A peaceful protest against budget cuts in education in Valencia, Spain on Tuesday ended in bloody police repression. Conjuring up memories of Franco’s brutal dictatorship, squads of riot police violently assaulted a group of some 300 students, arresting at least 26 and leaving scores injured. YouTube footage displayed a policeman forcefully pushing two girls onto a car, while photos emerged of young kids with bloodied faces surrounded by riot police.

While the regional police chief branded the students “as the enemy” and insisted that riot police had merely deployed “proportioned physical force”, reporters on the scene confirmed that the baton-wielding police forces had even fired rubber bullets at the students. Despite the Spanish newspaper El Publicoreporting “brutal police aggression”, hundreds of students took back to the streets in the evening and encircled the University of Valencia in protest.

Tuesday’s demonstrations, which come a day after over a million Spaniards took to the streets to contest the governments’s labor reforms, marked the fourth straight day of student protests in Spain’s third largest city. Valencia is one of the most heavily hit region’s in Spain’s crippling debt crisis, and with the newly-appointed Rajoy government pushing through even more harsh austerity measures, budget cuts have left most schools without heating.

[SOURCE]