Deputies and leaders of the Frente Amplio and Adelante Andalucía denounce police attacks

Deputies and leaders of the Frente Amplio and Adelante Andalucía reported this Wednesday that they had suffered police attacks in different parts of the community while participating in pickets on the occasion of the general strike.

Ernesto Alba, general secretary of the Communist Party of Andalusia (PCA) and deputy for Málaga in the Autonomous Chamber for the Por Andalucía coalition, of which IU is a part, explains by phone that, while on a picket in Mercamálaga at around 4:30 a.m., in the middle of the morning, the National Police launched what he considered a disproportionate volley against a task that he describes as “informative” and “peaceful.”

"The discharge catches me in the middle and I see myself with a police officer hitting me with his baton on my left arm. Not once, in a moment of tension, but many consecutively. The pain left me half in shock. My colleagues took me back to the sidewalk, in a lot of pain. They took me to the Regional Hospital. I had no mobility in my hand, which I have been recovering. My arm is very swollen, but they have done an x-ray and there is no fracture," explains Alba.

“It was not the only strong discharge in Malaga,” he laments. The other one referred to is the one that occurred at the Municipal Transport Company. "It has been even harder. It is sobering to think that in the face of peaceful pickets reporting on the strike, housing and workers' salaries, it is charged in that way. I think that the statements of the PP and Vox criminalizing and threatening the workers are also in the police. It is seen when it comes time to act [on the part of the agents]", explains Alba, who is studying the possibility of moving from public denunciation to the adoption of legal measures.

Izquierda Unida distributed a statement in which, on behalf of the Frente Amplio, it “condemns the police repression” of “activists” during the strike day in Malaga, Granada and Seville. The text reports that not only Ernesto Alba, but also an IU leader in Malaga, Daniel Carmona, had to be taken to the hospital, in his case with a fracture of a finger on his left hand.

From Granada, Néstor Salvador, Organization Secretary of Adelante Andalucía, reports by telephone that, shortly before 6 in the morning, at the picket line at the metro depots of the Nasrid city, “some national police officers, by the way, none of them members of the operation and identified as required by law,” acted against the strikers.

"One punched me in the ribs. I have a fractured rib," says Salvador, who provides a report from the Granada Neurotraumatology Hospital that detects "closed chest trauma due to aggression" and "radiological suspicion of fracture of the fourth right rib." "We are going to report the police for aggression, for damage, and also for violation of fundamental rights. We were not exercising any violence. There were no burning barricades, nor throwing objects. We are going to ask for the resignation of the subdelegate of the Government in Granada," he says.

In a video broadcast by Adelante Andalucía, Néstor Salvador is seen on the ground, in pain after a tumult and then trying to get up with difficulty, falling again. The woman who assists and accompanies him is Inmaculada Manzano, regional representative for Granada from Adelante Andalucía, who also suffers a push from an agent and collides with a camera that was recording the scene. “She's a deputy!” warns someone present. A woman who identifies herself as a “nurse” is interested in Salvador and he points out his right rib area. “One [a police officer] punched me in the ribs there,” says the leader of Adelante Andalucía once he manages to stand up.

“They [deputy Manzano] have been pushed and their breasts have been touched [seen in the video], we do not know if consciously or unconsciously,” says the Adelante leader now, who has later published another video in which the parliamentarian is seen demonstrating.