Profe

European protests: Spain.
Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards took part in dozens of demonstrations that concluded the country’s
second general strike in eight months, protesting against severeanti-austerity measures in a country
suffering both from a recession now in its fifth quarter and record-level unemployment.
Whilst well over 100,000 demonstrators marched in Barcelona and Valencia, theworst violence of the day’s
strike suddenly erupted in Madrid at the tail end of of a demonstration that had seen tens of thousands of
protesters take to the city’s central avenues.

Close to theSpanish parliament in the Paseo del Prado boulevard - where some of the worst anti-austerity
violence in the country took place in late September - police fired rubber bullets and charged todisperse
groups of young protesters setting fire to rubbish bins, tearing down barricades and hurling missiles. Then
as ambulance sirens blared and some small groups sat chanting on the ground oppositequickly formed
police lines, others tore through a maze of nearby narrow streets setting more refuse containers ablaze,
smashing some shop windows and leaving a dense smell of burnt plastic hanging inthe air.
Prior to the evening’s violent conclusion, amongst the tens of thousands of Madrid protesters, the mood had
been mostly good humoured, although the messages on many of the banners - “Theyrob and divide”,
“Without fighting, what will you have?” and a simple “No” next to a giant pair of scissors representing the
cuts - were defiant.
“There have been so many cuts we haven’t got anypaper left in my department. We can’t even afford ink
for the printer,” one protester, a university teacher named Rubén, told The Independent.
“People are more and more angry. This strike isn’t goingto achieve anything, but this is the only way of
protesting we’ve got.”
“One day’s strike is not good enough... three days would be much more effective,” Antonio Rodriguez,
carrying a flag of...