Please Police Me?

If I remember rightly, one of my first posts here some years ago was about some riot or other that kicked off in Alcorcón, a suburb to the south of central Madrid. And, early this month of August, London was besieged by rioting youths in an eruption of violence and looting following an initially peaceful protest following an incident where a twenty-something young man was killed by a policeman in Tottenham, North London. The area is probably best known to non-Londoners as being the home of Tottenham Hotspurs (or simply Spurs) football club, who were knocked out of the Champions League by Real Madrid last season. Juande Ramos was once manager there, and former Madridista Rafael van der Vaart and gangly ex-Liverpool striker Peter Crouch are in the team. Spurs ground White Hart Lane could be seen from helicopter footage surveying the damage, and, although the stadium escaped unscathed, players were terrified.

Youths excited by the adrenalin of breaking glass, burning buildings, pack mentality and the prospect of free tracksuits, trainers and mobile phones spread the word by text, tweet and Facebook and pretty soon there was "copycat" rioting going on in Croydon (a suburb south of London... the picture above is the before and after image of a Croydon family business going up in flames), Brixton, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Oxford (!) and other cities.

British newspapers being what they are, the victim whose death sparked the riots was alternately described as a loving father-of-four (or father-of-six in some places) and a dodgy drug-dealing member of a family of  hardened criminals whose best pal - a fellow who went by the unsavoury nickname of Smegz - was killed by a broken champagne bottle in rather suspicious circumstances earlier this year.

Here's a BBC news video from the morning after the night before, with some extra "history" on the former troubles in Tottenham that have apparently returned, to shed light on the tension in the area...

...and here is a Sky News interview with a cheery gang of "masked" teenage looters...

...and finally, the unfortunately bumbling Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, "comes to the rescue" with a broom 

Obviously you've already clicked on a number of links in the article (you did click the purple blue links, didn't you?), but let's finish with some of the more interesting analyses of the riots:

• Trainers and mobile phones: the objects of our disaffection (The Guardian)

• The Clockwork Riots (New York Post) 

• Cameron: UK riots not caused by race or government spending cuts (Metro UK)

• UK Riots: How the drugs war fits in (Huffington Post)

• Punk spoke up for angry kids. Why won’t today’s bands follow suit? (The Guardian)

• Holiday boredom fuelled riots (London Evening Standard)

• Celebrities unite on Twitter to condemn riots (Daily Mirror)

• Mother who shopped her own Olympic ambassador daughter after riots weeps… (Daily Mail)

• Rap responds to the riots (The Guardian)

• How BlackBerry Messenger was used to plan two nights of looting (Daily Telegraph)

• What isn't behind the riots (Washington Post)

• How the UK newspapers headlined the riots (The Guardian) 

Eta, not eater

Juan Ignacio "Iñaki" de Juana Chaos is what most right-minded people would call "a nasty piece of work".

A key figure in the Basque separatist and - let's not beat around the bush here - terrorist organisation Eta, de Juana Chaos was found guilty of organising (or maybe actually carrying out) various bombings in which 25 innocent people died. 25 lives meant a sentence of 3,000 years for de Juana - whose parents were not Basque and whose father was a Francoist Guardia Civil - but thanks to some odd clause in Spanish law which points out that it would be impossible for a human being to see out 3,000 years behind bars the sentence was automatically cut to a more bearable 18 years.

Less than one year per victim.

Knowing that there would be an outcry when the "man" was let out of chokey after his 18 year sentence, the government scrambled to find something else to put off de Juana's release date and found a couple of inflammatory articles he'd written for a Basque paper that were promoting terrorism, which amazingly added up to another 12 years... probably by that time another government would have to deal with the problem.

25 deaths = 18 years, 2 newspaper articles = 12 years... hmmm.

Something sounds a bit off here.

Needless to say de Juana thought so too and went on hunger strike.

The ins and outs of all this are too lengthy to detail here, but whether de Juana lives, dies, remains in prison or is set free on whatever terms will be bad for the government and only exacerbate the so-called Basque problem. Another thing that has exacerbated this problem was The Times printing pictures of de Juana Chaos "shackled" to his bed with what looked like bandages and with the physique of Victoria Beckham without the implants.

I'm certainly not going back to Tony Roma's for some time.

Still, just as Becks' missus only has herself to blame for the shape she's in, should the emaciated de Juana really be blaming the "Spanish state" for his protruding ribcage? Or should the ridiculous state of a legal system where a 3,000 year sentence becomes an 18 year one really be the focus of our anger rather than that of a hard-done-by murderous terrorist who has already done his time for the crime?

Ah, and news just in... apparently following the appointment of a government-friendly judge, de Juana's extra 12 years have been reduced to three. Compromise, perhaps?

Here's how the story was reported:

• The Times (original story)
• The Independent
• BBC News (on new reduction of his sentence)
• The Guardian (on de Juana Chaos and the peace process)

...and here's how a couple of Spain-based English -speaking bloggers gauged the Spanish reaction:

• The Big Chorizo (on how the Spanish papers saw things)
• Lavengro in Spain (on the Guardian article!)
  
  

I predict a riot

A Madrid suburb best known for a tacky Madonna-imitating transvestite and an Ikea has hit the headlines due to a ruck between Spanish locals and Latinos.

Most reports seem to agree that the conflict took place following an argument over a basketball court "occupied" by a group of Latinos, and that this spiralled into a riot between Spaniards and immigrants, about 1,000 or so young people (1,000 Spaniards, the figures for the Latinos are unclear), and that the whole thing had been planned over the internet. Most reports also detail the various weapons used from knives and knuckledusters to guns and even swords(!)... but other details seem to vary depending on where you read the report.

Some sources refer to the object of the locals' ire as being Dominicans, others say they were Latin Kings, some call it a race riot while others say it was a protest against "delinquents" (fight fire with fire, eh?). Local politicians quoted in Spanish papers say that there have been no Latin Kings in Madrid for six months, while the BBC say that Latin Kings are "active" in Alcorcon.

I'll let you make your own minds up about whether this fracas is just a one-off or the tip of the iceberg... here is how the story was reported around the English-speaking world.

• BBC News
• Reuters UK
• Typically Spanish (Spain)
• ThinkSpain (Spain)
• International Herald Tribune (USA)
• Monsters and Critics
• Expatica (Holland)
• Upside Down World
• Vivir Latino (in English!)

You can also listen to a bizarre computer generated recording of the Herald Tribune story linked to above here, where Alcorcón is pronounced Al Cork'n.