Reporter and photographer harassed at Valencia "rat" fiesta

"I don't understand it, I feel so powerless. And just because we were doing our job," say Marga Ferrer and Laura Garsando, a photographer and a reporter for the regional daily Levante-EMV, following the events of last Sunday in the small town of El Puig (Valencia). Both reporters were intimidated by a group of revelers while they were trying to cover a local festival known as Trencà de perols, a 20-year-old tradition (300, according to the mayor) in which participants break an earthenware drinking jug with a rabbit or rat inside, and toss the captured animal at the crowd or nearby buildings. These days, live animals are no longer allowed, but the journalists said that the locals carried out a mock battle using dead rats, which they hurled at each other.

On that cold Sunday afternoon, Ferrer and Garsando went to El Puig "not out of personal desire, but out of obligation." Their paper had asked them to cover the event. Halfway through the festivities, Ferrer pulled out her camera to capture one of the rats as it was being lobbed overhead. Two people immediately moved in to cover her camera lens. A large group of people then descended on her, she said. There was a flurry of insults, shoves, hair-pulling and elbow jabs.

At one point, Ferrer tried to photograph what was going on. A man grabbed her camera while the others closed in on her, making threats. Meanwhile her colleague Garsando had her notebook taken from her and torn to pieces - "An anecdote compared to the psychological damage and the theft of a camera," she says.

In the end, both women were able to get away with help from two unknown people and an acquaintance. They eventually recovered the camera, but the memory card had been wiped.

"I thought they were going to break it, but they just deleted the photos. I would like to believe that there is someone with a little bit of humanity left among those people," said Ferrer. Both women called the emergency services because they did not see any officers in the town square. "There were no ambulance crew and no Civil Guard," they recall. The latter showed up a few minutes after the incident and has now launched an investigation.

The mayor of El Puig, José Miguel Tolosa, can be seen in a video shot by the Valencian television station Canal 9, enjoying the festivities from a balcony. He later showed up at the police station to apologize to the reporters while "playing down the incident" and asserting that he "saw nothing." Tolosa later told Levante-EMV that there were "enough police" at the fiestas, and that it was just "a few individuals" who assaulted the reporters, even though Canal 9 footage clearly shows several dozen people surrounding and insulting them. The Civil Guard is reviewing this footage to identify the people who participated in the incident.

"They were humiliating us. It was a lack of respect for our profession," said Ferrer. "We wanted to report on something going on in a public place. We didn't go anywhere forbidden."

Neither one of them has had the chance to question where the locals got the rodents from, nor who was able to manipulate the camera so quickly. The question that is uppermost in their minds is: "If they are so proud of their fiesta, why don't they want it to be in the news?"