In the past decade we have witnessed how liberalisation and privatisation policies in Europe have led to a steady growth of unemployment and poverty, in parallel to the loss of rights and the weakening of welfare provision. At the same time, this impoverishment has caused more social intolerance, with a consequent growth of xenophobia and racism in many European countries, including Spain.
Citizen reactions were shaped in Spain through the M-15 movement, with two parallel lines of discourse: on the one hand, the building of opposition to a capitalist superstructure by fostering direct democratic mechanisms; on the other, the search for a new institutionality, through the dismantling of naturalised day to day experiences under capitalism. This was to be achieved by challenging hegemonic discourses that favour social division and by fostering social change through collective action, including civil disobedience.
The intensification of the Spanish economic crisis has led to the resurgence in media and arts of critical voices such as that of Andres Rábago, better known as El Roto, who keeps questioning austerity policies. In his role as a regular cartoonist for the Spanish newspaper El País, he has been inspiring readers for decades through his drawings. In his work, satire is used very effectively to depict current topics from a distant, critical stance that leads to a sense of absurdity and also to an intelligent pessimism regarding economic policies and other social issues. Depictions of governments as servants of capitalism, citizens as victims of war and economic cutbacks, or the environmental harm caused by unscrupulous industries seeking their own benefits, are some of the images conveyed through his cartoons during the past decades, through a very personal combination of written and iconic discourse. This iconicity is also present in his captions, through which the use of rhetorical figures such as synecdoche, parallelism, irony and antithesis challenges and provokes an estrangement effect on its audience.
