Juicio al 'procés' - Referéndum en Cataluña — El conflicto catalán - Parte II
- Autormarage
- Fecha de inicio
Igual después de un fin de semana desconectada se me ha olvidado todo, pero juraría que no hace tanto decías que no se había proclamado porque no salió en el BOE o algo así. ¿Ahora sí existe? Me estoy liando. Igual hay que hacer un referéndum sobre si existe o no existe. O podemos empezar por un sondeo en el banco de los acusados que están ahora en el Supremo, que nos digan si por fin está proclamada o no. Que estoy hecha un lío. Que no existe es evidente, puesto que Cataluña va a votar con el resto de España en las europeas y va a participar en las elecciones generales españolas. Pero lo que no sé es si los que votaron en el pseudo-referéndum del 1-O cree que existe pero está suspendida, o no ha llegado a existir porque no se publicó en el BOE
¿Y cómo me desenvuelvo en el foro de la Monarquía? Ahí también escribo lo que pienso, pocas veces porque para qué, pero cuando escribo digo lo que pienso. La diferencia quizá es que en el foro de monarquía da la impresión de que somos 4 las que pensamos que Letizia no es el diablo hecho mujer, y aquí hay más gente que coincide en mi opinión. Pero presento mi opinión, no la del grupo.
Edito y añado: Por cierto, no había una norma de no comentar foreros? Porque parece que te ha dado por hacerme un estudio psicológico...
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The detailed account of how the Catalan Police mocked the rule of law and cheated Spain on October 1, 2017
Mar 10, 2019
The Spain Report
Chronicle: Senior officers and experts from the Civil Guard, the National Police, the Home Office and the Mossos testified at the Supreme Court.
The Civil Guard had been investigating matters related to the Catalan independence movement since 2014, before the previous separatist vote on November 9 that year, General Angel Gozalo, commander of the VII Zone, told the Supreme Court this week.
"We were not going to talk about national sovereignty at any time", the former central government representative in Catalonia, Enric Millo, confirmed.
In their conversations with the then Catalan government, however, the separatists only wanted to talk about one issue: the referendum. Oriol Junqueras, then the regional Deputy First Minister and now in the dock on trial, was "absolutely in favor of it".
"I do not have anything against one being in favour of independence", said Mr. Millo: "but what you cannot do is to break the law [...] one group of Spaniards cannot make a decision that affects all Spaniards."
He said he was "worried" about the dismissal of Jordi Jané on July 14 as regional interior minister, as well as that of Albert Batlle, the director of the Catalan Police, the Mossos d'Esquadra, on the 17th.
Batlle, according to the testimony of Colonel Diego Perez de los Cobos, told him that he had resigned following the departure of the regional minister because the regional police no longer planned to comply with court orders to prevent the referendum from going ahead: "there had been doubts about the performance of the Mossos on October 1 for a long time".
At an anti-terrorist coordination meeting in Madrid with Superintendent Ferrán López, after the attacks of August 17 of that year, the colonel asked the superintendent about the situation: "If this continues, what are you all going to do?". "We will always comply with court orders," answered López.
In July, however, they had been asked, during a meeting at the office of Joaquim Forn, the new regional interior minister, to draw up scenarios "to carry out the referendum", according to testimony from the former chief superintendent in charge of intelligence for the Mossos, Manuel Castellví, who attended the meeting.
After the meeting, Mr. Forn made some statements in public: "he sent a message of normality for the referendum on October 1".
Within this environment of distrust, the Catalan Parliament, on September 6 and 7, passed two new bills into regional law: the referendum law and legal transition law. The latter, published on September 8 in the Catalan government's official gazette, said in Article 3 that "Until the Constitution of the Republic is approved, this Law is the supreme law of the Catalan legal system".
Immediately after those laws were passed, "we went from theory to practice", the former Secretary of State for Security, José Antonio Nieto, told the court. The Public Prosecutor's Office in Catalonia issued instructions to "prevent or stop the referendum from taking place" and the government began evaluating sending police reinforcements to the region to carry out a double mission: to support the Mossos if the regional police did indeed carry out court orders to prevent the vote, or to act themselves, if the Mossos did not.
The prosecutor's orders were "clearly aimed at preventing the preparation and holding of this illegal referendum", said Millo, the former central government representative.
