Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Crime and Protest

2022; Michigan State University; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/jstudradi.16.1.0109

1930-1197

Justin Helepololei,

Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses

In the years following the Great Recession of 2008 and Spain's 15M plaza occupations in 2011, protesters in Spain engaged in increasingly agitational and illegal forms of dissent, challenging the legitimacy of the government itself while working to build popular support among the millions impacted by ongoing economic and political crises. This article draws on ethnographic research conducted in Barcelona and Sevilla, Spain, during 2012 and 2013 to analyze a range of campaigns in which protesters, influenced by local histories of anarchism and autonomous squatting, engaged in coordinated theft and property occupations as modes of direct action or “social banditry” to protest continuing economic crisis, government corruption, and police impunity. I examine some of the efforts of the police, the Spanish state, and mainstream Spanish media to marginalize protesters who engaged in illegal activities, and ways protesters fought to present counternarratives to justify their actions. In the examples I describe, I find that protesters have been largely successful in building support across diverse demographics, to the extent of defending illegal squats for years, and even holding political office as mayors in several cities. I argue that the use and promotion of illegality within protests has been critical to protesters’ ability to redefine those in power as the true criminals and to leverage a critique against the larger political and economic system.This article examines the deliberate use of criminal actions in protests that followed Spain's indignado or 15M (for the 15th of May) plaza occupations of 2011. On 15 May 2011, a small group of activists in Spain, inspired by the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt, took over the Plaza del Sol in Madrid. The Spanish activists dubbed “indignados,” or the indignant ones, called for “real democracy,” in response to deepening austerity policies, a stagnant two-party political system seen as beholden to banks, and an economic crisis that was driving youth unemployment as high as 50 percent and resulting in hundreds of thousands of evictions.1 Within weeks, protest occupations took over plazas across the country, with some lasting for months before being chased out, often violently, by police. Although each of the plaza occupations was eventually ended, the movement brought new energy into existing social movements, and pushed seasoned activists to find new ways to connect with the newly politicized victims of Spain's unending economic crisis.In what follows, I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Barcelona and Sevilla, Spain, in 2012 and 2013 to describe several protest campaigns in which activists conducted explicit, illegal actions—specifically, theft, blockades, and property occupations—to protest the ongoing economic crisis and to counter the Spanish state's policies of austerity. I analyze police strategies to contain the direct actions of protesters, and consider how protesters have countered these strategies by broadening their movements. Although I focus on some exemplary cases, these forms of protest have been taken up by activists in cities throughout the country.2Despite efforts by the Spanish state and mainstream media to marginalize protesters who engage in illegal activities, and despite the concerns and objections of other protesters within the same movements, criminal dissenters in these contexts succeeded in building popular support across diverse demographics. This support took the forms of campaigns to end police brutality against immigrants and squatters, citywide protests defending illegal occupations, and even the election to public office of protesters who were arrested in illegal actions. I argue that the use and promotion of illegality in these ways has been critical to protesters’ ability to redefine those in power as the true criminals and to leverage a critique against the larger political and economic system.Scholars of social movements have explored the relationship between dissent, crime, and policing in several ways. Studies looking at the connections between the policing of protests and day-to-day policing have discussed differences in how particular populations are policed, and how policing tactics are applied and adapted across contexts.3 Researchers connecting crime and protest have tended to focus primarily on “riots,” examining the conditions and motivations that inform instances of looting and property destruction as they relate to protest.4 But some studies have also explored less frequently discussed criminal protest tactics, from hacking to aiding undocumented immigrants in crossing borders5 to the disruptions of white, public space by “flash mobs” of African American teens.6In this article, I analyze the use of overt, illegal practices by protesters in Spain—namely, the expropriation of goods and property—and the success they have had in building popular support. This success, I argue, is a result of three key elements: (1) their use of criminal protest actions to address the concrete needs of communities at the neighborhood level, (2) the defining of their illegal protest activities as moral responses to an immoral and illegitimate state, and (3) their articulation of historical precedents of illegal resistance. In this article, I examine the actions of protesters, as well as the framing they have used to justify their actions. Within protesters’ self-presentation, theft, and occupation are legitimate correctives against the illegitimacy of the Spanish politicians and large financial institutions whom protesters have referred to as “the real criminals.” These protests are not attacks against society, but a social self-defense against the structural violence of economic deprivation, driven