Registered with the Post Office as a newspaper. Published by Relgorest for Red Weekly, 182 Pentonville Road, London N.1 (01-837 6954) the past two weeks.
It began on Wednesday 3 March, in the Basque city of Vitoria. On that day a general strike began in solidarity with local workers who had been on strike for almost two months against the re fusal of their bosses to negotiate with democratically elected workers repres entatives (as opposed to the flunkies of the official, state-run 'union').
The strike was a total success. From the early hours of the morning flying pickets moved throughout the town en suring the shut-down of factories, shops, restaurants, schools, and banks. Ninety per cent of the city's workers joined ine strike.
Other pickets threw up barricades around the city's outskirts and regulated the flow of traffic. workers com muttees ensured matessenal services were maintained to working class households and took over the policing of the streets from Vitoria's 190 local policeon, who were compereiy overwne med by this massive display of proletarian DOWCE This was a challenge which the Franlast Saturday Printed by Prestagate Ltd, Reading, Berkshire *Basauri and Vitoria will go down in history as the places where the Spanish workers' revolution started", declared a statement adopted by a 15,000-strong general assembly of Basauri workers last week. These words of the working class of Basauri, the main industrial suburb of the Basque city of Bilbao, sum up the immense meaning of the struggle that has been sweeping through Spain in coist state could not tolerate. Heavily armed police reinforcements, drawn rom me enure norm or spain, were moved into the city.
Inel st move was To surround the local barracks, where soldiers had been confined to quarters, in order to They then moved to break up demonstrations throughout the city.
At 5pm they surrounded a church in a working class neighbourhood where a workers' meeting was in progress. When the workers rejected the police demand tO Come our more man oU to sas grenades were oopea into me churcu As the choking crowd surged out of the church, the waiting police opened up with rifles and sub-machine guns.
Three workers were killed instantly, one died later of his wounds, and a total or lzu were injured. left behind them a pool of blood thirty yards across.
But this act of brutality did not deter the workers of Vitoria. day pickets were our once agam rebundPicket in solidarity with Spanish workers outside Iberian Airlines office in London Photo: DEREK BOWIE (IFL) ing the barricades, and a call was issued for a general solidarity strike. On Friday 5 March, 50,000 attended the funeral of those killed by the police Over the weekend solidarity demonswanons ww me suuggen vitora took place throughout Spain, and on Monday these erupted into a solidarity strike movement.
out the Basque country (75 per cent of the entire working population of the province of Guipuzcoa joined the movement). Mass demonstrations took place in the streets of every Basque city. In Madrid four factories struck and the telephone workers took to me streets.
MASS ASSEMBLY The police In Basauri a 15,000 strong demonstration was attacked by the police, who killed another worker. day a mass assembly of workers voted The following to call for an indefinite general strike. The funeral of the murdered militant was attended by a crowd of 40,000, who cemons rarea ror ree nours m the city streets.
In the following two days 200,000 building and engineering workers stopped work in solidarity in Madrid, holdStriking miners in the northern province or astumas were only prevented rom holding a mass protest rally by a massive police cordon that completely sealed off the city of Oviedo This latest wave of struggle has, for the first time in recent historv. brought together the working class across the entire territory of the Spanish state into united action. It has also brought into being the sort of bodies - mass assemblies, workers committees, pickets, workers' self-defence bodies - that can Parayse we ponucal macminery or tne Struggles such as these are throwing the dictatorship into an ever-deepening political crisis and laying the basis for the sort of coordinated general strike movement that will spell its death and pectable' image. views.
Some 500,000 workers struck throughitical way.
The following NAME.