First of all, I would like to apologize because I didn’t post anything on Saturday or Sunday. I really am sorry, but I literally didn’t have time to do it. I hope things like these don’t happen again!
Apologies apart, let’s talk about last Saturday’s demonstration in Madrid.
When I was walking down the street to get to Neptuno square, I saw many national policemen near their vans, controlling the area.
As I arrived to Neptuno at 17:30 ,a group of journalists was discussing how they were going to cover the demonstration. The fact that two of them were carring bycicles attracted my attention and I was wondering the use they were going to make of them, but I feared my doubt would stay unclear to me.
Since the time of the demonstration was coming and there wasn’t many people there, I decided to ask those journalists if I was in the right place. Indeed. Moreover, one of them asked me if was attending it and I told him that I was, not only as citizen, but also as a journalist! “Oh, are you studying Journalism? Why don’t you come with us? You can learn a lot of things!”. I was quite astonished. A group of journalists was inviting me to go with them and see them work! I was attending the behind the scenes of a report! That sounded really good to me.
So, I went with them. They introduced themselves and turned out to be workers of the on-line platform TM-EX. It is an association of Telemadrid ex-workers in exile. Since this public TV channel from the Community of Madrid decided to fire 80% of their workers, these professionals decided to create their own project. They defend a good-quality, close television in the service of citizens, more and more contrary to the spirit of Telemadrid, which manipulates the information in order to be on the side of Esperanza Aguirre. Check out their web page linked above if you want to watch their interesting reports. You may find some good information about people who is not usually listened to.
Before starting the demostrations, there were already people with clever and significant banners:
“Money from Church for the unemployed and for public schools.”
“Garzón will be judged for the Gürtel case before the corrupted people.”
“The Church the education reform.”
After that, we went towards the masses of people. As you may expect, I wasn’t exactly among the demonstrators, but ahead of them. I was surrounded by tons of journalists covering the event. There, I could see protesting people from a lot of sectors: teachers, firefighters, people from platforms against evictions, 15M movement, from the sanitary sector … In short, people fed up of cuts and the austerity carried out by our Government and imposed by the troika: International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank.
Furthermore, the leader of the movement ‘Fuck Troika’ (‘Que se lixe a Troika’, originally) from Portugal was supporting this Spanish demonstration:
There were a predominance of Republican flags (attentions: flags of the Spanish Second Republic) and then, an anarchist one, others bearing messages, etc. In the front row, the large banner was this one:
“Peoples united against Troika”.
“We don’t owe anything!! We don’t pay!!”. This was also the most repeated phrase during the demostration.
As soon as we got next to the Stock Market of Madrid, the demonstrators started to explode bags (it is a metaphor, since in Spanish both elements are called “bolsa”):
Then, next to the Bank of Spain, people shouted “There is the Ali Baba’s cave” and they called “thieves” to its bosses before asking for their resignation as well:
During this demonstration, I learnt some things about journalism and it seemed very curious to me to see journalists working behind the scenes, interviewing people, preparing what they were going to say to their cameras, recording, taking pictures…
This is the reporter of TM-EX interviewing a teacher in the demonstration
And, as in almost every demonstration, satire and sarcasm played an important role:
Finally, when we got to the end, there was the final speech, the reading of a manifesto. They denounced the “brutal and inhumane adjustment politics imposed by the hateful troika with the help of the accomplice governments, which are causing in Europe the biggest economic crsis in democracy in the last decades. Millions of people are forced to unemployment, poverty and even death because of an ilegitimate and unpayable debt.”
Two parts of the final speech:
Also, some demonstrators mooned the troika…
…right after listening to the speech, let’s say, in a more “normal” way:
I would like to thank the staff of TM-EX for having me. I love your ethic and journalistic values. People like you are needed nowadays. I recommend you to check out their special report on this demonstration.
Thank you so much!
A window to the world 