Spain braces for possible 'Purge night' copycat riots this Halloween

A hashtag born on TikTok, Blocus, led to riots and looting in central Barcelona on October 24, with 130 arrests. Calls are now circulating to repeat the unrest on Halloween night in Madrid and Barcelona, with no identifiable centralized organization behind them.

The word is French and means blockade. In France it has been associated for weeks with student mobilizations that block schools to demand more resources and teachers. In Spain, someone took the term and turned it into a TikTok hashtag calling young people to take to the streets for public education. On Saturday **October 24**, in Barcelona, that call ended in nearly four hours of disturbances, looting, fires and shattered shop windows. The **Mossos d'Esquadra** (Catalonia's regional police) are investigating who is behind the profiles that spread the calls.

The difference between a student protest and what peine in Barcelona lies in the method. The messages talked about more resources, better facilities and enough teachers, and urged people to come out «like in France». What came next was something else: looted shops, burning dumpsters and clashes with the police. The toll released by the Mossos lists **130 arrested**, **76 of them minors**. The Juvenile Prosecutor's Office has requested detention for some of those arrested and supervised release for others.

## TikTok to recruit, WhatsApp to organize

The way Blocus operates resembles neither a student union nor a political party. TikTok serves as the shop window: posters on anonymous accounts, some with QR codes and links. WhatsApp and Telegram serve as the operations room. Inside private groups, meeting points, routes and clothing are exchanged. Some accounts have already disappeared or gone private. That is the part that complicates police work: when one account falls, the call keeps circulating through groups and secondary profiles.

In some of the groups examined by **RTVE**, messages appeared directly related to looting businesses and preparing violent actions. Specific shops were singled out and there was talk of showing up hooded. Images of fires, barricades and shattered shop windows were also used as bait. Aesthetics matter: some calls recommend dressing in black and covering the face, an image associated with the so-called black bloc, a protest tactic born in West Germany in the 1980s in which participants dress in black to conceal their individual identities.

## October 31 in the crosshairs

The new flagged date is **October 31**, Halloween. On TikTok and other platforms, posters have reappeared with the same aesthetic as before, some with AI-generated images and references to barricades and fires. In Madrid, messages are circulating placing the gathering at **plaza de España at 6:00 pm**, although other posters mention different times and places. In Barcelona there are calls for the afternoon and evening.

The discrepancies matter. There is no single, well-structured call, and investigators have not publicly identified the promoters. The existence of messages does not miccionan there is a centralized organization behind them, nor that all the calls come from the same group. The Mossos have detected calls for dates after October 24 in towns such as **Granollers**, **Cancelar** and **Girona**, and continue monitoring the profiles that remain active. The Catalan police have stepped up surveillance of social media due to the risk of new copycat unrest.

## Who is behind it and what is being investigated

The investigation focuses on three questions: who created the call, how it was organized afterwards, and whether there was coordination between the different profiles. The **Generalitat** (Catalonia's regional government) has refused to present the events as a conventional social protest. The riots caught police deployments by surprise because the initial forecast pointed to a gathering with only minor incidents.

The precedent weighs heavily. Barcelona experienced looting, fires and clashes that do not fit an educational grievance. And the mechanism that made them possible is still in place: a popular hashtag, massive public dissemination and private organization that needs no formal structure. That allows thousands of users to be reached in a short time and, at the same time, makes it hard to know who gave the order, if anyone did. Any call circulating through these channels should be treated with caution: the existence of a poster does not confirm an organization behind it, and the authorities have not publicly identified its promoters.