During the third day of protests by farmers and herders, the tension has soared in some mobilizations. The demonstrators again blocked different roads and entered the center of several cities such as Palencia, Ciudad Real and Salamanca. The difference is that yesterday the confrontations between demonstrators and the police intensified. In total, since Tuesday the National Police and the Civil Guard have arrested 19 people, identified 2,700 to be sanctioned and filed almost 5,000 administrative and traffic complaints. Yesterday, specifically, seven people were arrested.
The violence also caused a Civil Guard officer who was fighting with a group of farmers to be injured by the throwing of a stone, which hit him in the eyebrow. It happened in the town of Zafra (Badajoz) yesterday morning, when demonstrators tried to block traffic on the A-66 road, also known as the Plata motorway. A spokesman for the protesters, Daniel Lara, who was asked if he did not fear any sanctions, told Europa Press that “this is a very big battle” and that “if we lose, we don’t win money, we lose money in the field, What does one more or one less penalty matter?”
Yesterday was the day when the large agrarian organizations, Asaja, COAG and UPA, which act in these demonstrations as a “unit of action”, joined the protests. They mobilized in Ávila, Salamanca, Ciudad Real and Huesca after the first two days the initiative and all the leading role had platforms outside of these representative entities, which are the ones that maintain the relationship with the central government. In Catalonia, the concentrations were also formed spontaneously, but with the support of the union Unió de Pagesos. On Wednesday they organized a large slow march, with 2,000 tractors coming from Lleida, Tarragona and the center of the territory to finally enter Barcelona.
Precisely, yesterday the last Catalan farmers, those who spent the night in Barcelona, ??left the city, not without first having met with the president of the Parliament, Anna Erra, and with the Catalan political groups. After the meeting, the political groups signed an agreement to review water restrictions due to the drought in the countryside, reduce bureaucracy and speed up the payment of aid.
Today it is planned that Asaja, COAG and UPA will expand the protests in Zamora, Bilbao and Extremadura. The 6-F Platform, linked to the ultra-right, called on farmers to go to Madrid tomorrow to collapse the capital.
In Spain as a whole, road closures were recorded yesterday in eight autonomous communities, with specific blockages in logistics nodes, such as industrial estates, and with roadblocks in Salamanca, Logronyo and Pamplona. Farmer demonstrations were also recorded in the provinces of Granada, Almeria, Valencia, Palencia, Huesca and Asturias.
The Spanish Confederation of Goods Transport (CETM) has calculated that if the conflict of French farmers cost Spanish transport more than 120 million euros, what is being recorded in Spain, with more than 75,000 trucks affected, already adds 35 million daily on average. In this regard, he has protested the road closures and the threats to block the main logistics nodes, which makes it difficult for trucks to move. In Valencia, for example, yesterday there were difficulties in accessing the distribution centers of the supermarkets, although at the moment there is no problem with the supply of the stores.
