A-Infos (en) Spane, CNT #438: Repressive recipes from the past against the Future Plant (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

It is absolutely impossible not to evoke the Wallace Hartley Band 
(popularly known as "the Titanic orchestra") when talking about the 
actions of governments around the world in the face of evidence of 
climatic and environmental collapse in which our planet has been 
immersed for decades, and which everything seems to indicate is already 
heading towards its final stretch in the coming years. ---- Legend has 
it, never fully confirmed or denied, that the musicians of said 
orchestra continued playing even beyond the moment when it was already 
evident that the ship was going down in the icy waters of the Atlantic, 
where sub-zero temperatures made survival impossible for too long if you 
did not find a place in one of the few lifeboats.

This modern myth is often cited to refer to cases in which, faced with 
serious situations or events that will predictably and irremediably end 
in a catastrophe, it is decided not only to do nothing, but to continue 
pretending that nothing bad is going to happen.

The Spanish Criminal Code establishes sentences of up to seven and a 
half years in prison for those people who directly or indirectly cause 
or carry out emissions, discharges, radiation, extractions or 
excavations,[...]that, by themselves or in conjunction with others, 
cause or may cause substantial damage to the quality of the air, soil or 
water, or to animals or plants, and could seriously harm the balance of 
natural systems as well as pose a risk of serious harm to people's 
health. (art. 325 CP)

On the other hand, article 570 bis) of the aforementioned penal code 
understands a criminal organization as a group formed by more than two 
people on a permanent basis or for an indefinite period of time, who in 
a concerted and coordinated manner share various tasks or functions with 
the aim of committing crimes.

In the context of a climate crisis scenario and the passivity of 
governments to tackle it, groups have emerged that have decided to 
confront this situation through civil disobedience and peaceful protest.

If we put the two previous paragraphs in relation, it is easy for us to 
conclude that they are talking about companies such as Repsol, Endesa, 
EDP, Naturgy, Arcelormittal, Cepsa, FCC, Iberdrola, Enagás or Cemex (the 
ten most polluting companies in Spain: 
https://www.publico.es/ciencias/diez-empresas-contaminantes-espana.html). 
I am not saying that these multinationals have the aim of committing 
environmental crimes, but it is clear that they act with obvious intent 
in this regard.

Translated into plain language, this means that their policy is: no 
matter what happens, I will act. If fracking is necessary to extract 
gas, despite the obvious environmental disturbance that this entails and 
the risk to human populations in the area, then it is done and we cross 
our fingers that the damage is not very noticeable and in the short term.

It is an open secret that the most polluting companies on the planet are 
so because the states in which they are based lack the political will 
necessary to put a stop to these predatory practices. In this way, the 
States become necessary collaborators, either by action or by omission, 
of the actions of the main polluting companies on the planet.

In the context of this climate crisis and the passivity of governments 
to tackle it, groups of people have emerged who are aware of the 
planetary disaster that wild capitalism (excuse the redundancy) is 
leading us towards, and who have decided to confront this situation 
through civil disobedience and peaceful protest.

These non-violent actions have taken the form of different actions to 
raise awareness, consisting, for example, of roadblocks, interruption of 
sporting events or, more commonly, the throwing of washable paint at 
government buildings or yachts and private jets.

Logically, the State's repressive response has not been long in coming, 
and dozens of activists have been arrested throughout Spain during the 
past year 2023, accused of being part of a criminal organisation, which 
the Prosecutor's Office initially even threatened to consider to be for 
terrorist purposes. A qualification that had to be rectified in the face 
of popular outcry and the obvious absurdity, even for them, that such a 
claim represented. So much so that during one of the arrests, one of the 
investigating officers confessed to one of the detainees that "they knew 
they were not criminals" but that they "had to do their job." 
Unwittingly admitting that the arrests were not aimed at prosecuting or 
preventing any crime, and that they therefore responded to interests 
other than those of criminal policy.

The "Operation Spora", which is how the national police have called the 
raids carried out against climate change activists over the past year, 
aims to configure the protest actions of these people as a set of crimes 
ranging from public disorder to damage to property, including crimes 
against traffic safety (roadblocks).

To do this, it has become essential to "paint" as criminal actions that 
in no case can be considered as such and that, in most cases, are also 
protected by the fundamental right to protest and freedom of expression.

The protest and visibility tool most used by these activists is to throw 
washable paint (watercolour) at buildings that house public 
institutions. These actions have been described by the national police 
in their reports as a "crime of damage", when in fact absolutely nothing 
is damaged by them.

The protest and visibility tool most used by these activists is to throw 
washable paint (watercolour) at buildings that house public 
institutions. These actions have been described by the national police 
in their reports as a "crime of damage", when in fact absolutely nothing 
is damaged by them.

As stated in Supreme Court Ruling 273/2022, of March 22, from an 
interpretation derived from the legislative evolution of the typicality 
of the crime and the inclusion of graffiti in the crime of damage, it 
must be taken into account that the criminal legislator, when 
promulgating the 1995 Code, decided to differentiate the crime of damage 
from the tarnishing of property. The former contemplates the damaging 
results that a loss of the substance of the thing implies, while 
tarnishing included the acts of tarnishing because it disfigured the 
property, without physically damaging it, or if it did so, it did so in 
a way that could be repaired, without affecting the substance, so it 
would not cause damage. Mere tarnishing, which did not cause damage 
because it was easily repairable, was not subsumed under the crime of 
damage, but under the lack of tarnishing, which was repealed by the 
reform of the Criminal Code in 2015. So that for there to be a crime of 
damage, the thing must be destroyed, or it must be made to lose all or 
part of its value, leaving out of this crime the so-called tarnishing 
which in its grammatical meaning is "action of removing grace, 
attractiveness or lustre from a thing", because the action carried out 
does not affect the substance of the thing that continues to exist as 
such, although stained. Functionally, it continues to provide its 
utility. Therefore, if the result involves the loss of aesthetic 
conditions, which are susceptible to being cleaned, it found its place 
in the lack of article 626 of the Criminal Code, and that after its 
decriminalization in 2015 is now referred to the administrative 
sanctioning area of the Citizen Security Law (art. 37).

In other words, staining is not damaging an object, because it does not 
need repair, only cleaning, and therefore, it should not be punished as 
a crime, although administrative sanctions of a purely economic nature 
may be imposed. This statement is of a general nature, since the 
jurisprudence contemplates some cases in which the tarnishing of goods 
with certain characteristics could be considered a crime of damage, but 
that is not the subject of this article.

We live in a system in which passivity in the face of the ecological 
excesses of large polluters is the norm, and, nevertheless, people who 
try to awaken governments and people with enough power to try to stop 
this slow agony of a planet that can no longer support more "capitalist 
accumulation" and that, in a sort of self-defense, responds to us more 
and more frequently with extreme heat waves out of time, endless 
droughts, rapid desertification of immense areas or irreversible 
disappearance of flora and fauna are persecuted, singled out and 
criminalized.

Governments, like the "Titanic orchestra", remain unperturbed by the 
sinking of the earth-ship, and have preferred to continue playing the 
macabre melody of economic interests over that of the survival of the 
planet, deciding to forget that none of the musicians of the Wallace 
Hartley Band survived the shipwreck either.

https://www.cnt.es/noticias/recetas-represivas-del-pasado-contra-futuro-vegetal/
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