by neoliberal reforms, and enforced by the police. This article begins with a description of one such protest.By the time I arrived, the crowd was already far too large to fit into the community center. We had come to see the premier of a documentary titled 4F: Ni Oblit, Ni Perdó (“Neither forgotten nor forgiven”), the product of several years of investigation into a court case that resulted in the imprisonment of four young people. On the night of 4 February 2006, a large contingent of police was in the process of shutting down a party at an illegally occupied building when an officer was struck in the head with a potted plant dropped from above. The officer was hospitalized, went into a coma, and survived, but the injury resulted in severe paralysis. Three young people, each of South American origin, were arrested outside of the party. These three were held in police custody for several hours. They endured severe beatings during their interrogation by police officers, who used racial epithets against them, calling them sudacas de mierda or “fucking South Americans.” These three were eventually taken to a hospital to receive medical attention for their injuries. A young woman named Patricia Heras wound up at the same hospital that night. She had been injured in an unrelated bicycle accident. Though she had not been at the party, police accused her of being present during the altercation because of her injuries and “squatter” (okupa in Spanish) style clothing. Patricia and the three others were accused of participating in an assault against a police officer and sentenced to several years in prison. Three finished their prison terms and are now free. Patricia Heras took her own life two years into her sentence.In the years since 2006, support for the defendants of the 4F case (4F for February 4)7 had been persistent but remained outside mainstream interest. Friends and family members staged protests calling for a review of the case, condemning the physical and psychological abuse carried out by the police, and calling for corruption charges after it was revealed that evidence was destroyed and contradicting police statements had been suppressed. 4F supporters argued that this case was representative of a much larger effort by the city of Barcelona to clean undesirable elements—squatters, but also immigrants, sex workers, and homeless people—from the touristic city center.8 Two of the same police officers involved in the interrogations of the 4F case were later arrested for using their positions to falsely accuse and torture a student from Trinidad and Tobago after an altercation at a nightclub.9Using a loudspeaker, one of the event's organizers, a tall young man in a black sports coat and white dress shirt, explained, in Catalan, that a new, larger location had been found to host the screening that could accommodate the hundreds who were continuing to arrive. He began to walk, gesturing like a circus ringleader for the crowd to follow. I chatted with friends as we walked, leisurely stopping to greet others who had come from all over the city to see the film. The procession came to an abrupt halt in front of a shuttered building on Via Laeitana, a major thoroughfare that cuts through the center of Barcelona. At this point it was unclear what our next stop was. Were we going to march somewhere else? Were we waiting for something?Suddenly, ladders extended above us. Two young people climbed up and began pasting a sign over the building's entryway. The sign read: Cinema Patricia Heras. The crowd cheered as the flapping paper sign was unfurled and glue was smoothed across it. A sheet was stretched in front of the shuttered doors and the sound of people working with heavy tools began to clank and grind from behind it. The applause grew louder as suddenly the sheet was dropped to reveal a now open door and activists clearing the way. As the organizer who had led us there explained, after twelve years of disuse, the former Palace of Cinema would be hosting this special premier. For the next twenty-four hours, protesters would be taking over the closed theater and using it to denounce not only police violence, but the property speculation driving that violence as well. In other words: This was no longer just a screening. This was an occupation.10Cheering this announcement, some members of the crowd entered immediately. Others, myself included, remained in front of the building, debating whether to take part in what had suddenly turned from a somber film screening at a community center, into an unexpected and illegal protest. The spokesman admitted that the organizers did not know what would happen to the trespassers, warning that “People who enter have to know that you are assuming some risk.” At either end of the street, police began to gather, blocking off several lanes of the street outside the theater. With such a visible occupation, and with no clear escape routes, arrests seemed all but guaranteed. Responding to the crowd's hesitation, an older man, wearing a neon-green vest over his clothes, took up the megaphone to speak to the crowd. He introduced himself as an iaioflauta—a member of a collective of senior citizens that had formed during 15M protests in 2011. Early news reports on the 15M Movement dismissed the first demonstrators who had begun to occupy the Plaza del Sol in Madrid as perroflautas. Translating literally to “dog-flute,” perroflauta is a derogatory label for delinquent youth, one that evokes a stereotypical image of a young person who refuses to be a “productive” member of society, instead making money through street performing (hence flauta, or flute), and usually accompanied by mangy dogs (hence, perro).Reacting to the media's dismissal of the 15M demonstrators as perroflautas, a group of sympathetic senior citizens formed their own collective, calling themselves iaioflautas (grandpa-flutes), and claiming the protesters as their real and symbolic grandchildren. On their website's mission statement, and in interviews at protests, iaioflautas