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...