Barcelona Letter: No a la Guerra!

The wails of air-raid sirens echo off the ritzy shops and the grand modernista facades of the apartment buildings lining the Plaça Catalunya, as thousands of "bombs" explode among the civilians gathered in the square. People fall to the ground in silence, while others stand with raised fists, defiantly repeating the chant they've been shouting for weeks: "No a la guerra!"

These so-called "bombs" aren't real, but some 50,000 black balloons exploding in a visceral protest against the war in Iraq. The display is just one of many war protests taking place on this last weekend of March in Barcelona, a city that seems now in a constant state of protest.

We had scheduled this trip to Barcelona weeks before the cruise missiles started targeting presidential palaces -- and gone through with it over the protests of worried relatives and colleagues who said it was crazy to board an Airbus in wartime. For our part, we were sorry to miss the first major anti-war rally in our hometown of Boston, called for the same weekend, which drew tens of thousands to Boston Common -- one of the main venues for protests in the Vietnam war era. On our way in from the airport, we asked our taxi driver where the anti-war protests would be. He laughed, and said, "Everywhere."

And so it is. On nearly every block in every neighborhood, sheets hang from the windows of businesses and residences alike, spray-painted black and red with slogans: "No Sangre Por Petroleo" (No Blood for Oil), "Bush No! Guerra No! Saddam No!" and "Alturem La Guerra" ("Stop the War" in Catalan). There are anti-war emblems pinned to the lapels of wool overcoats and anti-war stickers plastered on the side of trendy leather handbags. American fast food joints which are empty except for a few die-hards ignoring the calls for boicots of American products. No less than nine policemen are stationed around a McDonald's and an abutting Kentucky Friend Chicken.

You can't walk down the street, order a beer, or shop for a hat without being constantly bombarded by reminders of the very real bombs falling on Baghdad, as close to Barcelona as Denver is to Boston. Flyers around town advertise new manifestacions for the coming days: April 2, April 7, April 10, April 15 and so on. This is not a single march but a weeks-long marathon of anti-war sentiment.

World Capital of Peace

Known for its colorful street life and whimsical Gaudi buildings, Barcelona has been a center of the Spanish Left for decades -- the hangout of choice for writers, communists, artists, acrobats, and anarchists. The city was the last stronghold of the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War, and, along with the Basque country, suffered most from Franco's tanks and bombs. In his Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell wrote, "I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites."

Not surprisingly, the city has now emerged as the eye of the storm of peace protests in Spain, already the country with the strongest anti-war sentiment in Europe. Even while protests in Paris and Berlin have reportedly begun to sputter, La Vanguardia newspaper loudly proclaims Barcelona the new capital mundial de paz, the world capital of peace. 400,000 people marched peacefully in the streets the weekend after the start of the war, on a day that London fielded half that number, and New York only a quarter.

Unlike protests in the U.S., where 70 percent support the war, people here don't need to convince their neighbors. In Spain, 92.4 percent of the people are against the war. The Spaniards are instead banding together in sorrow and outrage to send a message to the rest of the world and their own embattled president. Even the normally apolitical kids at the discos are talking war. "Bush is a bully," says Jaime, whom we meet on the way to a club downtown. He seems surprised to learn that many Americans are also against Bush. Like others in his country, he has no idea that millions of Americans feel just as ignored by George Bush as the Spanish populace does by Aznar. "Everyone knows Aznar is finished in the next election," says Jaime, "for the sole reason of the war. No one knows yet who the next president will be, but it won't be him."