Report from Spain

09.apr.01 - The new foreigners' law (designed to fit european
standards, they say) has risen a wave of protests organized 
by the "sin papeles". It's being a very complicated situation.
Most of the collectives lacked any organizational experience, 
or campaign preparing skills... Nevertheless they've compensated
it with lots of energy and the justice of their demands...the 
spanish government tries to deny them constitutional rights 
such as the assembly or demonstration rights...

Political parties are doing their worst in years: socialists and
communists have both tried to become "representatives" of 
some definite collectives like "ecuatorianos" and have in fact 
detached them from other migrants, making them use the 
common "latin" sort of background (!).
Other collectives, specially the ones who are protesting
in Barcelona, have seen how their "spokespersons" and 
"representatives" made and broke agreements without their
consent, and got them in and out of hungerstrikes without 
having clear political perspectives.
The support among civil society (students, unions, church) has 
been growing, but at the same time one can feel that time is 
against us, if the media attention goes down...

Today the government issued an order to evaluate the possibility
of "regularizing" the situation of 60.000 people who were 
declared illegal inthe latest regualrization proccess...but at the 
same time this comes with the annulation of all the legal 
services the migrants had in unions and ngo's...

Quite clearly it looks like the "american model" (no one is legal,
and everybody has to work under slavery) will become the rule 
here if we cannot stop them...

The noborder network here is working in several of the encierros 
andspecially on the legal aspects which may get us engaged in 
a civil disobedience campaign and in some legal "recursos"
against the"unconstitutionality" of this law...

For more information go to: http://www.lasagencias.net/
(noborder.org)
 

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