Rajoy threatens to deploy army inside Spain after Barcelona attack

 

Rajoy threatens to deploy army inside Spain after Barcelona attack

By
Alex Lantier and Alejandro López

19 August 2017

Well before the facts of Thursday’s horrific terror attack in Barcelona are clearly established, Spain’s right wing Popular Party (PP) government is pressing to deploy the army inside the country. This would be the first time that the army was deployed inside Spain since the country was ruled by the fascist regime of Francisco Franco, which took power via a 1936 military rebellion and a bloody three-year civil war.

Yesterday, Interior Minister Ignacio Zoido announced that he would for now keep the terror alert at level four on Spain’s five-point scale. However, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s PP government is summoning a defense council to discuss raising the terror alert to five, indicating a “very high and immediate danger of terrorist attack” and allowing for the domestic deployment of the army.

The Spanish army is already preparing for the move to alert level five. El Confidencial reported yesterday that Defense Minister Dolores Maria Cospedal had given the general staff “concrete orders” to “be ready” to deploy troops inside Spain within days. Cospedal had previously said in an interview with COPE radio that if the terror alert level were raised to five, “the army would intervene and it would be totally normal.”

The deployment of the army in Spain would not be aimed at preventing future attacks like the latest atrocity in Barcelona. Rather, the PP aims to impose martial law and shift political life in Spain far to the right. It aims to strangle workers struggles and settle its disputes with the pro-austerity Catalan regional government in Barcelona, which erupted in June after Barcelona scheduled a referendum on Catalan independence…

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