InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5
PUERTO REAL, Spain -- A Spanish "Robin Hood" mayor held responsible for raids on supermarkets to feed the poor led a band of protesters Tuesday on a march against austerity.
More than 300 followers joined the 60-year-old Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, a hero to many hit by recession, and a criminal to others, in a march to Cadiz in the hard-hit southern region of Andalusia.
"We are rebelling against a crisis caused by the world of finance but paid for by the working class, the workers, the small farmers," said the charismatic Gordillo at the head of a "workers' march."
"We want to remind the people in power that their budget cuts have an impact on real lives," said the bearded leftist rebel, wrapped in his trademark Palestinian scarf and wearing a straw hat on his head.
"Cutting, cutting, cutting leads to recession and recession leads to absolute misery," he said, as his band waved the green and white flags of sun-scorched Andalusia.
The series of protests Gordillo is leading in the south of Spain is just the latest action in more than 30 years' fighting to redistribute wealth through cooperatives and cheap housing.
The charismatic Gordillo has been re-elected mayor of the village of Marinaleda at every poll since 1979.
He is a regional member of parliament for the Izquierda Unida -- a party of Communist, ecological and leftist ideals -- and a member of anti-capitalist Andalusian workers union SAT.
Until now, Gordillo's fame has been limited to Spain.
But this summer he hit the world headlines as he goaded on activists with a loudspeaker as they burst into supermarkets and filled trolleys with packets of food such as pasta, oil and biscuits to give out to the poor, leaving without paying.
They have burst into a bank branch, and last week they occupied a former palace-turned hotel with swimming pool in Hornachuelos, near the regional capital of Cordoba.
The protests are not new: since the 1980s the SAT union has been occupying large landholdings in Andalusia, the nation's most populous region with eight million inhabitants.
But the deep recession and the toughest austerity measures since the return of democracy after the death of Franco in November 1975 have given their protests a new resonance.
Andalusia has been hit particularly hard by a recession brought on by the collapse of Spain's construction industry when a property bubble popped in 2008, destroying millions of jobs.
"Now that citizens have so much distrust for the 'big parties' this clearly minority union has been able to adapt so that its argument has a bigger impact, with populist overtones, " said Fernando Vallespin, political science professor at Madrid's Universidad Autonoma.
After Spain tumbled back into recession last year, its unemployment rate rose to nearly 25 percent -- the highest in the industrialized world. In Andalusia the rate hit 33.92 percent, rising to 33.92 percent in southern coastal port of Cadiz.
"Andalusia is suffering from structural unemployment," Vallespin said, blaming a subsidy-dependant agricultural industry that was not sufficiently intensive.
The problems got worse after the property crash.
"Many of those who had left to work on the coast where there was non-stop building are now going back to their villages," he said.
But there are no jobs waiting for them.
In the march, 21-year-old Cristelia Fernandez is waving the Andalusian flag.
"I identify completely with the union," she said in a quiet voice.
A farm worker, she has not been able to find work harvesting olives nor planting autumn strawberries.
"There is nothing, the future is very dark," she said.
Gordillo says she is not alone.
"Many families are in a desperate situation," he said. "We have to say 'enough is enough' in this crisis."
