The “toilet paper roll” protest in the Plaza de Armas, which kicked off Paraguay’s “indignados” movement. Credit: Natalia Ruíz Díaz/IPS

By Natalia Ruiz Diaz
ASUNCION, Nov 29 2013 (IPS)

A few hours before a human chain was to surround the Paraguayan Congress on Thursday, Senator Víctor Bogado, accused of fraud and misuse of public funds, was stripped of his parliamentary immunity from prosecution.

On Nov. 15, an earlier vote in which 23 of the 45 members of the Senate voted for the ruling Colorado Party lawmaker to keep his immunity triggered the first social media-organised protest against corruption, which ultimately ended up forcing Congress to hold a second vote and reverse the decision.

Under pouring rain, dozens of protesters gathered in front of Congress in the Plaza de Armas Thursday evening to celebrate the first victory of the demonstrations, instead of forming a human chain in protest.

And while the number of demonstrators was smaller than in the previous protests in the plaza because of the torrential rains, the police presence was heavy, with hundreds of officers and anti-riot water cannons. At times there were more police than demonstrators in the downpour.

Natalia Paola Rodríguez, a 35-year-old lawyer and university professor, arrived late “because the torrent almost swept my car away.” But she told IPS she needed to be there “to share the excitement; what we did is really important” for this country of 6.6 million people – the second-poorest country in South America after Bolivia, and one of the most unequal.

Hugo Galeano, a 23-year-old student, also defied the weather, “because the celebration had to be here.”

“Public pressure twisted the arm of one of the branches of government,” a euphoric Galeano told IPS. “This isn’t over, this will become an ongoing thing,” he added, before walking off, chanting along with the rest of the protesters.

Topo Topone R. is the alias used on the social networks by lawyer Alejandro Recalde, one of the people behind Paraguay’s protest movement, which has labelled itself #15Npy, along the lines of Spain’s 15 May (15M) movement of “indignados” or angry protesters.

The movement debuted in the Nov. 15 demonstration in the Plaza de Armas, when hundreds of protesters lobbed toilet paper rolls at the legislature, to “clean up” Congress. The protest, which got heavy media coverage, was followed by others.

Topo, 40, explained to IPS that the aim of the movement is to become a kind of citizen oversight mechanism to keep an eye on the authorities, through constant demonstrations and public participation.

“We will be wherever citizens feel alone because there is no organisation or political party fighting for their demands, until the corrupt political class, which uses the people instead of serving them, is eliminated,” he said.

A taxi driver who did not want to give his name told IPS that “we got tired of the abuses,” before pointing out that “my colleagues contributed a lot to this triumph.” Taxi drivers were the first to refuse to provide service to the 23 senators who defended Bogado in the first vote in Congress. The boycott was then joined by restaurants and other businesses in Asunción.

#15Npy is a movement organised over the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as political blogs, one of them created by Topo himself shortly after left-wing president Fernando Lugo was removed from office in June 2012 through a controversial impeachment trial.

José Carlos Rodríguez, a sociologist and political analyst, said the term “popular uprising” was not fitting in this case.

“Paraguay’s ‘indignados’ are an expression of a new middle class, which has moral grievances. They are different from the movements that have emerged in the Arab countries and in Brazil. In the Arab countries, the focus was the dictatorships, and in Brazil the protesters were demanding rights,” he told IPS.

But like the waves of demonstrations in North Africa, Spain or Brazil, the movement in Paraguay has been organised through the social media.

A precedent for #15Npy was the “after office revolucionario” (after-office revolutionary) protests held during the Lugo administration (2008-2012) to back the president’s veto of a scandalous increase in the electoral court’s budget, which had been approved by Congress, dominated by the right-wing Colorado Party and other opposition forces.

Public pressure forced the legislature to backtrack at that time too, and it cancelled the budget hike. That led to the emergence of the new contemptuous slang terms “senarratas” and “dipuchorros”, which mix up the terms “senator”, “deputy”, “rat” and “thief”.

Rodríguez believes the protests will continue. “The people are going to go for more,” he said, adding that the Bogado case is only the tip of an iceberg of impunity enjoyed by the political leadership, which Paraguayans are fed up with.

Politics in Paraguay has historically been infamous for the high levels of corruption, impunity, nepotism and perks. And in the eyes of the citizens, Congress is the biggest culprit.

