LETTER FROM MADRID
When they had sex with Dani, a 31-year-old Mallorcan, extrovert, flirty and funny, they were certainly consenting. But to sleep with an air conditioner installer with anarchist sympathies, crest, piercing and a star of chaos tattooed around the knee, whom they had met in the libertarian centers of Barcelona. Not to go to bed with the worst “enemy” possible: a police officer, who is on duty.
Five of the conquests of this agent of the Spanish national police – the news site La Directa who revealed the affair identified at least eight during the two and a half years that his infiltration lasted in the anarchist and separatist networks of the Catalan city – decided to file a complaint for continuous sexual abuse, attack on moral integrity , revelation of secrets and deprivation of the exercise of fundamental rights.
While Spain recently approved the so-called “yes is yes” law, which placed the absence of consent at the center of the definition of rape (more than violence or intimidation), the case of the undercover police officer within the antifa movement fueled the debates in Spain.
Some, amused, saw in the police officer a kind of heroic cupid. The others, outraged, denounced an objectification of women incompatible with the feminist discourse of the left executive. Moreover, to obtain information of dubious interest, in self-managed centers with rather non-subversive activities.
The in-between of “Dani”
It all started in June 2020, when the country was just emerging from the first confinement. A certain Daniel Hernandez Pons then went for the first time to the gymnasium of the self-managed, “feminist and anti-capitalist” center La Cinetika, installed in a former squatted cinema in the San Andreu district of Barcelona. He’s looking for a cheap place to train. Tattooed, wearing T-shirts with messages, he quickly made friends in far left, separatist and libertarian circles.
Barcelona, known since the 19the century for the vigor of its anarchist movements, is full of them. We see “Dani” both in the occupied social center of Can Masdeu, housed in a leper colony abandoned since the 1950s, with its community vegetable garden and its Sunday activities, and in the former self-managed factory of Can Batlló, in the Kasa de la Muntanya, a former gendarmerie barracks squatted near Parc Guëll, or at the cooperative cultural space of La Comunal…
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