Police services and ministerial experts underestimated in their reports the power of an almost unknown platform | The State Security forces have already arrested six strikers, denounced another 34 and identified another 595
In the Ministry of the Interior and in the government delegations they can’t cope. In a matter of hours, police experts have had to improvise hundreds of security operations, convoy escort devices and surveillance deployments in logistics hubs to try to guarantee supplies in the face of the blockade that is causing a transport strike whose scope they did not see, and even underestimated the police information services and the ministerial experts.
And it is that -according to those responsible for State security and the main affected ministries- the Interior and Transport consultants pointed out from the beginning that the call for the almost unknown ‘Platform for the Defense of the Goods Transport Sector’ did not It was going to have a “significant effect” (sic) on communications and distribution, since the “indefinite national strike” did not have the support of the National Committee for Road Transport (CNTC), which is the one that brings together the large confederations and associations of carriers, such as the Spanish Confederation of Transport and Goods (CETM) or the National Federation of Transport Associations of Spain (Fenadismer).
The reports that arrived during the first fifteen of March in Moncloa, the Interior or the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda did not take the platform strike too seriously -according to various police specialists- since, among other reasons, the strike, on paper, was called by “businessmen” and not by the workers in the sector.
From March 7
Thus, the Ministry of the Interior did not launch any type of special plan despite the fact that the platform did not hide its plans. The first information about the call for the indefinite strike on the 14th began to be distributed on March 7. The Government did not activate any follow-up or coordination cell with the affected administrations despite the fact that the calling group – according to its own data echoed by police reports – claimed to have the support of some 130,000 SMEs and self-employed workers in the sector.
The organized response of the Government did not begin – admit those responsible for the Executive – until Tuesday evening, almost 48 hours after the start of the strike and when the blockade in logistics centers already threatened shortages.
The first instructions were not distributed until Wednesday morning. It was the Secretary of State for Security that communicated to all the Government delegations the order to “reinforce all police devices” to “act, organize and secure convoys of carriers of essential goods, patrol and provide security to the platforms logistics throughout Spain, act at all points of the road network where incidents occur and act and identify all picketers who participate in illegal acts.
Interior, not only changed the tone by describing certain acts of the strike as “illegal”, but decided that Wednesday almost on the mark to activate a kind of crisis cell, which was not foreseen in any organization chart. With a stroke of the pen, he created a Monitoring and Coordination Center in the ministry with three daily meetings —at 9:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., and 7:30 p.m.— chaired by the Secretary of State for Security, Rafael Pérez, although Fernando Grande-Marlaska has also led the some occasion in the last hours those meetings. Some meetings in which representatives of the National Police, the Civil Guard, the Mossos D’Esquadra, the Ertzaintza and the Navarre Provincial Police are participating, as well as those responsible for the Third Vice-Presidency of the Ministry of Ecological Transition; Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Territorial Policy and Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda.
eighth part
In parallel, the Interior has been increasing since Wednesday the police deployment for the strike, which at first was minimal, withdrawing troops from other tasks as they went along, until allocating an eighth of the Civil Guard staff and the National Police.
On Thursday at 2:00 p.m., the Ministry of the Interior reported that it had deployed 15,520 security force officials for two hours after affirming that it had suddenly added more than 8,000 agents to the device until reaching the current 23,598 members of the security forces of the State officially designated for unemployment in transport.
The balance of this deployment early Friday afternoon was six strikers arrested, 34 denounced and another 595 identified.
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