There are many types of abuse, many forms, many nuances, concepts, situations, realities, and actors. What everyone identifies with abuse is, on the one hand, the recipient, that is, who or what is being abused, whether it be an individual, animal, or person, a territory, a collective, a country, a nation, etc.; and on the other hand, the abuser, that is, the strongest, the one who can, the one who wants to do so, consciously or unconsciously, and acts to the detriment of the weak.
We see it daily in our society, and in very different ways: from parents to children, from children to parents, between couples, between ex-couples, also in the Palestinian conflict, the Ukrainian conflict, even at home we've seen it with October 1st, the abuse of authority and power. In the end, what's clear is that those who attack do so because they know they're the winner, and those on the receiving end suffer the consequences. It's also a recurring case to see how someone who has been abused, seemingly stronger than a third party, can easily become the abuser.
In these cases, perspective and context are important. In this sense, what was said yesterday at the congress commemorating the 120th anniversary of Arbó's birth serves as a communication to view the journey of the people of the Delta since the 19th century. «In the Delta, for example, following the second dThe church's confiscation, between the Second and Third Carlist Wars, and thanks to the canalization project on both banks, the right and the left, large estates emerged around 1856. Thus, the Delta was bought by large landowners who,Among other things, he established a period of prohibitions, such as hunting and fishing on rafts, and therefore relegated a society accustomed to not having money but also not having any desire, to misery, with the only option being to work for themselves.
During those years of hardship, change, and abuse, the natives of the Delta worked clearing wetland areas, hauling stone from La Sénia and Mas de Roses, working from dawn to dusk to cover the tusks that the fighting bulls of the Ebro Valley left exposed after seasonally grazing the land. In these jobs, horses were also an indispensable tool, opening drains and irrigation ditches. They only stopped for one week a year, where they would gather carts and wagons and spend the week bullfighting oxen, drinking, singing, and eating, in an improvised bullring anywhere along the riverbank. They would also hunt a bull and make it run, then kill it and eat it together.
Since the 1920s, and once the Delta was deserted, the three bull ranches that survived the war—Tarranda, Xarnego, and Margalef—protected specific areas, promoting biodiversity until the establishment of the Ebro Delta Natural Park in 1983, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. These areas include the L'Encanyissada reservoir, La Tancada, El Groguet, Les Olles, and Buda Island itself. These areas, if not for these extensive grazing herds, would have become part of the rice monoculture, with all that this entails.
During this final period, Native Americans were buying back their land from the landowners and began calling them "sinyores." They continued to celebrate festivals with bulls, heifers, embolados, entradas, and encapuchados, and they continued to celebrate life as they do on the Ebro, where the common denominator is the bull, the Jota, and water.
Now, a new generation of "sinyors", "sinyorets" and "sinyoretes", also from Barcelona, have accepted a bill to ban certain forms of bullfighting in Catalonia, knowing that they lack the authority to do so, knowing that they were regulated in 2010 and that things are being done correctly in the region, and knowing that this is an abuse.
As long as we are a society where we legally have the right to fatten animals in intensive production lines, in appalling conditions, and then slaughter them in Catalan slaughterhouses, we have no right to judge not only the groups but also the bloody spectacles. It is immoral and highly hypocritical.
For example, pig farming poisons aquifers in Lleida and Girona with its slurry, which is then slaughtered in places like Olot, where 14,000 pigs are slaughtered every day and then exported to Holland, where there are no farms of this type so as not to contaminate the aquifers.
The people of the Ebro, rough and noble, are accustomed to the abuse of the "sinyores", to being called savages, but, for me, a savage is someone who abuses.