insisted on their generation's responsibility to continue to fight for a better future for their children and their grandchildren.11Iaioflautas invoked memories of life under the Franco dictatorship and condemned the current police repression as a step backwards toward that era. Although the iaioflautas accept some responsibility for the current political and economic crisis, they are also outspoken about their own precarious position as members of an aging demographic, dependent on pensions and public health care, all threatened by austerity policies.Returning to the scene of the occupation, this iaioflauta, after announcing his group's support for the screening, puffed his chest out and declared over the megaphone that he and a dozen other iaioflautas would stand guard outside the cinema, and that they would deal with the police should they arrive. There were cheers from the crowd and a fair amount of laughter at his literal posturing. Many of the young activists and squatters in the audience were accustomed to facing off with police during protests. The idea of people their grandparents’ age confronting the cops was a funny image indeed. But as a friend of mine who had been attacked by police at a failed occupation attempt of that same building noted, it was probably the most effective defense possible. When dealing with so-called perroflautas the police hold nothing back, but with the older iaioflautas, they tend to show more restraint. And it worked. The documentary was screened without disruption. Mainstream newspapers estimated nearly 800 people in attendance.12 Family members, members of the 15M Audiovisual Assembly, and Rodrigo Lanza, one of the four who had been arrested in the 2006 incident, introduced the film and took turns speaking about the effort it took to put it together, as well as their hopes that it could lead to a reopening of the case and to the prosecution of the police, judges, and politicians implicated in the 4F muntatge—or set up. Further protests were held, and in 2015, a longer documentary titled Ciutat Morta, or “Dead City,” which discusses the 4F case and other incidences of police brutality, was shown on a regional, Catalan-language television station, bringing both the case and footage of the protest to a more mainstream audience. Public interest has grown since the broadcast, and several politicians as well as the police union representing the injured officer13 have called for more investigation into the case.The 15M Audiovisual Assembly and the iaioflautas are only two of the hundreds of collectives that came together through the large-scale plaza occupations that began on 15 May 2011. Examples of other groups engaged in direct actions to redistribute goods and property abound. In the following section I present some exemplary cases, but many more instances have occurred throughout the country and in the years since 2011.In 2012, the 15M “Housing Commission” in the city of Sevilla helped thirty-six families enter and illegally occupy a newly constructed and never inhabited apartment building. The Corrala de Vecinas la Utopía, as the building was christened by the occupiers, was one of many occupations that took place in some of the 3.4 million vacant homes built during Spain's real estate bubble leading up to the crisis.14 The residents of the occupation varied in age, from families with young children to retirees. Some were immigrants. Many had lived in Sevilla for most of their lives, and most said they had never been active in politics before the occupation, nor did they ever think they might become squatters. In an interview, one older Spaniard expressed surprise and gratitude at the way the occupation made her more outspoken and politically engaged.15 By participating in the occupation, residents could meet their immediate need for shelter, while bringing public attention to their plight and to a possible solution—to use some of the massive surplus of existing housing sitting empty. Despite the illegal nature of their occupation, and its eventual eviction by police, members of the Corrala Utopia insisted on their right to be there, citing Article 47 of the Spanish Constitution, which guarantees “the right to enjoy dignified and adequate housing.”Similar indefinite occupations took place in other parts of the country. Some of these were led by an activist organization called the PAH—from the Catalan and Spanish abbreviation for the Platform for those Affected by Mortgages. Started in 2009, the PAH brought thousands of people facing foreclosures together through autonomous chapters based in various cities and neighborhoods.16 The PAH began by organizing blockades to physically stop police from carrying out foreclosures and to gain media attention to the growing number of displaced. Most of the members of the PAH came from the working poor and immigrant neighborhoods disproportionately targeted by predatory, subprime mortgages.17 After 2011, the PAH also began to occupy uninhabited apartment buildings in their “Obra Social” or “Social Works” campaign, targeting buildings owned by banks that had been rescued by the Spanish state with large amounts of public funds. In an article on the participation of Ecuadorian immigrants in the PAH, Maka Suarez argues that “through building recuperation, the PAH has legitimized the appropriation of empty homes to be used by families who had no other housing alternative.”18 Suarez considers these actions of eviction resistance and occupations as revolutionary practices within a global movement of resistance against debt.In addition to acts of resistance, the PAH also went after those it deemed responsible for the housing crisis, organizing rallies calling for the punishment of bankers and corrupt politicians. Some protests took the form of escraches—a practice borrowed from Argentina, in which protesters went to the homes and workplaces of those individuals to shame them into changing their behavior and direct media and possibly legal attention to them. These protest practices