Behind the rural mobilizations in Spain coexist an amalgam of organizations, unions and unaffiliated farmers of very different tendencies. The germ of the 6F movement began to take shape through WhatsApp groups with the Valencian rancher Lola Guzmán, who has attended some Vox event and who turned to a law firm linked to the extreme right to offer her services to professionals. agrarians who may have a legal problem. Her goal now is to go to Madrid. In her messages these days, she repeats one of the mottos most used by ultra movements: “We are neither left nor right.”
In parallel, a good part of the protests that took place until yesterday on the roads and streets of different parts of Spain were based on calls organized by mobile messaging applications in which agricultural cooperatives were important. “We organize ourselves through the cooperative group,” the farmers of Castilla-La Mancha admitted yesterday.
The agricultural professional organizations (OPA) that begin their protests today, Asaja, COAG and UPA belong to very different fields but have decided to act in “unity of action.” Asaja is led by Pedro Barato and is associated with the CEOE. COAG, for its part, has a long history of demands in recent years, including some loud ones in Madrid against PP governments and against the then Minister of Agriculture, Miguel Arias Cañete. UPA, for its part, is integrated into the structure of self-employed workers of the UGT.
Unión de Uniones, an alternative organization, is also promoting farmers' rallies at the local level.
The unrest of the countryside and its demands are, therefore, real and transversal, which is why sectors that have nothing to do with the extreme right have joined the protest. It has tried to capitalize on the discontent and lead the protests, but it has not succeeded, or at least not in all territories.
In Catalonia they have had very little success and the farmers themselves are working to isolate them. “It all started with WhatsApp groups and we saw that they had traces of the extreme right; These elements have been filtered and the movement has been redirected,” comments Carles Vicente, organizational secretary of Unió de Pagesos. The Catalan union organization gave support to yesterday's marches in Barcelona and processed permits to demonstrate, although it has called for its own day of protest for February 13. Also in the rest of Spain, classical organizations try to isolate the most ultras, sometimes represented by landowners.
In some of the many Telegram groups where protests are organized they are very active. Diatribes against the Government, against the EU, the 2030 Agenda and environmentalism abound. Conspiracy theories also proliferate. A virtual agitation that has not managed to penetrate the protests.
The protests of the agricultural world will also be joined in the coming days by the minority association of transporters Platform for the Defense of Road Transport, the same one that already paralyzed logistics centers in 2022, although in a second call they failed.
The representative transport organizations respect the demonstrations but have not joined in and demand to safeguard the freedom of professional drivers.