The Home Office decided to send 6,000 officers from around the rest of the country, 90% of available extra capacity, according to Mr. Nieto's figures. He clarified that there is a permanent deployment of 5,000 Civil Guard and National Police officers in Catalonia: "The chief prosecutor told the head of the Mossos d'Esquadra, Mr. Trapero, that [his deployment plan] was not enough".
The turning point to make the decision to send reinforcement was what happened on September 20.
On the 19th, though, General Gozalo already had his doubts about what the real reaction from the Mossos would be: "something is going wrong", he told the court, when "there was a lapse of about 40 minutes" in them replying to a request for help when the Civil Guard turned up to search the premises of a courier company called Unipost company; that was "a lot" time, in the general's estimate.
The help that day "took hours to arrive", according to Millo.
At eight o'clock on the morning of September 20, Gozalo's men were at regional economy ministry building in central Barcelona to accompany the clerk of investigating court nº13, Montserrat del Toro, to carry out one of the 41 searches ordered that day by the judge.
"Minutes before," the general said, they told the Mossos what they were doing.
"The Mossos complained the Civil Guard had not informed them", Mr. Nieto confirmed: "but they could not [even] tell their immediate superiors because they were acting under a judge's orders".
Ms. del Toro explained to the court that the judge had issued search orders on September 19 and that meant carrying out four of the forty in offices in the same building, including that of Josep Maria Jové, the secretary general of the Deputy First Minister's office and the regional economy minister.
They arrived "at eight o'clock" with "two details" of the Civil Guard, "about 12 officers", but they were kept waiting for almost an hour in the lobby because nobody could see them and "no one told us where things were".
Ms. del Toro described "an unpleasant incident outside" at about that time: "a young person came up very close to the civil guard who was looking after [...] and put a flag very close to his face and yelled something, and it seemed to me like he spat at him".
Meanwhile, out on the street in front of the building, "after a certain point, a large number of people start to gather by the door", said Mr. Nieto, the former Secretary of State for Security.
At 9:15 a.m., Mrs. del Toro observed a conversation between a Mossos inspector, Teresa Laplana, and the lieutenant in charge of the Civil Guard detail: "although he had requested the security measures, which Ms. Laplana had considered in her opinion to be unnecessary because no public order incidents would take place".
In front of the door, the officers had left their long weapons inside the Civil Guard vehicles.
"That's right", General Gozalo confirmed: "there were long weapons with riot ammunition", guarded by the detail "until it was humanly impossible" for them to continue doing so because of the increasingly large crowd.
Documents filed by the Prosecutor's Office before the trial estimate 60,000 demonstrators gathered on that street over the course of the day, tell how the clerk of the court had to leave via the roof of the building in the end, a fact she confirmed in court, and how officers did not finally leave the building until seven the next morning.
Asked by a defense lawyer how many people had been killed on September 20, Mr. Millo was able to answer "to my knowledge, none" before the judge, Manuel Marchena, stopped the lawyer in his tracks: "Let's see, it's a very well known fact that there were no deaths…do not introduce elements of irony or elements that lack legal relevance…".
Mr. Castellví, the former head of intelligence for the Mossos, confirmed that hardly anyone was arrested for the events of that day: "two people were reported, the ones who had stolen those backpacks".
The events of September 20 set alarm bells ringing at the Home Office and the Chief Prosecutor's Office in Catalonia.
The deployment of police reinforcements "begins to take place on September 20, and is done by September 26" Sebastian Trapote, then Chief of the National Police in Catalonia, told the court.
On the 21st, the Chief Prosecutor designated Colonel Diego Pérez de los Cobos as security coordinator and the Mossos chief, Major Trapero, expressed "his disagreement" with that decision, according to the colonel himself, both verbally and in writing.
Trapero understood it "as an interference, as the establishment of some kind of authority over him", the colonel explained: "The Chief Prosecutor clarified it was not like that", that "it did not imply any hierarchy", "only the prosecutor could give them orders".
"The relationship with Trapero was always difficult" and the Chief Prosecutor told the head of the Mossos that "this plan of action, as drafted, does not stop the referendum from going ahead".
The closing and sealing off of the premises that were to used as polling stations before September 30 was ordered, as well as guarding those premises to prevent them opening on October 1. There were two police coordination meetings to that effect, but Major Trapero "does not attend, despite insisting the Mossos have the capacity to deal with the situation".
The colonel denied he had access to information from the investigation in investigating court nº13: "I had no interaction with the other cases".
