From his garden chair, planted on the Nationale 5, Terry filters the cars with a nod of his hood, his hands resting on an iron bar. Behind him, the flames tear through the Martinican night, in these times of struggle against the high cost of living.
The 19-year-old boy has been holding this filter barrier at the entrance to Rivière-Salée, a popular commune near Fort-de-France, since Wednesday with a few dozen other young people.
In recent days, the island of the Antilles, where the price of food is 40% higher than in mainland France, has been living under a nighttime curfew (9 p.m. – 5 a.m.).
The cause: a sudden outbreak of fever in the middle of the week, while a protest movement has been shaking Martinique since September 1. Around twenty gendarmes have been injured since October 8, according to the gendarmerie.
“We’re fed up. We are fighting against the high cost of living, but we don’t care about ourselves,” judged on the night from Saturday to Sunday Terry (who, like all the barragists, refused to give his last name), a salesman recently returned from France, where he lived for several years.
“In mainland France, with 200 euros, your shopping cart is armored…” he notes, in the humid night. In Martinique, “you don’t even have a shopping bag full” for this price, says Ketsia, armed with a baseball bat.
“They need to hear us”
On the roadblock where household appliances, furniture, an overturned car wreck and everything that could be recovered are burning, the 23-year-old young woman orders motorists to turn around, except for medical reasons.
“We’re fed up with our parents paying 400 euros when there’s nothing on the cash register,” says this construction worker, in a tank top and balaclava that only shows her eyes.
“Mom, she works and the money she receives is not even enough to pay the rent, electricity, water and groceries. She cannot meet our needs,” adds a 20-year-old electrician.
He sums up, while a roadblock worker revives the smoking pile with a jet of gasoline: “It’s distressing (to get to this point), to break, to burn. But we have to do damage to be heard. They need to hear us.”
Far from the roadblocks, dialogue began. But the previous night, a sixth negotiation meeting between state and local actors ended without agreement on lowering the cost of living.
The prefecture reports “notable” progress before the next meeting, scheduled for Tuesday.
“There can be no serious development, no serious discussion, in a climate of violence that would set in,” stressed the Minister for Overseas Affairs François-Noël Buffet.
« On tient »
After a few nights of riots, looting and fires, the streets of Martinique gradually regained their calm between Saturday and Sunday under the Caribbean storm, despite invisible police forces and smoking roadblocks: “No major incident” to be deplored and a lull which “is confirmed”, the local prefecture congratulates itself on Sunday morning.
The dams are limited to sensitive areas on the outskirts of the capital.
At Quatre-Croées, a crossroads in Saint-Joseph north of Fort-de-France, the road junction remains completely under the control of men ready to fight at night, without the police attempting to clear this departmental axis erected into a fortified place by machines of all kinds and burning cars.
“We hold the post. Until they take into account our demands on the cost of living,” explains a hooded and gloved man, among dozens of others carrying bottles of vodka and projectiles, on condition of anonymity.
The streets and roads, always lined with charred cars, blocked here and there with supermarket carts and other pallets, are not cleared at night either, even in the absence of rioters.
To mount the dams, one object is particularly popular: the refrigerator. In Rivière-Salée, where the roadblockers claim to be responding to the instructions of the RPPRAC, the movement behind the mobilization, Ketsia, the construction worker, watches a fridge burn.
She lifts her hood, breathes. “The end of an empty fridge. »
