One of the detained minors: "With friends we only talked about Paris. We wanted to demonstrate"

Barcelona"My friends and I only talked about that. About Paris. About the videos that were popping up on TikTok. I wanted to protest," he says, now that he is free. The phone rang at two in the morning. It was the Mossos d'Esquadra and they had arrested the boy. The next morning, they went to the City of Justice and entered a room full of relatives who, like them, were surprised, stressed, and worried. Fathers crying. Mothers denying that their child was capable of doing all that. They were reunited with him. All the children were minors and all had been arrested for the disturbances that were recorded this Saturday night in Barcelona. "It was chaos. There were only two lawyers for all the children," the relatives comment.

There were 130 detainees, 74 of whom were minors. The Prosecutor's Office has already requested the internment of six minors. Of these, three have already been admitted to closed-regime centers. The conversation is in front of the courts and he is not one of those six minors. He is 15 years old and wants to remain anonymous, just like his family. He lives in a metropolitan city and gets good grades. He says he is interested in "rights," especially the rights of young people, that he feels called upon by causes such as Palestine, and that he and his friends have talked a lot about the riots in Paris. "I wanted to protest," he insists. He went to Barcelona dressed normally, not with a balaclava or a hood. "I wasn't prepared for anything," he reiterates. He went to the city with two friends. First, they went to see an event and then they passed through Plaça Catalunya. He recorded up close, and shows the videos, of hooded boys destroying businesses and looting what was inside. He picked up four objects from the street and put them in his backpack, but he insists that he did not enter any shop nor did he break any glass.

At the protest, he recorded the whole time and photographed burning objects up close, all without separating from his friends, until someone opened a fire extinguisher and a white cloud disoriented him. He found himself alone on a street in the Gothic Quarter and that was where they arrested him. "He was in the wrong place," his relatives insist.

Conversations in the dungeons

The boy shows photographs of bruises on his legs, describes that they hit him with an expandable baton and that he slept in the holding cells, with eleven other minors, lying on the floor, using his shoes as a pillow. With the other boys, they talked about the demonstration, that they hadn't "caused" that much trouble either, that those who had really looted businesses had escaped. The minor asserts that not everyone received good treatment.

In the holding cells, the hours passed, and in the morning, the reunion with his parents and the hearing before the courts took place. Judicial sources point out that the majority are accused of robbery with force, public disorder, and, in some cases, assault on authority. In the case of some of the minors, they are being held in preventive detention because the judges have assessed that the environment and the family could not clearly guarantee containment measures in the face of possible repeat offenses. However, it has been considered that some were not yet aware of the gravity of the events. All, the sources add, have shown remorse. The Minister of the Interior, Núria Parlon, stated this Monday that it will also be necessary to work with the families of the detained youths because "the parents are responsible for it." "They took innocent children," they counter from the minor's family.

Ghost protests

It was not yet time to close, and, anticipating the worst-case scenario, shopkeepers have lowered their shutters or covered their display windows with cardboard and paper. There is a new protest in the style of Saturday's being called—using the concept Blocus, blockade in French–. "We cannot wait for them to come to force us to close. We don't want the images from Plaça Catalunya to be repeated," comment the employees of the Barça Store at the Les Arenes shopping center in Barcelona, near Plaça Espanya, in the mid-afternoon, waiting for confirmation "from those in charge" to be able to close. "It's just that many businesses were left completely destroyed," they recall. In fact, the Barcelona City Council created an emergency fund of about 500,000 euros this Monday to help the affected merchants in Plaça Catalunya. Meanwhile, in Plaça Espanya, car after car of Mossos police saturate the area, plainclothes officers infiltrate the flow of people and identify several of them.

How to reply

This Monday's call also comes from anonymous TikTok accounts, from Telegram groups without a clear owner. The Mossos were surprised by the violence of Saturday's riots and now find themselves forced to respond to any new call. But no one shows up. Practically no one showed up at a protest in Girona on Sunday either; in Granollers, 131 youths were identified and it came to nothing, just like in Mataró, where they found about fifteen boys burning cardboard. Right now, the Mossos admit, it is difficult to calculate which protests will be ghost protests and which will be real. Meanwhile, they warn businesses in the area and hotels close their main entrances.

And the notifications on Telegram keep sounding. "It will be a peaceful demonstration, we are going to have a matcha tea," they ironize in a group with more than 1,200 members that is preparing a new wave of mobilizations next Saturday in Barcelona. "On Thursday we will create a group for those who really want to come," comments one of the administrators. The 15-year-old minor who ended up arrested explains that he was never in one of those groups, that they saw everything on social media. TikTok and Instagram, above all.

Frantic day

The judicial officials were sighing this Monday as they left the City of Justice. There is a long waiting list. In the case of the minors, many have been released and will be brought before the judge in batches, eight per day. This Monday, many adults were also brought before the court, up to 51 detainees. All have been released with charges, in some cases with precautionary measures ranging from the prohibition of attending demonstrations and protest meetings in Barcelona to periodic appearances at the courthouse.

But the matter does not end here. The Mossos continue to review cameras and business cameras to try to identify more youths who did not end up being arrested. They are also mapping the detainees, who have a heterogeneous profile and do not respond to any clear pattern. The big question that the Mossos are asking themselves, however, remains who is behind all of this. They consider that a ghost initiative, which has appeared out of nowhere and which has taken hold in institutes in the metropolitan area, must have someone organized or expert behind it, especially taking into account that the aesthetics and the accounts are repeated in other European countries. However, there is still no main hypothesis, police sources state. This Monday, Parlon announced that the Interior Department will judicially request the closure of the mobile messaging groups that were used to summon the youths. The old groups are being closed, but new ones appear every day.