02.06.2014 - 09:11
After a whole week of incidents originating out of the eviction of the squatter social center called Can Vies, tonight was the first night without any notable unrest, either in Sants or in the rest of Barcelona.
Yesterday, the Barcelona city government demanded that the violence end as a condition to negotiating with the self-managed collective at Can Vies.
Forn: “With violence there is no dialogue”
The lieutenant mayor Joaquim Forn warned that with violence there could be no dialogue and that the answer would be the imposition of authority. At the same time, he asked for people within Can Vies who wanted to negotiate to show their faces, because that was the only way to have negotiations. He calculated the damages to public property on Saturday night at around 45,000 euros and warned that time was running out. He also said that today the municipal groups would meet to explain the next steps. Finally, he warned that it was dangerous to go into the half-demolished building.
The answer from Can Vies
The collective at Can Vies answered the city hall immediately saying that continuing to rebuild the warehouse was their way of showing their faces. They started work on Saturday and continued yesterday afternoon, when they decided to halt the reconstruction until an architects’ collective could assess the best way to proceed. Sources from the collective also wanted to show that the riots of the last nights had come out of a “strong police presence”.
The CUP tells the city hall to keep calm
David Fernàndez, member of the Catalan Parliament for the CUP [Popular Unity Candidates] asked the Barcelona city government to keep calm and recognize the “error and horror” that it had committed by evicting and “vandalizing” the Sants social center. “City hall has demonstrated that it has no respect for the culture of self-managed centers like Can Vies. You can’t be a firefighting pyromaniac, but that is the role that it has played,” he said at an appearance in Olot. Fernàndez explained that the city has experienced a very tense week that will have to be analyzed, but that maybe the conflict has begun to reach its end. “We are at the doors to a resolution,” he said. Outside the councilor’s offices, that is.
