Some 1,500 people, according to police sources, have concentrated this Wednesday night in Valladolid to show their support to the provinces razed by fire. The protesters have cried against and have asked for the resignation of the regional president, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco (PP), and his Environment Minister, Juan Carlos Suárez-Quiñones. The appointment comes after mobilizations in León and La Bañeza (León) and has overlapped with another in Burgos and one more in Soria. This Thursday there is another one in Ponferrada (El Bierzo, León), a area especially punished by the flames. Those present have claimed improvements for forest firefighters and remembered the victims of this summer of fire. “Our land burns! Against the fire of inaction, prevention and media already! Mañueco and Quiñones resignation!” Said the main banner.
The concentration has traveled the city center and has ended in front of the City Council, where manifests have been read in favor of, support for the countryside and rural world to reduce the risk and allusions to the precarious conditions of forest firefighters. “The peoples, the mountains, are not sold, defend themselves!”, They have shouted, among criticisms of the abandonment of the rural sector and many songs in favor of the brigades who these days have denounced. During the march they have waved flags of Zamora and the Leonese region of El Bierzo and the policies towards emptied Spain, the performance of the mountains and the measures of the Board since the crisis began. Valladolid has not suffered just forest fires this summer, none of great caliber, but has been covered by smoke and ashes from the west, with Zamora and León still burning. Several protesters have exhibited great black ties in honor of the five deceased so far in summer, four in this wave of fires and two of them firefighters, for whom minutes of silence have been kept and saved applause. Among the greats indicated, in addition to Mañueco and Quiñones, José Ángel Arranz, head of the community forest policy has been found.
Among the attendees there were a variety of profiles ,. The group of friends of Jimena Castillo, 23, and Inés Pérez and Alba Fito, 22, has come with eagerness to show their opposition “to burn Spain” and “the poor management of the Board with fires, with little prevention, especially in Zamora” and to claim that “more voice is given to these territories.” They consider “unfair the little visibility” of these provinces and appeal to the union between the uprooted autonomous territories: “If Zamora burns, Valladolid burns.” Jimena’s mother, 49, expresses her emotion with a suffering that “takes his life” because, like many of the attendees, he has family in the affected areas. “I want to give my solidarity and say that young people have to come yes or yes; without the mountains we have no life,” he summarizes.
Elsa Abril, 29 years old and a partner of a forest firefighter located in Palencia, explains the conditions that her boyfriend suffers these days: “He has not stopped for 12 days, with non -compliance working ratios, 17 -hour days, precarious material, the protective glasses have been broken and they have not given them anything, there are six firepacks for 12 [bomberos] And in his days he has volunteered because the rest of his teammates are rookies. ”The Valladolid remembers that the firefighter was in and is” despair “before the drift of the Board.
The demonstration has concluded in the Plaza Mayor with the intervention of people involved in some way or another with the fires, both as victims and linked to the forest sector. There the main banner has been exhibited, observed by Luis Pérez, 57, who lists autonomic cuts in forest care, such as firewall care or in surveillance torrettas, and tilda of “true disaster” what this August lived. For him, the unity is crucial to a common evil: “We are all at one, tomorrow it can be the Esgueva Valley or the Torozo Montes de Valladolid. They are always with the accusations of centralism but in my portal they were all out of outside, Valladolid is the union of all others and you have to be all with everyone.”
