Letter to the Editor, on Spain’s Dirty War

SPAIN’S DIRTY WAR: THE “OPERATION CATALONIA”

The PSOE, the party in the Spanish government, has changed its stance on Catalan independence, and that is opening a loophole through which uncomfortable truths are surfacing: Spanish nationalism has been fraudulently using justice, for political purposes, to try to destroy the Catalan independence movement. The twist is due to the fact that, to govern Spain, the PSOE needs the 7 votes of Junts, Puigdemont’s Catalan pro-independence party. Currently the PSOE has hardly any representation at any other institutional level, neither regions nor important cities, therefore it needs to govern Spain in order to be able to place in government positions a large number of people from its party and thus subsist economically. This has forced the PSOE to recognize implicitly that it had falsely accused the independence movement of being a coup plotter, violent, terrorist, racist, supremacist, of making a pact with Putin to weaken the EU … and, as it knew that all this was invented, it has now needed to clarify the falsity of these accusations so that the citizenship accepts the pact, also recognizing that the Catalan independence movement has suffered “lawfare” (judicial dirty war). The only “crime” of the Catalan independence movement has been to offend the aggressive and intransigent nationalism that is part of the Spanish DNA.

We knew, from an ex-agent, that the PP government organized “Operation Catalonia”, using reserved State funds, to try to find crimes that could have been committed by the Catalan pro-independence activists and, not finding them, bribed, fabricated and spread totally fabricated accusations with the help of the Spanish press. Now some newspapers have published contrasted information on the ways in which the then president of the government, Mariano Rajoy, was receiving the information of this operation of the State’s sewers. We have also learned of a list of people under investigation, not because they are suspects, but because of who they are politically. The “Operation Catalonia” made it possible that, allegedly, innocent political leaders were accused, tried to influence electoral processes, made an Andorran bank go bankrupt, played to hide information about a jihadist group that ended up attacking in Barcelona in August 2017.

After Franco’s dictatorship, the incipient Spanish democracy had to fight against the Basque terrorist group ETA and resorted to all kinds of dirty war (torture, human rights violations, stigmatisation of what was Basque, and even state terrorism by the GAL group) and, with a peaceful and democratic movement, such as the Catalan pro-independence movement, they have decided to activate the same pattern of dirty war by the state but now applied against a movement that has not committed any crime. As this attack has brought together the speeches of the political parties, the judicial and police actions and the stories fabricated by the media, it is difficult to unravel the truth in the open and to judge it.

Moreover, the same PSOE, which is now interested in uncovering the irregular actions of the PP government, in its own government has also practised illegal espionage and “lawfare” against the Catalan pro-independence movement. In any case, this case is unsolvable within Spain because how can the very top of the judiciary itself be tried for a crime? That is why it is necessary for the EU to get involved: penalise Spain and force it to accept a democratic solution in the form of a referendum.