Here in Barcelona, a mob of "antiwar" rioters stormed the El Corte Inglés (a well-known chain of department stores) on the Plaza Cataluña yesterday. They smashed windows and destroyed sections of the interior of the store, and looted what they could before leaving. Basically they stole hams and liquor, from what I could tell. Several other stores in the area were also attacked. The McDonald's on Puerta del Angel was completely trashed. (Avui has a nice color photo of a couple of squatters smashing the windows with the sign, which they'd torn down; just scroll down a bit), and the employees of the Corte Inglés at Puerta del Angel and Santa Anna drove away the rioters with a firehose. This was all caught on camera; I am not exaggerating.

No arrests were made.

Catalan Partido Popular leader, Alberto Fernández Díaz, was to have given a speech in the city of Reus, near Tarragona. He was booed off the stage by a mob of some 500 "antiwar protestors" who then assaulted him physically as he attempted to leave the building under police protection. They kicked and punched him and threw things, mostly eggs and tomatoes, but also rocks and bottles, and one of the latter hit Fernández Díaz in the forehead and cut him; he bled rather copiously. I am not exaggerating; this was all caught on camera.

No arrests were made.

Over 120 offices of the Partido Popular, José María Aznar's governing conservative party, have been attacked over the past few days in Spain. In Catalonia the PP offices in Barcelona, Lérida, Reus, Terrassa, Tárrega, and Cornellà were attacked yesterday, with varying degrees of violence; the worst was Reus, where the police had to charge the mob twice to disperse it. 47 of the anti-PP attacks since March 18 have occurred in Catalonia. In addition to throwing rocks and bricks, protesters also threw human and animal excrement, animal viscera, and animal blood.

No arrests were made.

In Barcelona, a mob of rioters stoned the central government's delegation, equal to a prefecture in France, down on Marqués de Argentera by the harbor. The only decent thing that happened in Barcelona yesterday was that a group of honest pacifists put their bodies where their mouths were and stood in front of the delegation building as "human shields" to force the rioters to stop the assault. Congratulations to those brave people; they may be against the war but they are also supporters of democracy and the rule of law.

No arrests were made.

Here in Gràcia, the boho neighborhood of Barcelona, I haven't seen anything broken, but the protestors, probably mostly squatters, have covered up most of the walls with graffiti ranging from plain stupidity to incitements to violence. Bank and savings bank branches have been particular targets; every single one of their façades is covered with paint, accusing the financial institutions of being capitalist murderers who are profiting from the war.

No arrests were made.

La Caixa, the biggest savings bank in Europe and one of the three basic foundations of Catalan civil society--the other two are the Generalitat and FC Barcelona--was the especially particular target. This is stupid because La Caixa is a nonprofit institution which spends a lot of money on the public good; they've established schools--some for handicapped people--and libraries, they've paid for literally thousands of scholarships (including sending 50 graduate students every year to the US and 25 each to Britain and France), they subsidize a very large cultural program including theater, music, and art exhibitions, they give large contributions to various Barcelona institutions from the opera house to the Picasso Museum, they support various sports clubs, they subsidize scientific research at the universities and hospitals, and their pet project is establishing "neighborhood houses" (casals) where retired people can meet up and play dominoes and hold dances and the like. In the old days, before the National Health, they funded clinics. La Caixa was founded in about 1900 with the stated goal of providing banking services to the ordinary working Joe, giving him a place where he could earn interest on his small savings without fearing that the bank would go bust, providing small loans for his store or workshop, and even serving as his broker if he wanted to put his money in stocks or bonds. What it especially did was provide someone honest and disinterested that ordinary people could talk to about money matters; half the little old ladies in town still do exactly what the Caixa guy at their neighborhood branch advises them to do with their pensions. (You need a degree in Econ or business to be a teller there; you also have to win out over others in a test like the civil service exam.) It is genuinely a fine institution with a sterling reputation that is dedicated to benefitting the public. And these morons call them murderers.

Tomás Alcoverro is La Vanguardia's guy in Baghdad and he is doing his best to imitate Robert Fisk, whose articles the Vangua publishes daily. Alcoverro says that Baghdad smells like burned and putrefying human flesh. Interestingly, he said the exact thing about the so-called Jenin massacre a few months ago. Mr. Alcoverro is full of shit.

Reports Catalunya TV about last night's pot-and-pan-banging protest: "Some of the participants in the protest, which occurred without incidents, joined together in places around the city with pots, pans, and other metal recipients in order to express their repudiation of the warlike policies of the United States and the governments that support it." Now they're being honest. They're not antiwar in the least, since they practice violence themselves. They're anti-American and anti-Aznar. That is the motivation that moves them.

By the way, Catalunya TV has not posted the video of the looting of El Corte Inglés or the attack on Fernández Díaz, though they have about twenty-five sports videos up. Wonder why? It's pretty exciting, action-packed video, great stuff. Wouldn't be, uh, censorship, would it?