by DeAnander
Tue May 22nd, 2007 at 09:28:29 AM EST
Pete Gelderloos writes about his experience of arrest and detainment in Barcelona.
"I'm a tourist! Tourist!" I protested, somewhere in the dungeons of the Guardia Urbana located inconspicuously along La Rambla.
"¡No!" the cop yelled back, wagging his finger. "¡Terrorist!"
[...] The cop was sure I was a terrorist because he was sure I was a squatter, and he was sure I was a squatter because he thought I looked like one (I was wearing a political t-shirt and had some slogans scribbled on my shoes).
From the diaries - whataboutbob
Pete describes the (alas) typical overreaction of drama-queen cops waltermittying themselves into the superheroes of action movies, Saving The World -- or just panicking at the disturbing thought that the populace might not be totally docile and under control -- or carrying out the EU's directives for the suppression of anarchists and Levellers -- or a mix of all the above plus an OD on testosterone and spiffy uniforms, take your pick...
Aside from the Orson Welles (Touch of Evil) overtones of being a lone traveller in a strange place, framed by unfriendly cops who confiscate one's passport and then berated by a bad-tempered judge in a Lewis Carroll trial scene... there's (I think) a shrewd analysis of the link between hot money, gentrification, and brutality, frame-ups, and an ever-expanding, expedient definition of "terrorism":
[...] as much as the Barcelona police have a vendetta against squatters and anarchists, along with immigrants and anyone darker than them, this repression is not a grassroots initiative: it's an order from on high. "The Mediterranean triangle" sounds like it could be a vacation package for sunbathers but in fact it's the term applied by the European Union to what it identifies as a top internal security threat-the anarchist movements in Greece, Italy, and Spain. These states have been directed to neutralize the threat, and it seems they will do whatever it takes. [...]
Why exactly does the squatters' movement warrant this kind of attention? Probably because it is the spearhead of the battle for the city. All across Barcelona, buildings are being gutted and rebuilt. The new versions are sanitized, homogenized, and much more expensive. Streets that still bear the names of the artisans who used to live and work there are now filled with tourists, and all the shops are fashion stores, trendy restaurants, venders of novelty trinkets imported from sweatshops in the Global South. Cops are everywhere-sometimes you can see them chasing the undocumented people who sell sunglasses near the beach. And recently the government has introduced laws of "civism," puritanical measures rarely seen this side of the pond including restrictions on playing music or drinking in the streets (you can bet the latter are never enforced against the bar-hopping American college students who rattle windows nightly with their loud voices and drunken brawls). Rents are going through the roof as the city turns itself into a museum for the tourists. Really, it's economic terrorism.
[...]There is a need for housing, and plenty of vacant, deteriorating buildings, so they occupy them, and fix them up. Poor people and undocumented people often squat clandestinely on an individual basis, and the movement is an organized, open version of this. Instead of trying to keep the squat a secret, they throw out a banner, clean the building up, and organize to defend their new homes. Many of the occupied houses are turned into social centers that are foundations for a much broader anarchist or autonomous movement. They also become focal points for the community struggle against gentrification. The collectives of the occupied social centers build relations with neighbors, protest together against speculation and the rising rents. The squatters provide a radical example of a solution to gentrification, and having freed themselves from wage slavery they can throw themselves into organizing, while at the more successful social centers, the neighbors support the squatters, making the authorities hesitant to evict them.
Here as everywhere else, it is a war of two different visions of society. The property owners, the politicians, and the cops who throw about the word "terrorism" are certainly terrified by the vision of a world in which everybody has housing, people don't need to scramble for wages just to honor someone else's concept of ownership; instead they organize with neighbors to meet their needs, they make their own plays and concerts and libraries in the social centers on every block rather than buying entertainment from the specialists who produce it; a world in which people don't have mind-numbing jobs they need to take vacations from, boring lives that chase them to exotic places as tourists to purchase some illusion of diversity and novelty; a world without borders, without documents, without immigrants having to run from the police, a world where people can travel and change experiences freely, unhindered by the filters set up by the authorities to control and profit off the myriad movement of life.
[emphasis mine -- DeA]
I'm trying to imagine being detained for 2 years for (essentially) setting off a firework.
I'm trying to imagine how far the authorities will run with their ever-narrowing definition of acceptable public behaviour: how far are we from thought-crime, from arrest based on an unacceptable facial expression or an anticapitalist remark in a public place?
From NOLA to Barcelona, the attempt to transform every nice place to live into a gated community for the affluent -- and every "myriad movement of life" from the molecular level on up into a gated, tariffed profit stream for a rentier -- is under way. What is to be done?
