Voltaire at his desk with a pen in his hand. Engraving by Baquoy, ca. 1795. Wikicommons/ Public domain.When a month ago the ‘Manifesto for Civil Liberties in Spain and Europe’ was launched in Madrid, it followed the shift from shock to outrage over the ‘case of the puppeteers’: the High Court had ordered the incarceration of two puppeteers for performing a play in which the police plant a banner with the text “Alka-ETA” to incriminate a social activist.
What the play set out to denounce became a sordid reality: the puppeteers standing accused of inciting terrorism hours after the staging of their play, thereby becoming the main protagonists in a national theatre performance, with media outlets acting out as the puppets of conservative power and its vulgar, yet sophisticated, ruse of political pressure for electoral interest.
At stake was the democratic right to freedom of expression. Internationally, the refugee crisis was already evident, even though we had so far paid scant attention to the problem communicated through the images circulating on our screens: the Idomeni refugee camp on the border between Greece and Macedonia becoming a quagmire in which tens of thousands of people were waiting to continue their journey to other countries within the European Union.