A broad range of people are participating in #15Npy – from office workers and students to artists, civil servants, taxi drivers, shopkeepers and ordinary people.

Some come from a background of activism in trade unions, social organisations or even political parties. But the great majority form part of the anonymous public, which up to now had been more resigned than participative in the face of realities such as living in one of the most unequal and corrupt countries in South America.

There are no leaders in the movement, only people who serve as reference points in different groups that communicate through Facebook and Twitter. On the networks they have already made it clear that Bogado’s loss of immunity will not bring the protests to a halt.

The next one will be a mid-December march on the courthouse, the seat of justice, “one of the branches of the state where corruption flourishes, and which provides citizens with anything but justice,” Topo said.

Both he and the demonstrators in the plaza stressed that President Horacio Cartes, a business tycoon in office since August, “should also take note” of the protests.

“Either he stops the repression of campesinos [small farmers] and only thinking about privatising and addresses the people’s demands, or we will go after him,” the taxi driver said.

“We are going to work at the grassroots level and go after the three branches of government; our agenda isn’t marked by anyone,” said Professor Rodríguez, who is very active in #15Npy.

Rodríguez the political scientist said these movements “produce a change in consciousness, but they do not directly bring about transformations.” In the case of Paraguay, the analyst said the support that the demonstrations received from the press and sectors of the business community played a key role.

In the Plaza de Armas Thursday evening, the protesters called for the resignation of the 23 senators who defended Bogado. The political scientist said “demands are always maximalist, you have to call for things even if you won’t get them, but basically the big victory is that Congress has changed, and it’s not going to be the same from here on out.”

"Corrala Buenaventura Is Here to Stay!" reads this protest banner in Málaga. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Jul 28 2013 (IPS)

“You live there for free, don’t you?” asked a woman as she passed by the Buenaventura “corrala”, a community in a building in this southern Spanish city occupied since February by families evicted from their homes for falling behind in their mortgage payments due to unemployment.

“We don’t want any handouts. We want to pay, through a social rent scheme,” replied 42-year-old Yuli Fajardo, who was living in a tent before she found shelter along with some 40 other people in one of the 13 spacious apartments in this four-storey block of flats in the central Malaga neighbourhood of La Trinidad.

Occupations by homeless families of vacant buildings owned by banks or real estate agencies have multiplied throughout Spain since the economic and financial crisis broke out in 2007.

But as a collective phenomenon, the new wave of squats started in the nearby city of Seville with Corrala Utopía, a block of 36 apartments belonging to a bank that has been occupied since May 2012 by around a hundred people, 40 of them children, Juanjo García of the 15-M (the May 15 “indignados” – Spain’s Occupy movement) housing committee in Seville province told IPS.

They call themselves “corralas” to indicate that they are community and neighbourhood associations, similar to the concept of the typical buildings of that name with common courtyards and services that proliferated in working class neighbourhoods in Madrid and other Spanish cities in the 16th to 19th centuries.

The new squatter communities receive support and advice from social movements like 15-M, the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH) and Stop Desahucios (Stop Evictions).

The National Institute of Statistics (INE) reports that there are some 3.5 million vacant housing units in this country of 47 million people – nearly 14 percent of the housing stock – mainly in the hands of banks. There were a total of 363,000 evictions because of mortgage arrears and foreclosures between 2008 and 2012, according to a report published in January by PAH.

Yanira, 20, and her 18-year-old boyfriend José were renting a house until they lost their jobs and took refuge in Buenaventura, one of the four corralas in Málaga.

Montse, who has an 11-year-old daughter, also lost her job and could not afford to pay for housing. Macarena, the most recent addition to the community, lives on the ground floor with her two small children, after her “alcoholic father threw us out on the street.”

“Do you think any of us would be here if we had an alternative?” asked Fajardo, who regrets the unsuccessful attempts to negotiate social rents with the bank that owns the building, and says that according to a Málaga court ruling, the corrala is due to be evicted on Oct. 3.

Buenaventura has just been sold by the bank to a private investor, lawyer José Cosín told IPS.

“We asked for an opportunity for marginalised, poor and socially excluded people to make a go of it. We carry our stigma like a brand on our skin, and we are judged by it,” said Fajardo, adding that “decent housing is a human right.”