Both the Assistant Chief Constable, Trapote, the head of the National Police in the region at that time, and General Gozalo of the Civil Guard said they never got to see the Mossos's plan in person: it was handed directly to the Chief Prosecutor.
Major Trapero was "reluctant [...] to be coordinated".
Both also confirmed the doubts or the dilemma between "guaranteeing collective security" and "the judicial mandate" was already present and that both were very clear that the first thing that had to be done was to enforce the law.
On September 27, judge Mercedes Armas, of the regional high court in Catalonia, issued a ruling ordering the closure of the polling stations for October 1 and on the 28th there was a key meeting between the representatives of the central government and the Catalan government.
Carles Puigdemont himself called the meeting, with just one item on the agenda.
All those present this week at the trial have said the members of the regional government who were present were notified that they must not carry out the referendum because the Constitutional Court had declared it illegal and because there were court orders ordering it stopped.
"The security meeting was something, a Kafkaesque situation" according to Colonel Pérez de los Cobos: "those who were on the other side of the table were the organisers of the illegal activity we had been ordered to prevent".
Mr. Puigdemont, the colonel said, clung "desperately" to the notion of civic coexistence as the "superior good" that had to prevail "and that he as First Minister of the Catalan government had to guarantee it".
He and the Secretary of State for Security both asked the First Minister to call off the vote, "again and again", in the words of Mr. Nieto: "we told him that the good that had to be protected was the law".
The security meeting on September 28 was "absolutely grotesque", said Mr. Millo, the former central government representative. "The easiest thing", he said, would have been to call off the referendum to comply with the judge's order, but "political will was imposed above professional criteria".
Asked if the meeting had "something absurd" about it, Juan Antonio Puigserver, a technical secretary general at the Home Office who attended the meeting, was more diplomatic in his response: "Yes, we did have some discrepancies about the chances of achieving effective coordination between the two administrations".
"Normal civic coexistence could not be an excuse", however, to not comply with the court orders: "civic coexistence should not be confused with the executive part of the court order".
The security meeting ended without Mr. Puigdemont calling off the referendum, and the doubts about what the Mossos were going to do were reinforced.
"We had very little hope the Mossos would do what they had to do", said Mr. Nieto.
Colonel Perez de los Cobos said the Mossos were prepared not to act if there were old people or children at polling stations, that Major Trapero had announced that same strategy at the security meeting, and that he did not really understand why Trapero, as an experienced senior judicial police officer, was paying more attention to the phrase about "civic coexistence" in the explanatory part of the judge's order, instead of what the executive part said.
"The big question was always 'What are the Mossos going to do?'"
The Mossos' plan, guided by that conviction that civic coexistence was the way to execute the court order, consisted of visiting the polling stations to write up 4,469 police reports on September 29 and 30.
Although they were ordered to close and seal off the premises, when questioned by the prosecutor, Mr. Zaragoza, Superintendent Castellví admitted the Mossos did not close any at all and nor did they seize any election materials.
At the polling stations, "recreational activities" of different kinds had been organised and many people stayed the night.
"We always thought October 1 was going to be very complicated, very difficult," said Assistant Chief Constable Trapote. They had prepared for two scenarios: supporting the Mossos and "having to act ourselves" in case the regional police did not comply: "we had the perception that situation might happen".
General Gozalo said that the radical separatist CDR protest groups held resistance workshops prior to October 1, although "it's not something you need a master's degree for" and that they were using a "pre-war-like language".
Superintendent Castellví told the court the Mossos had been monitoring the CDR groups since April of that year and that there was a report that spoke of "RI",
"What does 'RI' mean in this report?", the prosecutor asked.
"Revolutionary independence", Castellví replied.
"We all got the risk analysis wrong [...] the deployment [...] was not enough."
He explained that the only modification the Mossos made to their plan of notifications, reports and pairs of officers was "to increase the total number by about 800 officers".
In the early hours of October 1, the Civil Guard, the National Police and the Home Office got "reliable confirmation" the Mossos were not going to try to prevent the vote, which Colonel Pérez de los Cobos described as Scenario B.
Assistant Chief Constable Trapote rang Colonel Perez de los Cobos who rang the Secretary of State, Mr. Nieto. The answer? Scenario B, the Mossos were not carrying out the court order.
Colonel Pérez de los Cobos described their performance in the early hours of October 1 as "non-existent".
"Major Trapero's excuse [for police not to act on October 1] was that there were small children and elderly people", said Mr. Nieto.
