Violent clashes between protesters and security forces were produced this Saturday in a demonstration in west-central France. The claim was against irrigation reservoirs used for agribusiness, In a country already convulsed by the protests against pension reform.
About thirty people, from both sides, were injured. in the brawls of the little one municipality of Sainte-Soline (about 400 km southwest of Paris), according to the authorities. The organizers report a much higher balance sheet and of a person who would be in critical state.
The concentration, which had not been authorized, it mobilized 6,000 people, according to the authorities, and close to 30,000, according to the organizers. These include the collective of associations Embalses No, Graciasthe movementor ecologist Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth Lifts) and lto the Paisana Confederationa union of farmers coming to the left.
Security forces deployed some 3,200 mendouble that in a protest in October in the same place. Authorities say the protesters included “at least a thousand” violent activists, some from abroad. “The objective is to approach and surround the reservoir to stop the work,” a member of the Earth Uprisings group told AFP.
At half a day, near the works, clashes broke out between activists who used firecrackers and Molotov cocktails, according to the gendarmerie, that responded with tear gas and water cannons. According to a first official balance, seven demonstrators and 24 gendarmes were injured, two of them seriously, one from each side.
The organizers report “at least 200” demonstrators injured, ten of them hospitalized and one in a coma and with a compromised vital prognosis. They also denounce a police deployment of “criminal violence”.
The prime minister, Elizabeth Borne, denounced for her part a “whirlwind of intolerable violence” and the “irresponsibility of radical speeches that encourage these actions”. The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, pointed out against the “inexcusable” violence of the “extreme left”.
Agricultural reservoirs store water drawn from the surface groundwater table during the rainy season and retain it in the open for irrigation purposes. Their defenders consider them essential in case of drought or restrictions on water consumption. But their adversaries maintain that thanks to them the agro-industry “hoards” the water, to the detriment of small producers and the fight against climate change.
France plans to build 16 such reservoirs, mainly in the Deux Sèvres departmentwhere Sainte-Soline is located, with a retention capacity of 6 million cubic meters. The project is promoted by a cooperative of 450 agricultural producers and has state support. The construction of the Sainte-Soline reservoir has a cost of 70 million euros (75 million dollars), 70% financed by public funds on the condition that agroecological methods are used.
For more than two months, France is immersed in a wave of mass protests against the pension reform promoted by the liberal president Emmanuel Macron. In the last week, after Macron imposed by decree that reform that raises the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64the marches have radicalized, with clashes and hundreds of detainees in dozens of cities. The tension forced the cancellation of a visit by King Charles III of the United Kingdom.
“I have no problem with this type of violence, even if I am not part of it. Now there is violence everywhere, starting with this pension reform (…) I understand that people are angry,” one of the protesters in Sainte-Soline, from northern France, told AFP. “While the country rises up to defend pensions, we will go in parallel to defend water,” said the environmental organizers of the march.
Source: Ambito
