The proof of dirty war against Catalonia’s independence movement

It was a widely-known secret that this very paper had published on December 1, 2014, and now it is all in the open in the voice of the Spanish Interior Minister himself, Jorge Fernández Díaz: the Spanish government used State institutions to wage a dirty war against the Catalan independence movement by smearing its main leaders with alleged cases of corruption.

The conversations made public yesterday between Fernández Díaz and Daniel de Alfonso, Director of Catalonia’s Anti-Fraud Office —whose words show a shocking complicity— prove every hypothesis: the use of the Spanish police, specifically UDEF (Financial Crime Unit), to fabricate evidence against Catalan politicians; pressure on judicial bodies (the reference to Eduardo Torres-Dulce, then Attorney General --who ended up resigning--, is an eye-opener); taking advantage of theoretically independent organizations such as the Anti-Fraud Office, created --to add insult to injury-- by the Catalan Parliament; and the use of certain friendly newspapers to publish falsehoods under the guise of reporting.

Most of these accusations went up in smoke, but left the accused parties absolutely defenseless when the reports first appeared in print. This was the case with Artur Mas in the middle of the 2012 campaign, with Xavier Trias before the municipal elections, and the brother of Oriol Junqueras, the current Catalan vice-president, who was the main target of the Minister at the time of his meeting with de Alfonso, according to their conversation.

All of this is a perversion of democracy that in any civilized country would lead to the immediate resignation of Fernández Díaz and the director of the Anti-Fraud Office, who has shown himself to be as a solicitous collaborator of the Spanish minister´s strategy.

But there is more to it. The Spanish government has never clarified the source of all those apocryphal reports by the UDEF (which caused bad blood within the Spanish police force), nor has it been held politically accountable. This is because minister Fernández Díaz enjoys the support of the Spanish president, Mariano Rajoy, who is ultimately responsible for the serious undermining of the rule of law that specific individuals have suffered for the sole reason of defending the idea of Catalan independence democratically.