The root of the problem, according to García, is “the commodification of the right to housing” during the construction boom that preceded the bursting of the real estate bubble five years ago.

There are now thousands of empty housing units and thousands of homeless people unable to make their mortgage payments because they were left jobless. The unemployment rate is 26.3 percent, according to INE figures for the second quarter of the year.

In Seville, 10 vacant buildings have been occupied by families that are being advised by 15-M. The squatters are unemployed, work in precarious jobs such as construction, are young people with good educational levels who have left their parents’ homes, or are over 65, García said.

“We are fighting for a roof over our children’s heads,” said 28-year-old Lidia Nieto, a member of the Las Luchadoras corrala in a new building in the La Goleta neighbourhood of Málaga belonging to a real estate company, which has been occupied since April by nine single mothers with their children.

Nieto lives on the ground floor of the apartment block with her eight-year-old son Yeray. She has a weekend job cleaning businesses and offices.

“We saw this empty building and decided to occupy it,” she told IPS while she chopped vegetables discarded by a nearby shop “because they are damaged and can’t be sold.” She used to live with one of her sisters and her parents.

“We saw ourselves living on the streets with our children. Do you think if we had proper jobs we would be living here? I’ve been unemployed for two years,” she said.

“Collective occupations are completely legitimate and are based on practical and ethical reasons,” said Iván Díaz of the Seville 15-M housing committee, at a conference in Málaga.

Squatters in new corralas are demanding that electricity and water meters be installed, so they can pay for utilities.

María, who lives next to Corrala Buenaventura, told IPS she is on good terms with the squatters. But the vendor at a nearby fruit shop said he had heard that some neighbours complained about noise at night.

The Málaga city government cut off water to Buenaventura on Jul. 18. But after the families protested by camping all night outside the town hall, the authorities re-established the water supply the next day.

The government of the autonomous region of Andalusía, where Málaga and Seville are located, approved a decree-law Apr. 12 on the social function of housing, establishing the need for a stock of social housing units.

The regional law also provides for the temporary expropriation – for a period of three years – of the housing units of families facing imminent eviction, “in cases where there is a risk of social exclusion or a threat to the physical or mental health of persons.”

This measure, appealed in July by the national government of rightwing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on the alleged grounds that it is unconstitutional, has benefited “only 12 families for three months,” complained García, who said it fell far short and was plagued with “flaws and defects.”

The European Commission – the EU executive arm – and the European Central Bank criticised the Andalusían anti-eviction decree, arguing that it could undermine the stability of the banking sector and economic recovery in Spain, according to a Jul. 10 report.

Economy professor Arcadi Oliveres has become a popular face of the growing discontent in Spain because he calls a spade a spade.

“I have called for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to be impeached for destroying the welfare state,” he said.

But Oliveres, from Catalonia in northeast Spain, is not alone in his mission. He and Teresa Forcades, a Benedictine nun and medical doctor, have created an unusual platform representing people who are fed up with the country’s leaders who, they say, failed to do anything to prevent the severe economic crisis tearing Spain apart.

Protests, like this demonstration against foreclosures in the southern city of Málaga, are being held almost every day in some part of Spain. Credit: Inés Benítez

The platform is also supported by leftwing parties and sectors related to health, housing and education – areas that have been drastically affected by the conservative Rajoy administration’s budget cuts.

“There are good, well-intentioned, well-educated people who don’t agree with the economic decisions and the current political process,” Oliveres told IPS. “Our mission is to bring together people from these three sectors and come up with a joint candidate for the parliamentary elections in Catalonia in 2016.”

Oliveres blames the country’s political leadership, both the governing centre-right People’s Party (PP) and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), for the crisis that has driven up unemployment levels in Spain to among the highest in Europe.

Anna Torres, a sociologist from Barcelona, concurs with Oliveres. “The leaders are not connected to the people, and the parties aren’t either. That is why people are looking for answers in social platforms,” she told IPS.

“Europe has gone through many phases and has made leaps and bounds in terms of social welfare,” she said. “It would be a pity to have to go back to working in buildings that collapse, like what happened in April in Bangladesh (where 1,127 garment factory workers were killed), or to working as slaves, like in China.”