were denounced by conservative politicians and media outlets, who framed them as a threat to social order and tried to link the PAH with “terrorist” organizations like ETA, the Basque separatist group.19 Despite attempts to malign the PAH, many groups came out in support of their efforts to stop evictions. When a company of firefighters in the city of La Coruña refused to assist in the eviction of an eighty-five-year-old pensioner, their union, El Sindicato Profesional de Bomberos de FSP-UGT, defended the firefighters’ decision to align with the anti-eviction movement, declaring that “Firefighters rescue people, not banks.”20On multiple occasions, PAH activists were arrested for occupying banks, obstructing evictions, and appropriating empty apartments. Ada Colau, the PAH's spokesperson of several years, was often among those arrested. Undeterred, Colau and others insisted on the righteousness of their actions. During a 2013 parliamentary hearing, Ada Colau, acting as a representative of the PAH, was asked to speak in front of a legislative committee on housing. Partway through her written testimony she paused and gestured toward the deputy general secretary of the Spanish Banking Association, proclaiming: “This man is a criminal, and should be treated as such.”21 The chair of the committee asked her to retract her statement, but viewers across the country shared the video many thousands of times over social media. Ada Colau's confrontational statements and arrest record became even more noteworthy when, in June 2015, she was elected mayor of the city of Barcelona, stepping down from her role in the PAH to represent a newly formed “participatory platform,” named Barcelona en Comú or “Barcelona in Common.”22Across Spain, activists from the 15M have been elected to various offices, backed by protest parties like Barcelona en Comú at the city level, or Podemos at the national level and in Madrid. These electoral victories demonstrate, at the very least, that efforts to completely marginalize protesters as terrorists or criminals have failed. Ada Colau is not alone among Spain's radical mayors. In 2012, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo gained the nickname “the Robin Hood mayor” for leading workers of the Andalusian Workers’ Union (SAT) as they expropriated fallow public land to grow food.23 Sánchez Gordillo and the SAT gained further notoriety from protests at supermarket chains in which workers “liberated” and redistributed cartloads of stolen food in celebrated instances of shoplifting.24 Marinaleda, the small town in the south of the country where Sanchez Gordillo is mayor, has been called Spain's “communist utopia,” because of the town's commitment to guaranteed employment and housing. From the perspective of Sanchez Gordillo and the SAT, their public actions were symbolic and material attempts to take back what is rightfully theirs, as the taxpayers and workers whose labor and resources produce the wealth they are taking back.Another example of an activist who has promoted theft as protest is Enric Duran i Giralt, from Catalonia in the northeast of Spain. Duran had been a participant in earlier, alter-globalization protests and active in Spain's ongoing, anticapitalist “free culture” movement and hacking convergences that emerged out of Spain's anti-authoritarian community of squatters, referred to as okupas—a shortened and modified reference to occupations.25 Beginning in the 1980s, young people with ties to antimilitarism, anarchism, punk music, feminism, and other countercultural tendencies began taking over empty buildings and turning them into free living spaces and cultural centers. Several of these occupied centers have been open for decades, and okupas have fought back against police evictions, physically and through building relationships with neighbors. In many places, occupied social centers offer space for activists to hold assemblies and coordinate protest actions.26In 2008, emerging out of this more militant “antisystem” milieu, Duran i Giralt became famous for “expropriating” €492,000 from thirty-nine different financial institutions, accomplished by taking out loans with no intention of paying them back. He has since channeled the money into various political projects, including several collectively written and produced newspapers, as well as manuals encouraging others to engage in similar forms of “economic disobedience,” and physical spaces to support ongoing organizing.27 As for Sánchez Gordillo, Duran's actions have led critics and admirers to refer to him as “Robin Banks” or “the Robin Hood of the Banks,”28 using the English terms to connect him to the archetypal bandit figure. Though Duran himself has been in hiding since 2013, the projects he helped fund have grown in scale and support. The largest of these is the Catalan Integrated Cooperative—a regional network of cooperatives that shares resources and spaces like Calafou, an “ecoindustrial postcapitalist colony” in the Catalan countryside, and Aurea Social, a building near Barcelona's Sagrada Familia cathedral where numerous collectives and projects of the Catalan Integrated Cooperative (CIC) meet. The “Manual of Economic Disobedience,” now in its second edition, includes sections promoting individualized strategies for debt and tax resistance, presented as methods for channeling resources toward collective projects to build alternative economic systems.29 By connecting initiatives that address “food, health, education, housing, and political participation,” members of the CIC—from farmers to acupuncturists to teachers and artists—are building an increasingly comprehensive range of alternative institutions, based on principles of autonomy, self-management, and mutual support.30Although protesters like Duran i Giralt and most okupas have objected to the channeling of activism into electoral politics, others, like Ada Colau, have pursued political office and in some cases won elections. As I explore in the following, the electoral successes of activists like