The image that Spain projected to the world in 1992 was one of celebration: the fifth centenary of the discovery of America was being commemorated, Barcelona was the venue for the Olympic Games and Seville for the Universal Exhibition.
The Region of Murcia, on the other hand, began this year of festivities enveloped in a deep economic and social crisis, especially in the region of Cartagena, where the demonstrations and tension ended up leading to the burning of its regional Parliament on February 3, that year.
The 30th anniversary of that event has coincided with another episode of protests that ended with the assault on the Lorca Town Hall, when a group of ranchers entered by force and forced the suspension of a plenary session to limit the construction of new pig farms.
Both cases, however, "have more differences than similarities," José Ibarra, author of the book
Cartagena en llamas
, explains to EL PAÍS, in which he analyzes the context of the burning of the Regional Assembly.
In 1992, he points out, thousands of people in Cartagena saw their jobs endangered by industrial reconversion.
"In Lorca, we are talking about a problem of a single sector and politically spurred action, something that did not happen 30 years ago," he explains.
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50 injured when confronting the police and the workers of companies in crisis in Cartagena (2/4/1992)
Ibarra lived through this crisis as a worker at the Bazán shipyard, now Navantia, which had some 3,500 workers exposed to dismissal due to lack of workload.
The shadow of the closure extended over two other large companies in the area: the Peñarroya lead smelter, with some 350 employees, which had already closed its mining businesses in the nearby municipality of La Unión, and the three Ercros fertilizer factories. , which employed about 800 people.
In that year, Ibarra points out, some 5,000 direct jobs were lost and another 15,000 indirect jobs in a city with a population of 175,000 inhabitants.
"While Spain was partying, Cartagena exploded and burned," he sums up.
A general strike in December 1991 gave way to a chain of almost daily demonstrations and protests: 127 in 180 days according to Ibarra's calculations.
The one on February 3 was going to be one more, not even especially massive: a handful of Peñarroya workers, explains Antonio Miñarro, one of the union delegates of the foundry in those years, wanted to meet with the president of the autonomous community, the socialist Carlos Collado, who appeared in the plenary session of the Chamber.
It was not the first time that they demonstrated on the Paseo de Alfonso XIII, where the modernist building of the Assembly stands, but that day they found "a police cordon like we had never seen before, and things got very tense, the police He refused to let us pass, and immediately they began to load, ”he tells EL PAÍS.
Paco Segura, a trade union representative from Ercros, places the trigger for the "campaign battle" in the blow that, according to what he says, an agent dealt the then regional delegate of the Workers' Commissions in Cartagena, José Luis Romero.
He “broke her lip with his baton, and ordered a volley of rubber balls.
That's where it all started," he recalls.
Antonio Sáez, president of the Bazán works council, asked for reinforcements: “We went from about 200 protesters to more than 3,000 ″, he points out.
What he remembers “with more pride” from that time is the union of the workers in the protests and “the communion of society with the workers, everyone turned upside down”.
Clip from 'The Year of Discovery' (2020)
Fragment of the film 'The year of the discovery', by Luis López Carrasco about the fire in the Parliament of Murcia, in 1992.
Romero laughs as he evokes that coup that turned events around.
“Society turned upside down, because the closures of those companies led thousands of families to unemployment and everything was lived in great despair, because there were no alternatives,” he says.
Today, the industry continues to be a pillar in the economy of Cartagena, but other sectors have joined, such as tourism or agriculture, in 1992 “none of that existed” and “politicians did not offer alternatives” he points out.
The rulers, agree the former union leaders, "did not know how to live up to it."
And this is also recognized by the socialist María Antonia Martínez, who in April 1993 assumed the presidency of the Region.
That February 3, she was the vice president of the Chamber and she was inside it when the Molotov cocktail swept through the conference room.
“The weather in Cartagena was terrible, the crisis was having a tremendous effect.
We didn't know how to do it, that's the truth.
We did not see the dimension of what was coming at us.
That crisis was not trivial, many companies went under.
It was a collective failure,” she explains.
Damage caused to the first floor of the Regional Assembly, in 1992. EFE
The burning of the Assembly, considers Martínez, was the "extreme manifestation of a very serious situation."
But he rejects the halo of romanticism that he has acquired over the years: "You cannot celebrate or justify attacking the place where the popular will resides."
The former president still keeps a thick screw that went through the window of her office in one of the protests.
The Chamber's head of press and protocol, Enrique Arnaldos, was in Parliament when the fire broke out.
He assures that the police acted "professionally" in a climate of high tension.
“The demonstrators yelled nonsense at them, but the agents did not respond despite the fact that they had been enduring brutal tension for hours.
They acted only when the conference room was already burning, ”he assures.
Cover of EL PAÍS, whose main news of the day was the burning of the Murcian Parliament.
At that tense moment, recalls Santiago Andreo, one of the ushers, someone said that there were people inside the room.
He was 27 years old and a newcomer.
He entered the room avoiding the smoke, "which was very black, and due to the direction of the wind, it entered the rest of the building."
He verified that it was empty and opened the window of the glass dome that covers the Patio de los Ayuntamientos to create a “chimney effect”.
“I cared about the Assembly as if it were my home.
At that moment I felt no fear.
When I went out into the street and at night, I felt sorry, because everything seemed like a war zone, with broken windows, burning cars, everything devastated.
It is the same memory of Pepe Campillo, who manages the cafeteria service of the Autonomous Parliament.
In 1992 he was already working there with his father and they were the last to leave the building.
“There was smoke all over the street, it smelled like gunpowder.
Everything was destroyed."
The fire was put out by firefighters and the three house workers laugh when they say that no one saw that day the huge fire hose hanging just outside the door of the room that burned.
There he was that February 3, 1992 and there he is still, 30 years later.
"We didn't use it then, I hope it will never be necessary to use it again," concludes Arnaldos.
The Regional Assembly of Murcia, during a vote last day 9. REGIONAL ASSEMBLY OF MURCIA
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