"We found a significant number of people gathered in front of the polling stations with an extra goal as well as voting: to stop the police and the Civil Guard from doing their job".
"That first part of the court order had not been carried out", said Mr. Millo: "the goal of police action was the election material, not citizens".
They observed "insufficiency, inadequacy, inefficiency, no doubt we were facing the failure of the Mossos", said Colonel Pérez de los Cobos, who canceled all the meetings he had planned with the regional police for that day: "there was no point".
When Civil Guard and National Police riot officers arrived at polling stations, "we came across the second big surprise of the day: the increasing severity of the situation we had to face" with "perfectly organised masses" that prevented officers from carrying out court orders.
The Mossos did not deply the BRIMO, their riot police, on October 1. "I do not have any record of it", said Mr. Nieto. There was a "Barcelona-Las Palmas" game, replied Mr. Castellví.
Mr. Millo held a press conference to again ask Carles Puigdemont to call off the referendum.
In response, the First Minister of Catalonia "criticised the state very harshly, describing it as repressive" and "ended up applauding the people who were defending the ballot boxes", which Millo found "tremendously irresponsible" because "it necessarily implies opposing the actions of the judicial police".
Police commanders and Home Office experts confirmed there were clashes, confrontation, violence and resistance, a "virulent attitude" in the words of more than one witness.
Initially passive resistance "became active," said Colonel Perez de los Cobos, "in some cases Mossos were seen holding the ballot boxes while citizens voted". He described the actions of the regional police on October 1 as "a massive scam and show".
The pairs of Mossos officers sent to polling stations, said Assistant Chief Constable Trapote, could not do anything faced with the large crowds that had gathered "because that was Utopian".
The police denied riot officers charged in the technical sense of that phrase, although "there was a use of force", Mr. Nieto confirmed.
The aim at all times was to try to comply with the court order to seize the election materials, and all of the witnesses characterised the use of force as proportional.
Colonel Pérez de los Cobos said units were deployed throughout the day, "there was no order to stop acting", although there were fewer deployments in the evening.
Decisions to withdraw were made by the unit commanders depending on the situation at each polling station. Mr. Trapote confirmed this was also the case with the National Police.
Mr. Nieto explained that it was also due to "a physical issue", as officers had been out on the streets since five in the morning: "There was no political order to withdraw police units on the evening of October 1".
General Gozalo, asked about the use of "pepper spray" in the town of Aiguaviva, denied it was any such thing, "no Civil Guard officer used pepper spray", but rather "a personal defence spray", one of the tools officers have at their disposal.
"It was about officers getting inside [...] trying to open a passage for the team that was going to carry out the court order."
The colonel said 93 Civil Guard officers were injured that day, and Mr. Trapote added 65 national police officers. Neither of them were officially informed of the number of civilians injured, although they both saw the figure of 800 or 850 mentioned in the media.
Asked by Vox, the private prosecution, how many Mossos officers had been injured, Superintendent Castellví replied: "I cannot answer that because it is not my area of expertise".
There were "a dozen or so" arrests on October 1, according to Mr. Nieto: "not even that".
Both Mr. Trapote and General Gozalo described a hostile environment at the polling stations.
"They were organised, they blocked us, they attacked us," said Trapote: "virulence, aggression, even making human chains in order to block access to the polling stations".
Asked why they had not mediated with the groups outside, he answered "Mediate with who? […] They were not letting us into the polling stations, how were we going to mediate?".
Gozalo described how there could be "a group of people who harmonically brought themselves together" at the door to block access but "then that resistance mutated into a greater degree of virulence".
Of the 2,259 polling stations opened on October 1, Superintendent Castellví estimated at 110 or 134 those were closed by the Mossos, and hid rhetorically behind the use of the pairs of officers again: "Throughout the day, there was a pair, at least, at those polling stations".
"The action plan was not changed, there was that increase [...] and there were no more modifications, I seem to remember".
"The perception of reality the Catalan government had was completely different from the one we had", said Mr. Nieto: "everything was quite surreal".
He added that a climate of "parallel legality, almost a parallel reality" had been created.
"The world was a bit upside down", Mr. Millo said. Catalan institutions had called the referendum and then called people out to "defend our institutions".
"Under the rule of law, civic coexistence is impossible without respect for the law", said Colonel Pérez de los Cobos.
http://www.thespainreport.es/articl...le-of-law-and-cheated-spain-on-october-1-2017
Mar 10, 2019
The Spain Report
Chronicle: Senior officers and experts from the Civil Guard, the National Police, the Home Office and the Mossos testified at the Supreme Court.
