MADRID — Spain’s government halted an air-traffic control strike Saturday by imposing an emergency decree to threaten the disgruntled employees with prison terms under military law. Flights resumed, but hundreds of thousands of travelers remained stranded at airports.
By Saturday evening, the decree, which had never been used before, prompted 283 of the 295 controllers scheduled to report for duty to do so, according to Spain’s civil aviation agency, Aena. Flights were resuming at an increasing pace at airports packed with bewildered travelers.
Spanish airspace reopened after being closed with the start of the wildcat strike Friday evening over a work-scheduling dispute, but the government warned that it could be up to two days before airports return to normal at one of Europe’s top tourism destinations.
All over the country, people marooned at airports at the start of a long holiday weekend told stories of being herded around like cattle in search of information, sleeping on chairs or floors, or resting on check-in weighing scales or propped up against their luggage.
“It’s total chaos,” said Spaniard Rocio Garcia, who had hoped to spend the weekend in Paris. “There are two people attending a line of some 500 people.”
Aena said an estimated 600,000 people missed flights Friday or Saturday because of the strike.
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero placed the country’s approximately 2,000 air-traffic controllers under military authority in a “state of alarm” order, meaning strikers who refused to resume guiding aircraft in and out of airports faced the threat of jail terms under the military penal code.
Zapatero acted under a constitutional clause that had never been used before and also is reserved for national emergencies such as earthquakes or other breakdowns in essential public services.
Deputy Prime Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said Saturday evening that Aena will investigate all air-traffic controllers who failed to show up for work over the past 24 hours without due justification, and a prosecutor also is probing if they can be punished. Travelers also are filing complaints, he said.
“These are very serious events, and it is clear that accountability will be demanded,” Rubalcaba told a news conference.
He said the government will never allow another air-traffic controllers strike to take place but declined to explain what legal mechanisms the government would employ.
Scenes of chaos abounded.
At Barajas Airport in Madrid, Jason Bridger, 40, of Brighton, England, said, “We have been told that the airspace is open, but these guys won’t open the security.
“So the airspace is open, but they won’t open the airport. Loco!,” Bridger told AP Television News.
Marcos Salt, a 50-year-old from Buenos Aires, said he was in Spain en route to Vienna. “Nobody can tell me how I am going to get to Vienna or get back to Buenos Aires. They can’t get you a hotel because they are all full. So we are here forgotten by God!”
The strike was yet another headache for Zapatero as he tries to pull his country out of recession and fights off suggestions that Spain’s debt load will put it next in line for a bailout, after Greece and now Ireland.
The strong-arm tactic was almost certainly a bitter pill to swallow for a man who takes pride in his Socialist ideology and always tries to curry favor with unions. It recalled a similar wildcat strike in the United States in 1981, although Zapatero stopped short of firing air-traffic controllers and breaking their union, as then-President Ronald Reagan did.
