EL PAIS (Spain)

Worldcrunch

On Tuesday, hundreds of members of the Spanish SAT workers’ union walked out of two supermarkets without paying for the shopping carts they had filled with food. The supermarket raids took place in Andalusia, in southern Spain.

“Is this a theft? A symbolic act? An atrocity? An act of violence ?” asks El Pais referring to the way this incident has been described in the Spanish press. The Socialist party called it “barbaric.”

According to the Spanish newspaper, a first group of union members raided a Mercadona supermarket in Ecija, near Sevilla and filled 10 shopping carts with food. The food was distributed to non-profit organizations in the city of Seville after food banks refused to accept it.

At the same time, a second group took on a Carrefour supermarket in Arcos de la Frontera, near Cadiz. The instructions were clear: no destruction, no chocolates, no yogurts or desserts, just basic necessities and essential items - sugar, oil, vegetables, plain biscuits and milk.

In this second supermarket, union leaders ended up negotiating with the managers who agreed to let protesters leave with a dozen filled trolleys, El Pais reports.

“At this moment of crisis, when the town is being expropriated, we want to expropriate the expropriators, the landlords, banks, and the big supermarkets who are earning money in the middle of an economic crisis,” said union leader Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, who is also a United Left (IU) MP in the Andalusian Parliament.