Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2011 as news. The camp had lasted 24 days, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba was Interior Minister and the 30-million-euro claim had just been filed; the outcome of the claim is not covered.
This is the other side of the coin of the 15M movement. The “indignados” and their demands for a more honest political class and an end to abuses by some financial institutions have now exhausted the patience of another kind of outraged group: the shopkeepers around Puerta del Sol in Madrid. More than 2,000 businesses are now claiming 30 million euros in compensation for the losses their businesses have suffered because of the protest camp.
They have accused the government of acting irresponsibly by neither preventing the camp nor clearing the area, and that is precisely what this group of indignados was looking for. Had riot police stepped in and cleared the area, the movement would have grown stronger, since people would have seen it as unfair to evict protesters for claiming their rights on a public street. Rights against rights, and democracy against the freedom to trade.
It’s a difficult situation for any government to make a decision on: if it does something, it’s unfair, and if it does nothing, it isn’t doing its job.
Here is the report from El Mundo:
Representatives of the Madrid Confederation of Specialised Retail (COCEM) have delivered a letter to the Ministry of the Interior, addressed to the minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, in which they claim 30 million euros for the losses suffered by shops in the Sol area following the 15-M camp.
The letter, signed by COCEM’s president, Hilario Alfaro, states that “the shopkeepers around Puerta del Sol have been suffering for 24 days now the negative consequences, and the damage to their image, caused by the illegal camp set up by the 15-M movement”.
They add that the movement “has been replaced by marginal characters of every kind, specialists in fighting the system and in creating insecurity and unsanitary conditions”.
The representatives of the roughly 2,000 affected shops state that, “since your Ministry is responsible for the damage caused by its passivity in fulfilling its legal obligations”, they will hold the Administration financially liable for the abnormal functioning of a public service that depends on the Ministry of the Interior.
“One person’s freedom ends where another’s begins.”
Featured image: Zarateman, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