The Civil Guard had been investigating matters related to the Catalan independence movement since 2014, before the previous separatist vote on November 9 that year, General Angel Gozalo, commander of the VII Zone, told the Supreme Court this week.
"We were not going to talk about national sovereignty at any time", the former central government representative in Catalonia, Enric Millo, confirmed.
In their conversations with the then Catalan government, however, the separatists only wanted to talk about one issue: the referendum. Oriol Junqueras, then the regional Deputy First Minister and now in the dock on trial, was "absolutely in favor of it".
"I do not have anything against one being in favour of independence", said Mr. Millo: "but what you cannot do is to break the law [...] one group of Spaniards cannot make a decision that affects all Spaniards."
He said he was "worried" about the dismissal of Jordi Jané on July 14 as regional interior minister, as well as that of Albert Batlle, the director of the Catalan Police, the Mossos d'Esquadra, on the 17th.
Batlle, according to the testimony of Colonel Diego Perez de los Cobos, told him that he had resigned following the departure of the regional minister because the regional police no longer planned to comply with court orders to prevent the referendum from going ahead: "there had been doubts about the performance of the Mossos on October 1 for a long time".
At an anti-terrorist coordination meeting in Madrid with Superintendent Ferrán López, after the attacks of August 17 of that year, the colonel asked the superintendent about the situation: "If this continues, what are you all going to do?". "We will always comply with court orders," answered López.
In July, however, they had been asked, during a meeting at the office of Joaquim Forn, the new regional interior minister, to draw up scenarios "to carry out the referendum", according to testimony from the former chief superintendent in charge of intelligence for the Mossos, Manuel Castellví, who attended the meeting.
After the meeting, Mr. Forn made some statements in public: "he sent a message of normality for the referendum on October 1".
Within this environment of distrust, the Catalan Parliament, on September 6 and 7, passed two new bills into regional law: the referendum law and legal transition law. The latter, published on September 8 in the Catalan government's official gazette, said in Article 3 that "Until the Constitution of the Republic is approved, this Law is the supreme law of the Catalan legal system".
Immediately after those laws were passed, "we went from theory to practice", the former Secretary of State for Security, José Antonio Nieto, told the court. The Public Prosecutor's Office in Catalonia issued instructions to "prevent or stop the referendum from taking place" and the government began evaluating sending police reinforcements to the region to carry out a double mission: to support the Mossos if the regional police did indeed carry out court orders to prevent the vote, or to act themselves, if the Mossos did not.
The prosecutor's orders were "clearly aimed at preventing the preparation and holding of this illegal referendum", said Millo, the former central government representative.
The Home Office decided to send 6,000 officers from around the rest of the country, 90% of available extra capacity, according to Mr. Nieto's figures. He clarified that there is a permanent deployment of 5,000 Civil Guard and National Police officers in Catalonia: "The chief prosecutor told the head of the Mossos d'Esquadra, Mr. Trapero, that [his deployment plan] was not enough".
The turning point to make the decision to send reinforcement was what happened on September 20.
On the 19th, though, General Gozalo already had his doubts about what the real reaction from the Mossos would be: "something is going wrong", he told the court, when "there was a lapse of about 40 minutes" in them replying to a request for help when the Civil Guard turned up to search the premises of a courier company called Unipost company; that was "a lot" time, in the general's estimate.
The help that day "took hours to arrive", according to Millo.
At eight o'clock on the morning of September 20, Gozalo's men were at regional economy ministry building in central Barcelona to accompany the clerk of investigating court nº13, Montserrat del Toro, to carry out one of the 41 searches ordered that day by the judge.
"Minutes before," the general said, they told the Mossos what they were doing.
"The Mossos complained the Civil Guard had not informed them", Mr. Nieto confirmed: "but they could not [even] tell their immediate superiors because they were acting under a judge's orders".
Ms. del Toro explained to the court that the judge had issued search orders on September 19 and that meant carrying out four of the forty in offices in the same building, including that of Josep Maria Jové, the secretary general of the Deputy First Minister's office and the regional economy minister.
They arrived "at eight o'clock" with "two details" of the Civil Guard, "about 12 officers", but they were kept waiting for almost an hour in the lobby because nobody could see them and "no one told us where things were".
