A69: Three pro-motorway activists sentenced, in an increasingly violent climate towards opponents of the construction site

The timing of the case is particularly bad. While on Tuesday, July 1st, the Tarn prefect announced a decree banning any gathering of opponents of the construction site of the future A69, between Toulouse and Castres, in anticipation of a new mobilization planned for the weekend, on the same day, three individuals aged 19 to 24 were taken into custody, suspected of having damaged an irrigation station on the farm of an anti-A69 farmer in Puylaurens (Tarn).

The following day, as part of a preliminary recognition procedure, they were sentenced by the Castres judicial court to forty hours of community service. Among them was the son of a major subcontractor of the concessionaire responsible for the construction of the A69… However, during the hearing, while the defendants admitted the facts with which they were charged, they specified that they had acted solely under the influence of alcohol and in no way for reasons related to the motorway project.

They also pleaded complete coincidence to explain why, on the night of June 28, around 4 a.m., they found themselves in the field of an opponent of the A69 and attacked his irrigation system. "Was it just pure coincidence? It's hard to say. What is certain is that the victim had been targeted by a pressure campaign claimed by A69 supporters," a local source told L'Humanité .

A week earlier, the farmer and other opponents of this highly controversial motorway project had been targeted by posters on the public highway. "Yes to the A69, no to thugs," one could read next to a dozen names of anti-A69 activists. The result: a loss of around €80,000 if one takes into account the impossibility of watering the crops during the heatwave and of planting the next market garden and cereal crops.

This climate of violence against environmental activists opposed to the A69 motorway is nothing new. For the past year, intimidation, threats, and attacks have been on the rise, with no response from the authorities. On September 2, the home of a resident of Verfeil, a town in Haute-Garonne, which was on the route of the future A69 motorway, was attacked with a Molotov cocktail by a commando of three hooded men.

For several weeks, environmental activists had been stationed on her land to delay the demolition of the house and allow the occupant to receive proper compensation. We met her two weeks after the attack, and Alexandra still seemed very affected. "I thought about my kid sleeping inside. What would happen if the fire attacked the house... I was very scared," she told us.

A few days after the assault by the hooded commando, she also suffered a power outage. The Enedis technician who came to the scene urgently quickly identified the problem. "A cable located several meters high had been severed. A clean cut, impossible to make without construction equipment. There were even caterpillar tracks on the ground... I said to myself, 'Stop, that's enough.' I'll sign whatever they want," she told us.

On September 16, she finally handed over the keys to the site, which was immediately transformed into a "zone to defend" —ZAD in activist jargon—by the anti-A69 movement. Similar attacks had already taken place in previous months in other areas of the highway construction site.

At the beginning of 2024, a few kilometers away, several ZADs were set up all over the route of the future A69. The two largest, Cal'arbre and Crem'arbre, were located in the commune of Saïx. According to the activists' account at the time, they were very quickly victims of several stone-throwings and clandestine operations against their installations: "At Cal'Arbre, in the middle of the night, our dormitories were set on fire and our comrades stoned. The offensive came from the adjoining cement factory, with the help of security guards and under the surveillance of the gendarmerie, whose late arrival did not put an end to the throwing of projectiles."

On March 25, a car belonging to one of the radical ecologists was targeted. And on August 13, at around 3 a.m., three hooded individuals arrived on the scene and were surprised by the occupants. One of the commando members brandished "presumably a knife to our friend's throat to prevent him from moving," while another doused a "tent and [a] vehicle with gasoline" and set it ablaze, according to the anti-A69 activists. By early morning, the vehicle was nothing more than a smoking wreck.