Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Spain investigates organizer of protests
BARCELONA, Spain — Violent clashes broke out for a second consecutive night in Barcelona between police and protesters angry about the conviction of a dozen Catalan separatist leaders, as Spain launched an investigation Tuesday into an activist group organizing the protests.
Thousands of people held vigils near the Spanish government offices in Catalonia’s four provinces, but it was in the northeastern regional capital, Barcelona, where police charged at protesters after some hurled firecrackers and other objects at the officers and kicked temporary fences put in place to protect the building.
The protesters sang the Catalan anthem and shouted, “The streets will always be ours,” “Independence,” as well as slogans calling Spanish police “occupying forces” and urging them to leave Catalonia. They erected improvised barricades with trash bins, fences, and piles of cardboard that they set on fire.
The evening vigils, also held in Girona, Lleida and Tarragona, as well as smaller towns across Catalonia, had been called by ANC and Omnium, two grassroots pro-secession groups whose leaders Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart were sentenced Monday to nine years in prison for sedition.
Seven politicians were also given prison terms of about a decade in Monday’s landmark Supreme Court ruling, and three more were fined for disobeying the laws as they pushed ahead with a banned referendum on Oct. 1, 2017, and briefly declared independence based on its results before Spain crushed the defiance.
Activists also blocked highways, smaller roads and railway tracks for brief periods on Tuesday, after an attempt to besiege Barcelona’s international airport the night before that left thousands of passengers stranded.
Authorities said that three people were arrested and more than 170 others injured in Monday’s protests, including about 40 police officers and a protester who lost an eye. The airport authority said that 110 flights were canceled Monday and 45 on Tuesday. Nearly 1,000 were operating normally, the authority said.
Most impromptu protests are responding to an online campaign by Tsunami Democratic, a loose, leaderless grassroots group that uses encrypted messaging apps to call for peaceful disobedience. Spain’s caretaker interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said authorities were investigating the group.
The court also barred the 12 convicted Catalan separatists from holding public office. That has an immediate effect in the upcoming Nov. 10 Spanish election because six of them were planning to run as candidates to the national parliament.
Spain’s caretaker prime minister and Socialist leader, Pedro Sanchez, who won the April election but failed to get support for a minority government, is hoping to remain in office.
Even from the early hours after the 493-page Supreme Court ruling was issued, very different views emerged from Madrid and Catalonia. While Sanchez called for beginning a “new phase” and urged Catalan separatists to abide by the law, the ruling invigorated the wealthy region’s independence movement, with many of its leaders making new calls to work toward effective secession or repeating the slogan “we will do it again.”
Cuixart said by email via his lawyer that he and the others sentenced by the Supreme Court will take their case to the European Court of Human Rights.