Without a Traceroute

There was a big protest march in Barcelona yesterday. They passed down Las Ramblas which is the biggest tourist drag in town. There were quite a few demonstrators. The ones in the front of the march seemed very militant. They were shouting slogans and throwing flash-bang fireworks (you can see the smoke from one in the first phot below), but the march seemed orderly and not violent. There were some demonstrators wearing masks and sunglasses who were tagging buildings along the street with spraypaint. The police were following the march in vans but weren’t interfering, even to stop the vandalism. By later that night, almost all the grafitti had been cleaned off.

As near as I can make out from talking to a few of the protesters and searching online, Amadeu Casellas is an anarchist who robbed banks in the 70s and 80s in order to finance labor demonstrations. He was sent to prison and has been there for 22 years. Some of the sites claim that 20 years is the maximum allowed sentence for his crime. In any case, Casellas has apparently been on a hunger strike for the last 70 days and this demonstration was in support of him/his freedom.

On the one hand, a convicted bank robber seems like a lousy choice to rally around. On the other hand, 70 days is a freaking long time to be on a hunger strike. I’d be curious to learn more about the situation, but all the information online seems to be pro-Casellas propaganda, so it’s hard to know what’s really the truth.