• Riots: A new apocalyptic night in Barcelona
  • Injured: Independents leave a policeman unconscious in the altercations of Barcelona
  • Last hour Follow the last hour of what happens in Catalonia

Independence offered a paradoxical image this Friday in Barcelona. While thousands of people claimed that they were "people of peace" to vindicate the freedom of condemned sovereign prisoners and ask for self-determination, hundreds of meters from there groups of radicals, among which there were secessionists, faced the same violence as days passed to the National Police near the Headquarters, in Via Laietena.

Night riots passed this time in daylight. It all started with a student protest in front of the police station in which protesters threw paint and eggs at the agents, who did not move for hours. They had to do it when, almost at the same time that the demonstration began at five in the afternoon, organized radical groups were distributed to mount barricades, to which they set fire, and began to throw crystals, stones, pyrotechnic rockets, balls of steel and even a traffic light to the agents.

The police had to launch smoke boats and rubber balls to displace the radicals, who were with their faces covered, so that fire trucks could enter to extinguish the burning containers. The Mossos d'Esquadra warned that the radicals cut traffic signals to throw them into the police cordon. Some workers from institutions close to the incident site, such as the Palau de la Música, dedicated themselves to removing these obstacles from the center of the road, exposing their personal integrity and receiving the insults of the protesters.

The clashes lasted for hours and moved to the streets around the area. On the fifth night of riots, at least 22 people have been counted. The System of Medical Emergencies (SEM) has attended 89 people, three of them with eye contusions and another with a facial contusion, all pending hospital assessment. Throughout these days of protests, more than 200 agents of the security forces, between Police and Mossos, have been injured. In total, there were 17 detainees, including El País photojournalist Albert García, who would have been accused of pushing a police officer while trying to stop one of the troublemakers

Tension between neighbors and merchants

Barcelona lived its fifth night of violent riots, a situation that is generating more tension between neighbors and merchants, who had to deal with a new day of unemployment for political reasons. Also, throughout the day there were also incidents in other parts of Catalonia and roadblocks.

The riots put the closing to the day of general strike called by secessionism to reject the sentence of the process. This time he did not have as a main objective to paralyze Catalonia economically, but, in view of what happened this Friday, he had rather the intention of clearing the work agenda and favoring that independence could concentrate throughout the day in Barcelona and rise social pressure

That is why the impact of the strike was so different from the "country strike" called on October 3, 2017, two days after the police charges of the illegal referendum, where a much broader social consensus was brought together. The stormy of this Friday did not have the support of the majority unions, CCOO and UGT, nor that of the main Catalan employers, who without explicitly supporting the stoppages of two years ago did accept that it was an exceptional situation.

The data of the Generalitat point to a follow-up of 35% among officials and a range of between 60% and 80% in trade; 42.5% in public education; 90% in universities and 20% in public health.

Foment del Treball: "The strike has barely been noticed"

On the other hand, the Catalan employer Foment del Treball reduced the scope of the strike saying that "it has barely been noticed" in most sectors and that, of course, the impact "was smaller" than the strike of 2017.

The main demonstration that yesterday's call was more like a celebration of the Diada than a general strike is that all the bars and restaurants around the demonstration area were open and did business with the thousands of people who arrived from other points of Catalonia and that they consumed.

In other neighborhoods of Barcelona, ​​shops remained open with total normality and no pickets or rifirrafes were seen with those who opened. What makes another difference more than remarkable with the protests of two years ago, when there was more tension among the activists for a recent 1-O, with groups organized to force the closure of numerous establishments.

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  • Barcelona
  • Catalonia
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