Torres said the economic model is changing in Spain. “There is a crisis in the construction industry and traditional productive activities are disappearing, and we haven’t specialised yet in highly technological industries,” she said.

“We were in the process of doing that when the crisis hit, and now there are many trained workers who can’t find jobs,” she added.

Oliveres said his group was working for “a cooperative Catalonia infused with solidarity, without an army, that helps the Third World and is independent.

“I have recently been in Granada (in the south), Alicante (in the southeast) and the Basque Country (in the north), and after hearing me explain our ideas, people want to start doing something similar,” Oliveres told IPS in an interview in the offices of Justicia i Pau, the Christian-based NGO that he heads.

“We have nearly 40,000 people who have signed up to (the web page of) our platform Procés Constituent a Catalunya since it was launched in April, and so many speaking invitations that we could visit all of Catalonia 50 times,” he said.

The Procés Constituent is one of the numerous citizen groups and associations that have emerged in Spain since May 15, 2011, when the “indignados” or 15M movement – Spain’s “occupy” movement – was born out of a protest in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square.

The encampment set up at that time in the square by protesters gave birth to the movement that is opposed to the government’s austerity measures and social cuts and is demanding jobs, affordable housing, solutions to the wave of foreclosures and evictions, economic equality, social justice, and democratic control over banks and corporations.

The growing citizen movement is also protesting the unprecedented corruption that has come to light in this country, in which high-level officials and even members of Spain’s royal family are implicated.

Analysts estimate that just 15 of the 1,600 cases of embezzlement, bribes and tax evasion in the courts today involved at least seven billion dollars in public funds. More than 1,000 of the people prosecuted in connection with the cases are political leaders.

Nearly every day a protest is held somewhere in Spain, and some observers are warning about a social uprising.

Social movements like the Procés Constituent now bring together more people than the country’s traditional trade unions. Most of these new groups are organised horizontally and decisions are reached in assemblies – the legacy left by the 15M.

The protests and demonstrations have taken many forms. An association of writers from Catalonia, Poesia en Acció, held a poetry marathon to benefit the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH), one of the largest citizen associations in the country, which is helping thousands of people who are losing their homes to foreclosures.

According to a report released by PAH in January, there were 363,000 evictions in Spain between 2008 and 2012.

“Poesia en Acció is carrying out actions in solidarity with social groups that are suffering because of the crisis,” poet and literary critic Guillem Vallejo, the president of the organisation, told IPS.

“In the past two years, we have focused on helping Spanish groups due to the situation in our country. We used to help countries in Africa and other parts of the Third World,” said Vallejo, who along with 60 other poets and 80 students from the group’s workshops published the book “Poesía Solidaria” (Solidarity Poetry), whose proceeds will go to PAH.

“We’ll give the money raised in the marathon (12 straight hours of poetry reading and a solidarity breakfast and lunch on Saturday Jun. 15) to PAH for projects that provide activities and psychological support for children whose homes are in the process of foreclosure, while the parents try to solve their legal problems,” Vallejo said.

Several associations of motorcycle riders organised a food drive for the needy on Sunday Jun. 23, in a campaign in the Canary Islands called “Moteros contra el Hambre” (Bikers against Hunger).

The national statistics institute reports that unemployment exceeds 27 percent – or six million people out of work in this country of 47 million. There are more than 70,000 families in Spain with no members working.

The “Occupy” movement has spread to Mexico, where thousands of university students have taken to the streets, bringing fresh air to a superficial and flat election campaign and forcing political parties to pay attention to a long-ignored segment of the population.

“Our movement is demanding the democratisation of the media, and accurate, unbiased coverage,” said Sofía Alessio, one of the protesters, who belongs to the organising committee at the private Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM).

“This is an apolitical, peaceful movement,” the political science student told IPS.

There are 2.5 million university students in this country of 112 million people, which means it has one of the lowest higher education enrolment rates in Latin America. There are also seven million young people who neither work nor study.

The biggest student demonstrations in Mexico’s history took place in 1968, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets demanding educational reforms and a more democratic political system, which was dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the political force that governed the country without interruption from 1929 to 2000.

The response by the government of then president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970) was brutal. After weeks of student protests, the repression reached a peak on Oct. 2, 1968, when soldiers and their paramilitary allies surrounded Tlatelolco square in Mexico City, which was packed with thousands of peaceful demonstrators, and opened fire on the crowd.

