IndyMedia - Vrij Media Centrum Nederland

Wanneer: 02/10/2017 - 10:26

Another update by an anarchist comrade living in Spain:

It's Monday morning. Yesterday the Spanish state limited itself to police action, but at an extreme level and all across Catalunya.

Basically, all the voting centers were occupied before Sunday. The mossos (Catalan police) announced they would have to be closed or evicted by 6am Sunday morning. This would turn out to be one of the many ways that the mossos and the two major parties (CiU and ERC, united in coalition as Junts pel Sí) collaborated to encourage people to turn out to protect the voting centers. Although it was also true that the Guardia Civil and riot police of the Policia Nacional (Spanish) began evicting voting centers early in the morning.

There are 844 documented injuries across Catalunya, plus a lot of people who didn't seek medical attention (probably most of the people hit by rubber bullets or by police batons-- many got their injuries photographed but then didn't seek treatment). Over a hundred people hospitalized, some in serious condition.

Some of the more extreme cases: someone shot in the eye by a rubber bullet. An old man who had a heart attack after a police charge, and then police attacked again as folks were trying to revive him. A young woman in a voting center who was thrown down a staircase, had her fingers broken one by by one, and then the police partially pulled off her clothes and touched her breasts while laughing. Also plenty of old people with their heads split open, bleeding everywhere.

Also, folks who were staffing voting tables got IDed and might get charged with sedition.

The Catalan president is indicating he's going ahead with the unilateral declaration of independence, while other politicians are being coy, so it might be a negotiating measure. Essentially they sent civil society into the streets against an intransigent and armed opponent, under a strictly nonviolent discipline, ensuring a bloodbath. The widely publicized police violence, in turn, has provoked a political crisis which they are trying to use to get European governments to pressure both parties to the negotiating table.

It would be unfair not to mention the other main side of this, since people aren't just sheep but also make their own plans. Millions of folks here feel that yesterday was something that they won, that they organized themselves and there's a lot of truth in that. People here outmaneuvered the full police force of the Spanish state. Counted voter turn-out was 42%, on par with a normal election, and this despite police seizing an unknown number of ballot boxes and violently closing hundreds of voting centers. Obviously the "yes" option won with about 90%.

The crisis of legitimacy at this point is practically irreconcilable. The Spanish state will be lucky to get out of this with just a constitutional reform granting Catalunya more autonomy. On the other hand, they can still exercise more repression to prevent a unilateral declaration of independence, suspending the Catalan government, but the Spanish stock market already took a tumble and the rest of the EU, though declaring the referendum invalid, are also heavily criticizing Spanish repression.

The most dangerous thing at the moment, in the mind of many anarchists, is how effectively the Catalan police have fixed their image and converted themselves into national heroes, simply by doing nothing (it seems their orders were to only close voting centers if there were fewer than 25 people defending them).

Tomorrow there's a general strike planned. This is terrain we know, and it will be easier for us to talk about events in an anticapitalist light, although we have very little time to prepare. And if the Catalan government starts to negotiate, they'll lose the support of the far left (which is currently key to the pro-independence majority in the Catalan parliament) and those people will start to radicalize.

- http://www.ara.cat/politica/Policia-mha-grapejat-trencat-expressament_0_1879612220.html#rlabs=1%20p$3
- https://www.facebook.com/Postureig/videos/1476323769110385/?hc_ref=ARRTo...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6yB2mRuVEs
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nigOVS1sA4c
- https://twitter.com/cntwalabcn/status/914520945943089152