Little happens at one when a fortnight of manteros withdraws from the Maremàgnum in Barcelona. An agent and a port police car follow them a short distance away. The sellers look sideways after the bulging petates. They observe that the patrol does not lose track of them and they run into more police vehicles that watch over them so that they do not exhibit bags, belts or imitations of soccer jerseys. They do not get rid of them until they are lost in the direction of the Born.

"They don't let us be there during the day. We can only come there at night," said a young sub-Saharan expelled with his bundle on his shoulder, while pointing to the Palau de Mar. Until July, more than half a thousand manteros lined up in full sun next to the historic building and along the coastline of the Joan de Borbó promenade. However, the police device launched today a month ago has made the extended merchandise on the avenue disappear. On the morning of yesterday there was no vendor in which was the focus of illegal street sale that recriminated Ada Colau, nourished by the banished in February of the unauthorized souk in the Plaza Catalunya exchanger. From the end of the permissiveness that was reproached the mayor has boasted her partner, the PSC, and in particular, the new Councilor for Security, Albert Batlle.

"It was five or six years since I saw the walk like this," confesses Jordi López, who runs a shoe store in Joan de Borbó. At noon, a Mossos d'Esquadra car and an Urban Guard van are placed near the pier. The police presence is continuous until 10 pm. Once the operation is lifted, the manteros retake positions to try to sell at night.

"Now it is more attractive to go through this side. 85% of customers are tourists and, if they saw them, they went there," says Muñoz, who accumulated a 30% loss associated with the top blanket. "It has been two years like that and we notice it a lot in the sports brand models," he says. He thinks that the police action "has arrived late" : "At the beginning of summer we would have noticed it more, but we hope to start September with more force than last year."

In the last month "billing has recovered 50% in most sites", rate Fermín Villar, spokesperson for the Platform of People Affected by Top Manta, which estimates that trade sank "from 30% to 80%, according to the product, the time and place "due to what qualifies as" stark occupation "between Barceloneta and Colón.

Shortly after noon, about fifty men with the gender thrown behind their backs leave Pla de Palau's surroundings. "How are we going to earn some money if they don't let us be anywhere? We're very nervous," one of them acknowledges. They border where the device is most intense, and manage to deploy the packages on the dock in front of the rounds, where they fled between vehicles a few days ago. They avoid cramming and are distributed to the immediate vicinity of Columbus. They disperse them in less than an hour and leave Rambla up. At the beginning of the afternoon, many rested on the platforms of Catalunya and Drassanes, waiting with their hats tied.

"In some shift change they take a little longer, but they get them out right away," says Héctor Guillermo Izuel, president of the Colom antiquarian market. "We got to have 250 manteros around us and we are 16. We were isolated. There came a time when they had all the public," recalls Izuel, who asks that the device be extended until midnight. "We hope it is not a political makeup, like the operation before the elections," he says.

"The device has been a necessary gesticulation," believes Roger Pallerols, director of the Restauradores Guild. "It is still a long way from the solution required by the encystment of illegal street sales. In four years of erratic policy by the Colau team, a phenomenon of small dimensions comparable to that of large cities around us has become a cystic problem." holds.

"The inertia means that the top blanket does not disappear suddenly", completes Villar, who admits that the pressure has "scattered" him on other points, but ensures that the number of unauthorized sellers "has been reduced". "Some who are in a legal situation have raised it, because identifications are made and can be fined," he argues, while asking for measures to regularize the stay of immigrants without papers to incorporate them into the world of work. For Pallerols, the mayor and the commons must adopt Batlle's stern speech and guarantee a "forceful and permanent" intervention against the illegal sale.

The representatives of the manteros complain about persecution and that their proposals are not attended to. Occupation plans have barely reached a hundred. The City Council affirms that it wants to expand labor reintegration policies. "It would be interesting to make a census and see the skills and situation of each tablecloth, because the goal is also that these people can integrate," says Izuel.

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  • Mossos d'Esquadra
  • Barcelona
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