Criminalize to deactivate

PalmaWhat happens when a protest is so justified and so broad, cross-cutting, and peaceful that it cannot be discredited by its own actions? Perhaps what we are seeing with the police actions against the movement crying out in Mallorca against tourist overcrowding and for the right to housing happens.

It happened with the two activists from Santa Maria arrested for spray-painting slogans against real estate companies. The image of the two women handcuffed and paraded before the cameras said much more than the arrest itself. Then came a disturbing police report, both for its content and because it made us wonder what police culture allows such a document to be written. And it happened again at the end of the demonstration called by Menys Turisme Més Vida in Palma. A massive, family-friendly, and civic mobilization that ended with an unjustifiable action by the National Police. It was not disproportionate. Disproportionality requires two factors; it would be a response to a disturbance of public order. There was none. It was an unjustified action. It is also difficult to understand that the Police prevented access to Les Voltes because, supposedly, it was already full with about five hundred people, and a couple of days later, that same space hosted a concert with more than three thousand attendees. It's hard not to see a political criterion rather than a security one.

All of this recalls a known strategy. Not because the movement against overcrowding is comparable to Catalan independence, but because the response of the State forces seems to follow the same pattern as when a citizen movement acquires enough strength to influence public debate. First, a narrative is constructed about the activists. Then come the spectacular arrests, police reports that turn citizens into suspects, infiltrations, judicialization, or hard-to-explain police actions. Not everything happens at once or with the same intensity, but the logic can be recognized: they want to transform a political demand into a public order problem.

We saw it for years in Catalonia. The massive demonstrations on September 11th stood out for their civility. Hundreds of thousands of people claimed independence without violence or destruction. That peaceful character made any attempt to present the movement as a threat difficult. If reality does not fit the narrative that interests those in power, there is always the temptation to manufacture the narrative.

In all cases, the objective is not so much to respond to a specific protest as to wear down a movement. To intimidate, sow fear, break complicities, push it towards confrontation or exhaustion. It is a way of trying to defuse it. But the movement against overcrowding and for the right to housing will not disappear as long as the causes that gave rise to it exist. Criminalization does not resolve conflicts, it only tries to silence those who denounce them.