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ARCHIVED - VIDEO: Lorca pig farmers overrun police and break into government building
“What happened this morning is an attack on democracy”
by Tom Beck
Pig farmers stormed the Development Centre building in Lorca this morning to try and stop the town council from holding its plenary session, at which they were due to bring in new regulations to restrict the building of new livestock farms in the municipality.
The regulatory change was to make the conditions for new farms more restrictive, but some thirty farmers from Lorca prevented the municipal plenary session from being held this morning by breaking through a police cordon and into the Local Development Centre where the mayor, Diego José Mateos, and representatives of the sector were meeting.
Video of the shocking moment the protestors pushed through and into the building was shared on social media, with reports that the protestors managed to reach the mayor’s office and that they used excessive violence against the police.
At that moment, the Mayor of Lorca decided to suspend the plenary session due to the difficulties in guaranteeing the safety of both civil servants and members of the Corporation, with some on social media drawing similarities between today’s attack and the assault on the US Capitol building just over a year ago.
I'm going to tell my kids that this happened today in Lorca. pic.twitter.com/YCzGc1HrPe
— No, gracias. (@NoFumoTabaco) January 31, 2022
This assault on the local government comes just a day after a procession of tractors was seen rolling through the Murcian city, bringing Avenida Juan Carlos I to a standstill since early in the morning. Farmers drove their tractors from the Huerto de la Rueda to the Local Development Centre to voice their opposition to the restrictions on pig farms which was being debated in a plenary session.
Coinciding with this meeting, several hundred livestock farmers from Lorca had gathered at the Huerto de la Rueda fairgrounds from where they set off on a demonstration through the city to protest against the announced changes.
The mayor of Lorca condemned the violence shortly afterwards: “Today there has been an attempt to attack, to coerce the free deliberation and the free vote of the highest representative body of the Consistory of Lorca”.
“What happened this morning is an attack on democracy, and that, unfortunately, will go down as a dark day in the history of our municipality”, Mr Mateos said. “The plenary is a body where debate takes place in a peaceful manner, to reach agreements, not to attack or to try to impose ideas, to insult and attempt to coerce, as unfortunately happened this morning”.
‼ï¸Muy grave. La patronal ganadera de #Lorca asalta el Ayuntamiento de aquella ciudad para impedir que los representantes democráticas aprueben medidas para reducir el impacto de las macrogranjas.
— Javier Sánchez Serna (@J_Sanchez_Serna) January 31, 2022
PP y VOX han alentado este asalto a la instituciones al más puro estilo trumpista. pic.twitter.com/sQruD12zOG
What was the new rule, and why are farmers opposed to it?
Back in July 2020 all municipal groups, without exception, declared themselves in favour of the General Urban Development Plan to extend the distances of large intensive farms from towns, schools, health centres, watercourses and natural springs. This General Plan has spent more than a year being tweaked and altered before it was due to be ratified this morning.
“During this time, the state and regional governments have approved sectoral regulations on the environment and animal welfare that we are obliged to include in the text”, explained Gloria Martín, Councillor for the Green Party Izquierda Unida-Verdes. “The large pig industry in Campo de Cartagena and its deposits of slurry – a mixture of faeces, urine and food waste – which allegedly do not comply with the regulations and pollute the groundwater, has been decisive for the European Commission to warn in 2018 of the impact that nitrates were having on the extreme pollution of the Mar Menor”.
An ongoing court case to prosecute those responsible for polluting the Murcia lagoon will now focus on a group of 40 farmers who were watering their crops illegally and irresponsibly. While it can generally be accepted that restrictions on the ability of industrial farms to pollute the Mar Menor further are a good thing, the points of controversy as pig farmers see it concern the distances that the new rule will require pig farms to be built from municipal structures.
As the draft law states: “The new pig farms may not be installed within 1,500 metres of the urban land of the nucleus of Lorca, the nuclei of districts, schools, health centres and medical offices; less than 500 metres from catalogued springs or natural sources; less than 100 metres from ramblas or streams included in the Inventory of streams in the Region of Murcia”.
These distances restrict the number of new pig farms that can be built and where they can be placed, limiting the expansion of the industrial agriculture sector in Lorca.
Lorca accounts for 50% of all pig production in the Region of Murcia, which has increased by 17.7% since 2015, encouraged by the swine flu crisis in China. The existing pig farms and farmers will not be affected by the new regulations, which only apply to new farms. The area’s one thousand farms already house more than a million pigs, which have a devastating effect on the local environment by using huge amounts of precious water from desalination plants and pumping water contaminated with slurry back into rivers and waterways.
The farmers have been criticised for using extreme violence against the police inside the Development Centre when voicing their opposition to this new law: “Look how they grab the policeman with the grey hair in the assault on Lorca Town Hall”, said one commentator on Twitter, before asking, “Is nothing going to happen to them?”.
Mirad como agarran al Policía del pelo cano en el asalto al Ayuntamiento de Lorca. ¿A estos no les va a pasar nada? https://t.co/JoM5psaG1c pic.twitter.com/8Ei8LD3SxD
— WONDER ARAN BANDINI ðŸ³ï¸ðŸŒˆ ðŸ³ï¸ðŸŒˆðŸ’šðŸ’œðŸ”» (@tzantzi) January 31, 2022
Image: Javier Sánchez Serna/Twitter
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