No one has ever been held accountable for the massacre, and the question of the death toll is still controversial, although most sources put the number between 200 and 300.

This time around, the student protests, which are common during election campaigns, are taking aim at “the heavy concentration of the electronic media, which limits freedom of expression and the right to information,” Luís Vázquez, a researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), told IPS.

“It is necessary to democratise the media, to avoid an authoritarian regime. That has become the central demand,” the academic said.

The wave of protests was triggered by a May 11 visit by PRI candidate Enrique Peña to the Jesuit-run Ibero-American University (UIA).

During Peña’s visit, student protesters questioned his human rights record as governor of the state of Mexico from 2005 to 2011.

When the media depicted them as intolerant and sectarian, the students began to protest what they called biased coverage, especially targeting Televisa, Mexico’s leading TV station.

“Young people can have a lot of power if they organise and get involved in politics,” Rolando Cordera, professor emeritus at the economy faculty of the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS. “It’s important for young people to realise the influence they have in society.”

On Jul. 1, Mexicans will elect 500 members of the lower house of Congress and 128 senators, who will be sworn in on Sept. 1, as well as the successor to President Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), who will take office for six years on Dec. 1. State and municipal elections will also be held in 15 of the country’s 32 states.

Out of a total of 77 million registered voters, some 10 million are young people who will be going to the polls for the first time. In 2010, there were nearly 19 million Mexicans between the ages of 20 and 29, according to that year’s census. (Voting is compulsory in Mexico.)

The student protests, which have no clear, visible leaders, have been organised largely over social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The movement has also created a web site to provide information.

“We know that some people will want to make use of the movement for political purposes, but we won’t let that happen,” said Alessio. “We have gotten university students from across the country involved, because we believe that together, we can do more. And it’s not only young people who are going to benefit from the results.”

The Yo Soy 132 (I Am 132) movement, whose name is a symbol of the continuation of the original demonstration by 131 students during Peña’s visit to the UIA, has published a code of ethics declaring that it has no party affiliation, is peaceful, and expresses individual, rather than collective, points of view.

After the demonstration at the UIA hurt the PRI’s image, the party wavered between lashing out at the protesters, saying they were intolerant and maintaining that the left was behind the whole thing, and following a damage control strategy of arguing that all opinions deserved respect.

Karl Marx wrote that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The protest against Peña and the subsequent reaction by his party were reminiscent of a visit to UNAM in 1975 by former President Luís Echeverría, who was practically forced to leave by student demonstrators. As he was leaving the medical school, Echeverría shouted “fascists!” at the protesters

On Wednesday May 23, Yo Soy 132 organised protests in at least 20 large cities around the country.

The phenomenon has already been dubbed “the Mexican Spring” – an allusion to the so-called Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and other countries.

Although the movement has some things in common with Occupy Wall Street and Spain’s “Indignados” protests, such as a horizontal structure and the use of social networking sites, it differs in that it is not seeking in-depth changes to the political and economic systems.

“The movement has to go beyond the electoral question. It could come up with an agenda of political and cultural aims,” said Cordera.

From June to November, the resort city of Cancún in southeast Mexico will host a series of conferences on issues of concern to university students, organised by the Foro Mundial de Universitarios (World Federation for University Education).

“The young people’s vote has been reawakened,” Alessio said. “The scope of this is incredibly important, and we hope to achieve our goals.” (END)

"Indignados" in Málaga transformed a waste lot into a community garden. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, May 11 2012 (IPS)

A filthy vacant lot is now sprouting strawberries, tomatoes and carrots. This small community garden in the centre of the southern Spanish city of Málaga was created by the “Indignados” protest movement, which is celebrating its first anniversary Saturday by taking to the streets across the country.

“This urban vegetable garden is a symbol and a space for freedom,” Málaga resident Miguel Ángel, who has been involved in the movement since it emerged a year ago in response to the severe economic crisis in Spain, told IPS.

Organised over the online social networks, the movement spread throughout the country on May 15, 2011 (giving it the name 15M). Demonstrators calling themselves the “indignados” – indignant or angry – occupied the central squares of Spain’s major cities to protest an economic model they perceive as socially unjust and political parties they see as subordinate to the economic-powers-that-be.

