Retiro

I see old men bent forward on benches, spitting out seeds from crumpled mouths, leaning on wooden sticks. 

I see people lying in uncut grass: some of them read, some of them sunbathe - one man sleeps, wheezing with each deep breath. 

I see young boys waving sticks, playfully fighting, and couples sitting on stone steps, whispering about something excitedly.  

I see men plucking strings, their fingers plastered, their heads bowed, and women cradling blankets that will not stop crying.  

I see a girl scuffing her shoes on the dusty floor; her parents don't notice - her parents don't care: shoes are not what trouble them. 

Photograph of Retiro Park, Madrid

Look past the man and between the trees: you can see a snippet of La Puerta de Alcalá.

Photographs of Retiro Park, Madrid

The woman sat between the two men hardly seems interested, does she?

If I were I were to give this picture a name, I would call it: Las Cotillas. 

The Unwitting Anarchist

Alberto Casillas surrounded by the Spanish press and 25-S protestors 

In central Madrid, just a few hundred metres away from the Palacio de los Cortes, Alberto Casillas stands quietly outside Café Prado. Dressed in his uniform – a white shirt, black tie and badly-fitted black trousers – he stares into the stream of traffic that flits past him on the opposing street. The mob of photographers that encircled the entrance to the café a few nights before have gone; so have the scores of protestors that packed tightly inside it, sheltering from riot police behind Alberto’s outstretched arms. After guarding them for about half an hour, Alberto’s defiance against the local authorities that night made him an inadvertent hero among the protestors, encapsulating their insurgent spirit. ‘I told the police they could not enter,’ he informed the Huffington Post, who uploaded a video of his valorous behaviour, ‘because there were a lot of people inside and because we are all human beings.’ He added, ‘I do not want to go against the law, but if they entered (into the café) there would have been a massacre. There were children and everything.’

  
    Having worked at the Café Prado for the past three years, Alberto has witnessed personally how the protests of the 15-M movement, described a few months after its inception as ‘small’ and ‘inarticulate,’ have allowed the political group to become an influential societal force. By harnessing the unifying power of social media sites, its leaders have been able to summon large numbers of people to protest in the Spanish capital, most of which were initially peaceful. On May 18^th 2011, the BBC reported that ‘about 2,000 young people’ gathered in Puerta de Sol, one of the largest squares in the city, for a ‘peaceful protest’ over Spain’s high unemployment rate, the highest in Europe. With the ‘crowd singing songs, playing games and debating,’ the general ambience of the protest was cheerful, perhaps even festive. Now the tone is changing, though: caused by Spain’s unstable fiscal situation, a more radical form of political activism has emerged among the most recent protests in the Spanish capital. ‘Society is now on the precipice of it starting to break,’ declares Alberto Casillas. ‘You can see it in people’s faces, the sadness and powerlessness. It is the image of fear, all you see is fear, fear, fear.’   

    On September 25^th 2012, the day that lead to Alberto pleading the police to stop their violence, the 25-S movement, an offspring of 15-M, attempted to occupy the Palacio de los Cortes with the bold intention of forcing ‘the dismissal of the government.’ Unlike all previous protests of 15-M, the atmosphere was somber and frighteningly serious. ‘We believe that the current situation has exceeded all tolerable limits,’ their manifesto claims, ‘and we are victims of an unprecedented attack from the economic powers.’ Hunting in packs of two or three, the police seemed to choose their victims indeterminately in the brutal violence that ensued. They beat both innocent spectators and suspected protestors, leaving some of them sprawled helplessly on the floor. (One man, after being knocked unconscious by one of the riot police, was also left paralyzed). ‘I see a policeman shouting with a gun in his hand,’ writes Jesus G. Pastor in El País. ‘I see a disarmed citizen pleading, knelt down and defenseless,’ and ‘I see a victim that protests because they need things to change and they want to believe it is possible.’ Alberto Casillas even compared the police’s behaviour to that of Venezuela’s, whose members have been described as ‘a law unto themselves.’ ‘I lived in Venezuela for 25 years and I saw this type (of behaviour) there, he says. ‘Now I’m also seeing it here (in Spain).’

      At the Council of the Americas conference in New York the following day, Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish President, addressed the nation, praising the country’s silent citizens who did not protest the previous evening, who simply accept the hardships his government imposes upon them. ‘You do not see them, but the are there,’ he said. ‘They are the majority of the 47 million people that live in Spain,’ and ‘they are people that suffer, shouldering enormous difficulties.’ During his visit to the United States, one that had the intention of recuperating some of Spain’s economic credibility, he also declared: ‘the perception of Spain does not correspond with the reality.’ However, in what is most likely an attempt to appease the world’s media, is it not the Spanish government that creates a false impression of its current situation? Jorge Fernández Díaz, the Minister for Home Affairs, described the police’s behaviour on September 25^th as ‘magnificent’ and ‘splendid,’ despite the videos recorded by protestors and spectators that firmly suggest otherwise. Conrado Escobar, a spokesman for the same ministerial department, also said the police were ‘brilliant’ and ‘exemplary.’ By failing to reflect the truth of events that evening, these statements do not unify the Spanish public to its government: they simply push them even further away. However, regardless of whether they are silent or not, the majority of Spanish citizens have already been pushed too far by their government. Let us hope that the actions of Alberto Casillas, then, a man who prevented police attacking their fellow citizens, do not foreshadow what awaits Spain.

Alberto Casillas and me - the map immediately gave me away as a tourist.

Published on The Student Journals

©BenStupples2012