not so young have been going through them. It was part of the landscape
of the working class “barrio” of Sants. But the city wanted them out and after
several legal battles, some 7 months ago got the eviction approved by the
courts.
The city decided to execute the eviction just the day after
the European Parliament elections. The very same day the Chief of the Catalan
Police, long time contested for his handling of several street protests over
the past months, resigned “for personal reasons”. The botched eviction took
place under a spiral of violence. Rioters set fire to the backhoe demolishing
the building, a TV truck and dozens of trash containers (those plastic
contraptions catch fire very easily and light up the scene very dramatically).
Four days of rioting and no end in sight.
The riot police had utterly failed to control the
demonstrators despite coming in in force. Their tactics have been circumvented
by the rioters taking advantage of the small side streets and alleys. Pundits
and politicians keep saying in the media the protesters are very well organized
and put the blame on foreign elements of anarchists groups, mainly Italian. Antisystem,
they are called.
But they do not want to see or hear the tin pot banging of
dozens of neighbours cheering protesters in the street and cursing the police.
Raging unemployment, rising commodities prices, cuts in health and social
services have brought quite a lot of despair, frustration and anger to the
Spanish people on the whole and Catalans in particular.
Banners say: ”If you sow misery, will harvest anger”. Does anyone thing this is a matter of crowd
control?
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