Ms. del Toro described "an unpleasant incident outside" at about that time: "a young person came up very close to the civil guard who was looking after [...] and put a flag very close to his face and yelled something, and it seemed to me like he spat at him".
Meanwhile, out on the street in front of the building, "after a certain point, a large number of people start to gather by the door", said Mr. Nieto, the former Secretary of State for Security.
At 9:15 a.m., Mrs. del Toro observed a conversation between a Mossos inspector, Teresa Laplana, and the lieutenant in charge of the Civil Guard detail: "although he had requested the security measures, which Ms. Laplana had considered in her opinion to be unnecessary because no public order incidents would take place".
In front of the door, the officers had left their long weapons inside the Civil Guard vehicles.
"That's right", General Gozalo confirmed: "there were long weapons with riot ammunition", guarded by the detail "until it was humanly impossible" for them to continue doing so because of the increasingly large crowd.
Documents filed by the Prosecutor's Office before the trial estimate 60,000 demonstrators gathered on that street over the course of the day, tell how the clerk of the court had to leave via the roof of the building in the end, a fact she confirmed in court, and how officers did not finally leave the building until seven the next morning.
Asked by a defense lawyer how many people had been killed on September 20, Mr. Millo was able to answer "to my knowledge, none" before the judge, Manuel Marchena, stopped the lawyer in his tracks: "Let's see, it's a very well known fact that there were no deaths…do not introduce elements of irony or elements that lack legal relevance…".
Mr. Castellví, the former head of intelligence for the Mossos, confirmed that hardly anyone was arrested for the events of that day: "two people were reported, the ones who had stolen those backpacks".
The events of September 20 set alarm bells ringing at the Home Office and the Chief Prosecutor's Office in Catalonia.
The deployment of police reinforcements "begins to take place on September 20, and is done by September 26" Sebastian Trapote, then Chief of the National Police in Catalonia, told the court.
On the 21st, the Chief Prosecutor designated Colonel Diego Pérez de los Cobos as security coordinator and the Mossos chief, Major Trapero, expressed "his disagreement" with that decision, according to the colonel himself, both verbally and in writing.
Trapero understood it "as an interference, as the establishment of some kind of authority over him", the colonel explained: "The Chief Prosecutor clarified it was not like that", that "it did not imply any hierarchy", "only the prosecutor could give them orders".
"The relationship with Trapero was always difficult" and the Chief Prosecutor told the head of the Mossos that "this plan of action, as drafted, does not stop the referendum from going ahead".
The closing and sealing off of the premises that were to used as polling stations before September 30 was ordered, as well as guarding those premises to prevent them opening on October 1. There were two police coordination meetings to that effect, but Major Trapero "does not attend, despite insisting the Mossos have the capacity to deal with the situation".
The colonel denied he had access to information from the investigation in investigating court nº13: "I had no interaction with the other cases".
Both the Assistant Chief Constable, Trapote, the head of the National Police in the region at that time, and General Gozalo of the Civil Guard said they never got to see the Mossos's plan in person: it was handed directly to the Chief Prosecutor.
Major Trapero was "reluctant [...] to be coordinated".
Both also confirmed the doubts or the dilemma between "guaranteeing collective security" and "the judicial mandate" was already present and that both were very clear that the first thing that had to be done was to enforce the law.
On September 27, judge Mercedes Armas, of the regional high court in Catalonia, issued a ruling ordering the closure of the polling stations for October 1 and on the 28th there was a key meeting between the representatives of the central government and the Catalan government.
Carles Puigdemont himself called the meeting, with just one item on the agenda.
All those present this week at the trial have said the members of the regional government who were present were notified that they must not carry out the referendum because the Constitutional Court had declared it illegal and because there were court orders ordering it stopped.
"The security meeting was something, a Kafkaesque situation" according to Colonel Pérez de los Cobos: "those who were on the other side of the table were the organisers of the illegal activity we had been ordered to prevent".
Mr. Puigdemont, the colonel said, clung "desperately" to the notion of civic coexistence as the "superior good" that had to prevail "and that he as First Minister of the Catalan government had to guarantee it".
He and the Secretary of State for Security both asked the First Minister to call off the vote, "again and again", in the words of Mr. Nieto: "we told him that the good that had to be protected was the law".
The security meeting on September 28 was "absolutely grotesque", said Mr. Millo, the former central government representative. "The easiest thing", he said, would have been to call off the referendum to comply with the judge's order, but "political will was imposed above professional criteria".