The movement later expanded to smaller towns across the country, where people began to hold citizens’ assemblies. Then it crossed national borders, spreading to other parts of the world under different names, such as Occupy Wall Street, where protesters first set up camp in Zuccotti Park in New York City’s financial district.

“The vegetable garden in the central Málaga neighbourhood of La Trinidad is an example of what ordinary citizens can do when they get organised,” said Miguel Ángel, referring to the local effort that began in September 2011 to clean up and farm a vacant lot and share the produce.

Protesters in at least 1,000 cities worldwide are holding demonstrations Saturday May 12 to celebrate the birth of a global movement that sprang up in response to the economic and financial crisis that broke out in the United States in 2008.

The new global day of action will be called 12M-15M, according to the web site of True Democracy Now (DRY), a platform that lit the fuse of the original uprising under the slogan “We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers.”

The movement has managed to “put backbone into civil society and reconstruct the torn social fabric by means of neighbourhood assemblies,” said Miguel Ángel. It has fostered cooperatives and mutual support networks that have provided alternatives to the system, he said.

“15M has awakened people’s critical consciousness,” said Fabio Gándara, a lawyer who supports the movement which, he says, “has changed the political agenda” in Spain.

The Platform of Mortgage Victims, created in the northeastern city of Barcelona in 2009 by people who could not meet the monthly payments on their homes, succeeded in drawing attention to the plight of evicted families in Spain, thanks to support and public airing provided by 15M.

The protests also proved influential in parliament, which approved debtor protection measures, like raising the level of wages exempt from seizure to pay mortgage debts, and proposed a legal reform so that surrendering a house to creditors would settle the entire outstanding mortgage debt (in many cases greater than the original loan, because of interest rate rises).

The government of centre-right Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, in office since Dec. 20, 2011, approved a code of good practice for banks in April, advocating full debt forgiveness for poor families in arrears who return their homes to the banks.

Crisis, criticism and self-analysis

Some voices in the 15M have criticised the movement from within. “We have failed to establish the organisational basis for a long-term, enduring movement,” said Gándara.

“Commitment to a purely ‘assembly style’ model has greatly detracted from the effectiveness of the movement, and is preventing the achievement of real changes in the system,” he added.

In his view, the movement will not survive unless it “adopts more democratic and effective methods of organisation to complement the citizens’ assemblies.”

Spain is one of the European Union countries hit hardest by the crisis, with more than five million people out of work – a record unemployment rate of 24 percent.

Rajoy’s deep cutbacks, especially in health and education, stoked the protests which triggered a widely supported general strike Mar. 29, convened by the two largest trade unions.

The government justifies the budget cuts by the imperative need to reduce the fiscal deficit from the 2011 level of 8.5 percent of GDP, to 5.3 percent by the end of this year.

“The policies adopted by the governments of representative democracies like Spain, far from addressing people’s real needs, reflect the interests of a privileged minority anxious to maintain their advantages at all costs,” said Gándara.

Activist Esther Vivas told IPS that 15M “is profoundly critical of the democratic system.”

“It has given us back the capacity to believe in ourselves,” but like all social movements, it is cyclical in nature and during its first year of existence it has had peaks and troughs, said Vivas, of the Centre for the Study of Social Movements at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

The challenge now for the “Indignados” movement is to maintain its level of support in society, and to improve and increase coordination on a global scale, said the sociologist, who is co-author with Josep María Antentas of the book “Planeta Indignado: Ocupando el futuro” (Indignant Planet: Occupying the Future).

Antentas, a professor of sociology at the University of Barcelona, told IPS the eruption of 15M marked “the start of a new cycle,” allowing social protest to resume its place in society.

Saturday’s demands are the same ones voiced a year ago, because “we continue to bear the burden of economic measures adopted behind the people’s back, as well as the lack of direct participation by civil society in government institutions, endemic corruption, and the gradual dismantling of the ‘welfare state’,” Gándara said.

That is why True Democracy Now has called on people around the world to “take the streets” Saturday, “in favour of decent housing and quality public health and education, and against precarious employment and the bailout of banks with public funds.”

The Spanish government warned that it would not permit tents in the squares, which it said were illegal, after 15M proposed camping in the Puerta del Sol, in central Madrid, from Saturday May 12 to Tuesday May 15. (END)