Eso sale en las noticias de UK.. al menos los medios tienen más decencia que los de hispanistán
Spain reels at violent tactics by riot police | World news | The Observer
The middle-aged man sitting on a railway station bench protects a
younger man by wrapping his arms around him as he shouts desperately at
the helmeted, baton-wielding police officers running up and down the
platforms at Madrid's Atocha station.
"Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!" he bellows repeatedly in a
video that shows how police charged into the station during violent
demonstrations that shook Madrid last week.
On the other side of the ticket barrier a younger man is whacked with
truncheons by two policemen. "I don't know whether he is a passenger or a
protester," one of them admits. A third man who was waiting for a train
is bundled down the platform by police officers as he asks: "And what
have I done?" A youth points to blood running down his face. "What the
hell is this?" he asks.
On Friday, police told a judge they had needed to chase a group of
violent protesters across the railway tracks and had later arrested some
in a nearby bar. They, too, had suffered injuries. "People who had been
hurling stones at police tried to hide in the station, passing
themselves off as normal passengers," a spokesman said. "We had to go
in."
As Spaniards respond with dismay to the violence shown by demonstrators,
who launched attacks on police, and the response of some riot police,
during scuffles in the area around Madrid's parliament building last
week, the long-running drama of the country's deflating economy has
lurched into a newly confrontational stage, amid fears that there will
be more violence to come.
While police and the conservative government of prime minister Mariano
Rajoy were accused of authoritarian behaviour, radical protesters from
both the far left and the far right were putting a hard, street-fighting
edge on to the once peaceful protests of the civilised but ineffectual
indignados.
Cristina Cifuentes, the
government delegate in Madrid, had warned before the protests that they
were being infiltrated by violent members of Spain's far right and were
attracting the country's most radical leftwingers. But protesters later
pointed to a group of undercover policemen who, they claimed, had been
at the front of the protest waving red flags and encouraging others to
violence.
Other police certainly thought their undercover colleagues were
troublemakers, and there is also film of one of them being dragged out
of the crowd to be arrested and shouting: "I am a colleague! I am a
colleague!"
On Saturday, a 72-year-old man was among some 30 demonstrators who had
been accused of attacking police and given bail. "But I was sitting down
when they arrested me," he said.
The radicalisation came amid worries that the ratings agency Moodys
would downgrade Spain's creditworthiness, reigniting the pressure on its
debt and sending the interest rates that it must pay spiralling up
again.
Ministers have said that €10bn (£8bn) of cuts and tax increases must
come in next year's budget just to cover a leap in interest payments. On
Friday night, they said a coming round of bank bailouts, paid for by
the eurozone rescue fund, would send the country's debts soaring by some
€50bn. Spending is to be cut by 7% next year, bringing another wave of
cuts in health, education and other welfare services. Yesterday, Spain's
civil servants heard that, for the third year running, their wages were
being frozen.
A period of calm in Europe's more troubled economies created by the
European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, when he announced plans to
buy the debt of countries who asked for bailouts in the future, also
seemed to have come to an end. And with the threat of Catalan separatism
adding to worries about Rajoy's ability to control events in Spain,
many now expect him to ask for a full bailout for the country – placing
it in the hands of those who have forced Greece, Portugal and Ireland
into round after round of spending cuts.
Budget minister Cristóbal Montoro presented an austerity budget to
parliament on Saturday, with analysts widely seeing it as an attempt to
pre-empt the conditions that Spain would have had imposed on it anyway
for the bailout. "Reducing our budget deficit is essential," he said.
With unemployment at 25%, however, and the economy already set to shrink
for the next two years, Spaniards see no end to the tunnel of misery.
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