Mossoflautas!

When the police can't afford to beat you, they join you 

This past Friday some 50 members of the Catalan “Mossos d’Esquadra” regional police force marched into Barcelona’s largest police station at Plaça de Espanya to stage a sit in. Over the last eighteen months the Mossos have felt the pinch of a 5 percent cut in their wages, as the Generalitat de Catalunya marches along the austerity path in lock step with the rest of Spain. They entered with placards, and blew tiny plastic “flautas” in unison. One Mosso was quoted warning that “If they won’t negotiate, we’ll fight”. Still, by all reports it was a generally peaceful affair.

The problem is, the last time I saw 50 Mossos in the same place, they were beating peaceful 15M protestors bloody with truncheons:

That was 27^th May 2011, when under the guise of cleaning the grounds before the weekend's Champions League celebrations, the Mossos escorted city cleaning crews into the 15M encampment at Plaça de Catalunya, Barcelona’s central square. While they told the 200 or so Indignats camping there that they would be allowed back in, the cleaning crews began tearing down and removing the tents and other makeshift areas the protestors had constructed. Thousands of supporters descended on the square in a show of solidarity. It wasn’t long before the skull cracking began. 

Plainly speaking, when it comes to stifling dissent, the Mossos don’t fuck about.  

On 15^th June 2011, the Mossos fired rubber bullets on crowds seeking to block politicians from entering the Catalan Parliament situated in Barcelona’s Parc de la Ciutadella. Reports surfaced after the event that the Mossos employed the use of "Agent Provocateurs" during the march; a theatrical, subversive tactic used by police across the globe to turn peaceful protests into chaotic riots, effectively contaminating the public's view of a movement in an effort to turn the dissenter into a common enemy -- a shady villain to be feared and loathed rather than listened to.  

The Mossos cast an imposing shadow at these protests. Clad from head to toe in black riot fatigues, thick kevlar covering their torsos, their faces obscured not only by the visors on their helmets, but by police issue balaclavas. This is the strange paradox of the riot police and the protestor; only one side ever comes prepared for a fight, and the public is made to believe those in heavy armour are the brave ones. You start to wonder who needs protecting from who? 

On 19th June 2011, when the Indignats had once again converged on the Catalan Parliament buildings, I took a place along the barricade that separated the Mossos from the Indignats, standing across from one officer for about 30 minutes; his mouth and nose hidden under the black cloth of his Mossos mask. I could only see his eyes, permanently fixed on me. He stood completely at the ready, waiting for me to jump over the barricade. I half wondered if he was hoping I would.

Yet now, after months spent introducing their truncheons to the skulls of those calling out unfettered greed, and the strangle of austerity measures forced on the many to pay for damage wrought by the few, the opressors have become the protestors.

There is a rich irony in the Mossos being made victims of the same measures imposed by the elites they are made to serve, often toward violent and repressive ends, and embracing the spirit of dissent as a result. Feeling the sting of these same sharp cuts to their livelihoods that the Indignats have laboured under for years should be a lesson to them, and moreover, to police officers everywhere.

While the uniform, the badge, and the billy club may provide the illusion of power, ultimately the police remain members of the same under-classes they are frequently ordered to pummel into submission. To the elites they are a private army to be used for their protection, but ultimately, like the rest of us, they are expected to foot the bill for their folly. There is no justification for meeting peaceful protest with violent thuggery. “Just following orders” does not cut it.

For these 50 or so Mossos, and inevitably for police in every city where the people are rising up against the austerity disease, the question is simple. The next time you are ordered to crack the skull of a Perroflauta refusing to forfeit their right to be outraged, or to pepper spray a row of kneeling students at a university, will you remember that these same people whose orders you are “just following” can, and probably will, turn on you at any time?