Following protests in Madrid which turned violent on Tuesday night, Giles Tremlett writes: Even before the march, government officials had loudly claimed that protesters were troublemakers from both the left and the right.

Perhaps that is why riot police felt they could hide their identity badges – a move that protesters say proves they feel themselves to be above the law. A startling example of police culture came in a tweet from José Manuel Sánchez of the Unified Police Union (SUP). “We support them not wearing badges for violent demonstrators,” he said during the demonstration. “Give it to them hard.” Television pictures of baton charges and rubber bullets suggest they did exactly that.

Organisers had said the attempt to ring the parliament building would be peaceful, but they also clearly expected arrests. Authorities said on Wednesday they had found 260kg of rocks that had been hurled at police – not indignado behaviour.

Opposition politicians warned the protest could not be ignored. “The country is slipping out of the government’s hands,” the socialist opposition leader Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba said. “After yesterday’s demonstration it would be a mistake for politicians to talk only about public order.”

But while events in Madrid caught headlines, the settlement between Spaniards that has allowed them to enjoy almost four decades of democracy since the 1975 death of dictator General Francisco Franco was crumbling in a more serious fashion elsewhere.

In Barcelona it was legislators, not demonstrators, who were challenging the post-Franco settlement. Artur Mas, leader of the Catalan regional government called early elections for 25 November as politicians of all colours adapted to a game-changing demonstration for independence that brought hundreds of thousands of Catalans onto the city’s streets earlier this month.

Mas has called for Catalonia to have its own state. The upcoming elections will be seen as a plebiscite on that, however much his nationalist Convergence and Union coalition wraps itself in euphemisms and refuses to actually use the word “independence”. Once let out of its cage, the independence tiger may now prove impossible to put back – with polls showing a slim majority now in favour.

The New York Times reports: On a recent evening, a hip-looking young woman was sorting through a stack of crates outside a fruit and vegetable store here in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas as it shut down for the night.

At first glance, she looked as if she might be a store employee. But no. The young woman was looking through the day’s trash for her next meal. Already, she had found a dozen aging potatoes she deemed edible and loaded them onto a luggage cart parked nearby.

“When you don’t have enough money,” she said, declining to give her name, “this is what there is.”

The woman, 33, said that she had once worked at the post office but that her unemployment benefits had run out and she was living now on 400 euros a month, about $520. She was squatting with some friends in a building that still had water and electricity, while collecting “a little of everything” from the garbage after stores closed and the streets were dark and quiet.

Such survival tactics are becoming increasingly commonplace here, with an unemployment rate over 50 percent among young people and more and more households having adults without jobs. So pervasive is the problem of scavenging that one Spanish city has resorted to installing locks on supermarket trash bins as a public health precaution.

A report this year by a Catholic charity, Caritas, said that it had fed nearly one million hungry Spaniards in 2010, more than twice as many as in 2007. That number rose again in 2011 by 65,000.

As Spain tries desperately to meet its budget targets, it has been forced to embark on the same path as Greece, introducing one austerity measure after another, cutting jobs, salaries, pensions and benefits, even as the economy continues to shrink.

Most recently, the government raised the value-added tax three percentage points, to 21 percent, on most goods, and two percentage points on many food items, making life just that much harder for those on the edge. Little relief is in sight as the country’s regional governments, facing their own budget crisis, are chipping away at a range of previously free services, including school lunches for low-income families.

For a growing number, the food in garbage bins helps make ends meet. [Continue reading…]

El País reports: Con la que está cayendo…” This expression – which literally means “With this downpour,” but metaphorically is used as “With things as bad as they are” – keeps cropping up in conversation, as Spaniards spend their days with one eye on the stock market and the other on the risk premium – “which seems like a member of the family right now,” according to the sociologist Daniel Kaplún, an expert on public opinion.

It’s been like this for many months, and nobody knows when it will end. The economic and financial crisis has brought with it a cloud of social pessimism; a mantle of gloom; a lack of expectations that is cutting deep into the average citizen’s state of mind. There truly seems to be no way out.

“There is no future, and therefore no present either,” says sociology professor Enrique Gil Calvo, from Madrid’s Complutense University.

“We’ve gone from concern to anguish,” adds his colleague José Juan Toharia, from the capital’s Autónoma University. La que está cayendo reflects a collective feeling and individual emotions, as well. The triple whammy of anxiety-anger-depression can easily shoot out of control, warns the psychologist Antonio Cano. General practitioners have already noticed it.

Is there a way out, given the lack of ways out?

“We’re experiencing a situation of generalized fear, and rarely were there so many reasons for it: the economy is in free-fall, and jobless claims have grown from 1.8 million to 5.6 million in just four years. Besides, just when we thought we were getting out of a V-shaped crisis, it got worse, and it turns out that it was actually a W,” says Gil Calvo.

This has created a “nightmare” feeling ever since the spending cuts were first introduced in 2010. The bad dream comes with a sense of helplessness that feeds a “general despondency.”

“There is no cure and nobody there to provide a cure. The Socialist Party failed. The Popular Party [PP] is failing too, and there are no firefighters left,” adds Gil Calvo.

And then there is “the Friday syndrome,” says the psychiatrist Julio Bobes. As in, let’s see what cuts the government makes this time at Friday’s weekly Cabinet meeting.

The main victim is the middle class, essentially “those who have lost their job or their source of income, such as small business owners and the self-employed, including those who are unable to collect the money they’re owed. Many of them are on the verge of social exclusion, or already there,” says Kaplún, who calculates that these individuals make up “over a third of the population.” [Continue reading…]

Lorna Scott Fox writes: On 20 March, a Spanish judge gave prosecutors leave to proceed with a case against an 80-year-old nun charged with kidnapping. According to lawyers for victim groups, as many as 350,000 babies were stolen from poor, single or left-wing mothers between 1938 and the late 1980s. Sister María Gómez Valbuena, who had links with a maternity clinic and put ads in the paper offering help to unmarried mothers, is the first person to be prosecuted for it.

Accused of selling a baby to an infertile couple in 1982, she allegedly first told the mother that the child had died; then that it was going to be adopted, and that if she made a fuss she’d be accused of adultery and lose her other child (never mind that adultery wasn’t a crime). When the child grew up and, with the help of her adoptive father, tracked Sor María down, the nun apparently told her that her mother had been a prostitute who didn’t want her. But after watching a TV programme about the daughter and her search, the mother came forward and DNA tests confirmed the relationship.

The case against Sor María is unusual only in that it has got so far. In the last few years, hundreds of cases have been dismissed for lack of evidence: systematically destroyed records make it hard to prove how this traffic persisted long after democracy was restored. The WHO seems never to have noticed the surprising levels of reported infant mortality in Spain. The San Ramón clinic in Madrid allegedly kept a baby in a freezer to show mothers as the ‘corpse’. A culture of female submissiveness and respect for the Church prevented poor and vulnerable women from acting on their suspicions.

What became a business began as a Fascist experiment in biopsychiatry. In 1938, Franco set up a Gabinete de Investigaciones Psicológicas to conduct Nazi-inspired experiments on prisoners (men from the International Brigades, Republican women) to try to identify a ‘red gene’ or the ‘psychophysical roots of Marxism’. The precise nature of the experiments remains obscure. In 1939 it was concluded that children would have to be taken away from their degenerate (or executed) parents, and re-educated in nice Catholic families.