On September 25, 2012, tens of thousands of people gathered in the Plaza de Neptuno in Madrid. Called to surround the Congress, the night ended with severe police charges which continued even inside the Atocha police station. They arrested 35 people and 64 others were injured. Among them, 27 were agents, without the Government Delegation having specified their pathologies. On November 18, the hearing of 21 of these detainees will begin in what the organizers of the demonstration described as a “macro-trial”. More than 12 years later, justice will resolve what happened. The prosecution is seeking sentences that, in some cases, exceed seven years in prison and, in total, total 112 years for all defendants.
Dozens of videos flooded the networks this Tuesday, September 25. One of them left an image that we still remember. In response to one of the accusations made by the police, a plainclothes officer began shouting: “I’m a partner, dammit!” to escape the blows given to him on the field by his own professional colleagues. Next to him, also on the asphalt, was Ángel García, accused of disturbing public order and for whom the public prosecutor is requesting a sentence of 3 years and 8 months in prison, the lowest of all.
He will be one of the men and women who will march in the coming days in front of the Madrid criminal court: “There were thousands of us in Neptuno, the police charged and people started running. “I felt a strong push from behind and they threw me to the ground,” his story begins.
Ángel claims he was dragged by two plainclothes officers. “We must not forget that this mobilization was infested with this type of police,” underlines Elena García, one of the organizers of the call. After falling to the ground, this gardener, then aged 39, ended up being dragged a few meters by plainclothes police officers. “They took me near the police vans and there the riot police beat me and the two. This comes out in the images, in which we start to say that he is his partner so that they stop hitting him,” he illustrates.
After his arrest, he found himself in the cells of the Moratalaz police station. He claims to have suffered psychological abuse from the police: “They wouldn’t let us go to the toilet to relieve ourselves and they left it on every day to prevent us from sleeping,” he complains. He is not the only one to have denounced police abuse. Certain complaints of police mistreatment were not investigated and resulted in Spain being condemned by European justice.
The streets, a powder keg
In 2012, with Mariano Rajoy and the PP at the head of government, the poorest classes had not yet recovered from the hard blow of the financial crisis of 2008. Mass demonstrations took place on weekends in a capital which has become the epicenter of the crisis. mobilization. It was the time of the Marches for Dignity, the general strike, the miners’ march and the emergence of tides of defense of public services. In an attempt to appease and control this discontent, on September 25, 2012, more than 1,300 officers arrived in Madrid, coming from 30 groups of Police Intervention Units (UIP) out of the total of 52 that exist in Spain. Then they would approve the Gag law.
Images of bloodied protesters made headlines the next day, when another Surround congress also took place. At that time, 77% of Spanish society shared the reasons for going out on 9/25. “We asked for a new constituent process. We denied the 1978 regime in its entirety and we wanted to lay new foundations on which to build a new state model,” Elena recalls.
Unaccredited attacks
Today, twelve years later, Ángel is 51 years old and is serving a sentence that has dragged on ever since due to the long delay in the trial. “They accuse me of hitting an officer with a stick. It turns out that this agent is not identified, no one knows who he is,” he emphasizes. Ertlanz Ibarrondo is his lawyer and he emphasizes that this is a paradigmatic case because there are images that objectify everything that happened. Furthermore, he points out that the agents’ narration of events places his client in a different place than where he actually was.
Therefore, during the hearing it will be necessary to clarify whether there were clashes between protesters and riot police and who provoked them, the lawyer explains. He also believes that spending so much time waiting for a trial is a way of reducing the political action capacity of concerned people who want to defend their rights. “In my opinion, this is what this type of procedure is looking for, which we think about very carefully if we then participate in other mobilizations,” in his own words.
Ángel confirms this position: “Beyond the fact that I have not known what I will become for more than a decade, during all this time I have been afraid of participating in other mobilizations. “If they had already detained me without doing anything, it could happen again. » In this sense, Ibarrondo highlights the importance of videos that demonstrate the actions of the police, transformed into essential documentary evidence in legal cases like this.
From his point of view, this is what the Rajoy government tried to ban with the approval of the Citizen Security Law, known as the Gag Law, and which first censored the recording of these behaviors by the police. “In the case of Ángel and that of the other defendants, the documentary burden will be very high. There are numerous videos that prove that the events did not occur as the agents reported,” the lawyer determines.
The trial will last nine days during which all 21 defendants must appear in court. “They force us to face every day what this means for our daily lives. There are people who will have to do a lot of explaining at work for something that happened 12 years ago,” Ángel complains. When his turn comes, he will plead innocent before the judge and Ibarrondo will ask for his acquittal. “Maybe the prosecutor’s office will offer some kind of deal, but I’m going to refuse. “I will not accept any sanction for something I did not commit,” concludes the accused.
The organizers, exonerated by the National Court
Elena Martínez, for her part, was classified among the organizers of this 25-S. She and seven other activists were charged with crimes against high-ranking organizations of the nation under Article 494 of the Penal Code in the National Court after being identified during public meetings they held in the park on Sunday of Retiro. They were eventually acquitted. “It was a time of great social unrest and a certain abandonment of institutions towards the working classes, as is the case today,” comments this activist. And he adds: “People were beginning to realize that Spain had very great democratic deficiencies which came from the lack of break with Francoism, which is why we asked for a new constituent process.”
They chose September 25, 2012 to surround Congress and demonstrate their discontent. The accusations began around 7 p.m., when thousands of people gathered on Neptune. According to the government delegation, then led by Cristina Cifuentes, there were only 6,000 demonstrators. “It was going to be something peaceful and everyone has the right to assemble as a fundamental good without needing the approval of any institution, that is why we communicated the mobilization only at the administrative level,” recalls Elena.
Just days before September 25, she and seven others were summoned to court: “This is the first time that a crime that has not yet been committed has been put on trial. If we say that there are democratic deficiencies, this confirms it for us,” says the activist. The mobilization continued. “It was a brutal police deployment. Hundreds of people couldn’t even reach Neptune because they had been intercepted before,” he recalls.
Elena remembers it as a very strong example of people power, paraphrasing her words. “There were thousands of people who did not know each other, but we found ourselves there as companions, side by side, and it is this atmosphere that we hope to find for the trial, that the 21 accused do not feel alone,” he continues. This is how they face this “macro-trial”, as Elena herself describes it, which will take place from November 18 to 28 in Madrid and in which the prosecution requests sentences that would involve entry into prison of all the activists, accused above. all public unrest, attacks and resistance to authority.