Colau at the local, national, and European Union levels have produced mixed results. Among other reforms, Colau has pushed to rein in Barcelona's tourism industry, has visibly supported the movement to reopen the 4F case, approved funding for activist programs, and promoted a law approved by the Catalan regional government for the city itself to expropriate empty and unused bank-owned apartments for public housing—which Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy appealed but courts upheld. Such policies have earned her the scorn of conservatives, who view her as turning the city over to okupas.31 At the same time, some long-running, illegal, protest occupations have been the target of evictions, including one okupa of more than twenty years slated to be redeveloped into state-run public housing.32 Although more sympathetic actors like Colau have entered the government, there remain major differences between activists, especially in how they view the state—as a target, a terrain of struggle, a potential ally, or a permanent enemy. In addition, there is still strong opposition to any radical changes from within the government, especially changes accomplished through illegal means.In the past few years, legislators have introduced laws attempting to rein in social movements. One of the most widespread attempts to suppress dissent was the 2015 Citizen Security Law, labeled the “Ley de Mordaza” or “Gag Law.” This law created new sanctions for various protest tactics in the name of citizen safety. Sanctions include fines from €100,000 to €600,000 for crimes like photographing or filming police, wearing masks during public assemblies, using offensive slogans, or protesting outside of Parliament. Gaspar Llamazares Trigo, a politician of the Izquierda Unida party, criticized the conservative-led Spanish government for attempting “to criminalize the act of protest” by “trying to turn its political opponents into delinquents.”33 The law received a great deal of criticism domestically and internationally. The mainstream Spanish newspaper El Pais has a section on their website that tracks cases in which the law is imposed—including tourists fined for filming police and a soccer fan fined for having a bag with the letters ACAB in bold (which police interpreted as the protest acronym “All Cops Are Bastards,” though the bag itself read, in smaller font, “All Cats Are Beautiful”).34In addition to legislative changes criminalizing protest behavior, police agencies directed increased attention toward social movement spaces. On 16 December 2014, a day after the “gag law” went into effect, Catalan regional police launched Operation Pandora, a coordinated raid of several of the city's occupied social centers and homes. They confiscated phones and laptops, and arrested eleven individuals for suspicion of “belonging to a criminal organization of an anarchist nature with terrorist ends,” citing the possession of anarchist literature and propane tanks used for camping stoves as evidence of terrorist conspiracy.35 As researchers of the earlier alter-globalization movement demonstrated, the simple invocation of anarchism is a recurring tactic that is widely used to justify increased surveillance, police presence, and state control.36 Within what Kienscherf terms a “pacification” framework, methods of “strategic incapacitation” such as preventative detention, disruption, and surveillance are directed toward those sectors of the movement seen as “irreconcilable,” although “reconcilable,”37 moderate actors are dealt with using softer, negotiated management strategies. Since 2014 and the introduction of the “Gag Law,” police have launched additional raids targeting social centers in cities across Spain, leading to the arrest and detention of dozens more individuals and the disruption of various collectives.38 Although most of the cases were eventually archived—closed, but not dismissed, and able to be reopened—the arrests and evictions themselves are profoundly disruptive for individual protesters, as well as the social movements they support.Police operations can also be disruptive for the neighborhoods surrounding social centers, a fact that has earned the support and scorn of community members. Since the 1980s, police evictions of high-profile social centers in Spain have been met with days and even weeks of sustained, city-wide protests. Can Vies is a “self-managed, occupied social center” (centro social autogestionado) in the working-class neighborhood of Sants, Barcelona. It was established in 1997, when a group of young people occupied an abandoned building that belonged to Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB), the city's transit authority. The group gained support from various neighborhood groups for responding to the lack of municipal resources for youth programming with a wide range of events and activities. In May 2014, after years of failed negotiations among the city, the transit authority, and the occupiers, the city decided to evict the center and demolish the building. Police were met with days of pitched resistance and had to fight through barricades that protesters had erected around the building. Squatters, neighbors, civic associations, and iaioflautas joined demonstrations in support of Can Vies.After four days, the city stopped the partially completed demolition.39 Protesters responded by gathering to rebuild the sections of the building that had been torn down. In a public demonstration of support, dozens of volunteers, including children and seniors, squatters, and young professionals, formed lines to carry bricks and rubble. Architects and engineers volunteered to assess the damage and create a plan for reconstruction. The city's efforts to portray the occupiers as antisocial lawbreakers was undermined by the show of support that traversed differences in age and social standing. In the eyes of those defending Can Vies, it was the city, not the protesters, that represented a corrupt, antisocial element, tearing out a vital part of the n