Despite police baton charges in the last few days, and heavy deployment by the Catalan Mossos d'Esquadra police, this Sunday night has seen the 42nd consecutive night of protest roadblocks on Barcelona's Avinguda Meridiana, a major traffic artery. Every night since October 14th, when the Spanish Supreme Court sentenced nine Catalan pro-independence leaders to long jail terms, activists and residents have blocked the road in protest. However, they had to reinvent themselves to achieve the 42nd roadblock.
The same as every night, at around 8pm tonight, about a hundred people gathered on the boulevard at Fabra i Puig to start a new blockade in protest at the imprisonments and repression of rights in Catalonia, but the presence of 10 vans from the BRIMO - the Mossos riot squads - forced the protesters to retreat and to hold their weekly Sunday-night assembly in the nearby park of Can Dragó.
Strong presence of the BRIMO of the Mossos / @MeridianaResisteix
Once there, they decided to apply a new strategy with a sound precedent: "Be water", the Bruce Lee quote adopted by Hong Kong democracy protesters to dodge police. And that is exactly what they did. Taking advantage of a more numerous turnout than usual, thanks to the support of CDR protest groups, the Meridiana demonstrators organized themselves in different teams to carry out several simultaneous blocks at different points along the avenue.
This new "liquid" format forced the Mossos to spread themselves thinly to control all points where traffic was cut, enabling an additional large protest group to take advantage of and block the traffic artery at the same point as usual: the Fabra i Puig intersection, bringing the Meridiana to a grinding halt once again.