Asked if the meeting had "something absurd" about it, Juan Antonio Puigserver, a technical secretary general at the Home Office who attended the meeting, was more diplomatic in his response: "Yes, we did have some discrepancies about the chances of achieving effective coordination between the two administrations".
"Normal civic coexistence could not be an excuse", however, to not comply with the court orders: "civic coexistence should not be confused with the executive part of the court order".
The security meeting ended without Mr. Puigdemont calling off the referendum, and the doubts about what the Mossos were going to do were reinforced.
"We had very little hope the Mossos would do what they had to do", said Mr. Nieto.
Colonel Perez de los Cobos said the Mossos were prepared not to act if there were old people or children at polling stations, that Major Trapero had announced that same strategy at the security meeting, and that he did not really understand why Trapero, as an experienced senior judicial police officer, was paying more attention to the phrase about "civic coexistence" in the explanatory part of the judge's order, instead of what the executive part said.
"The big question was always 'What are the Mossos going to do?'"
The Mossos' plan, guided by that conviction that civic coexistence was the way to execute the court order, consisted of visiting the polling stations to write up 4,469 police reports on September 29 and 30.
Although they were ordered to close and seal off the premises, when questioned by the prosecutor, Mr. Zaragoza, Superintendent Castellví admitted the Mossos did not close any at all and nor did they seize any election materials.
At the polling stations, "recreational activities" of different kinds had been organised and many people stayed the night.
"We always thought October 1 was going to be very complicated, very difficult," said Assistant Chief Constable Trapote. They had prepared for two scenarios: supporting the Mossos and "having to act ourselves" in case the regional police did not comply: "we had the perception that situation might happen".
General Gozalo said that the radical separatist CDR protest groups held resistance workshops prior to October 1, although "it's not something you need a master's degree for" and that they were using a "pre-war-like language".
Superintendent Castellví told the court the Mossos had been monitoring the CDR groups since April of that year and that there was a report that spoke of "RI",
"What does 'RI' mean in this report?", the prosecutor asked.
"Revolutionary independence", Castellví replied.
"We all got the risk analysis wrong [...] the deployment [...] was not enough."
He explained that the only modification the Mossos made to their plan of notifications, reports and pairs of officers was "to increase the total number by about 800 officers".
In the early hours of October 1, the Civil Guard, the National Police and the Home Office got "reliable confirmation" the Mossos were not going to try to prevent the vote, which Colonel Pérez de los Cobos described as Scenario B.
Assistant Chief Constable Trapote rang Colonel Perez de los Cobos who rang the Secretary of State, Mr. Nieto. The answer? Scenario B, the Mossos were not carrying out the court order.
Colonel Pérez de los Cobos described their performance in the early hours of October 1 as "non-existent".
"Major Trapero's excuse [for police not to act on October 1] was that there were small children and elderly people", said Mr. Nieto.
"We found a significant number of people gathered in front of the polling stations with an extra goal as well as voting: to stop the police and the Civil Guard from doing their job".
"That first part of the court order had not been carried out", said Mr. Millo: "the goal of police action was the election material, not citizens".
They observed "insufficiency, inadequacy, inefficiency, no doubt we were facing the failure of the Mossos", said Colonel Pérez de los Cobos, who canceled all the meetings he had planned with the regional police for that day: "there was no point".
When Civil Guard and National Police riot officers arrived at polling stations, "we came across the second big surprise of the day: the increasing severity of the situation we had to face" with "perfectly organised masses" that prevented officers from carrying out court orders.
The Mossos did not deply the BRIMO, their riot police, on October 1. "I do not have any record of it", said Mr. Nieto. There was a "Barcelona-Las Palmas" game, replied Mr. Castellví.
Mr. Millo held a press conference to again ask Carles Puigdemont to call off the referendum.
In response, the First Minister of Catalonia "criticised the state very harshly, describing it as repressive" and "ended up applauding the people who were defending the ballot boxes", which Millo found "tremendously irresponsible" because "it necessarily implies opposing the actions of the judicial police".
Police commanders and Home Office experts confirmed there were clashes, confrontation, violence and resistance, a "virulent attitude" in the words of more than one witness.
Initially passive resistance "became active," said Colonel Perez de los Cobos, "in some cases Mossos were seen holding the ballot boxes while citizens voted". He described the actions of the regional police on October 1 as "a massive scam and show".
The pairs of Mossos officers sent to polling stations, said Assistant Chief Constable Trapote, could not do anything faced with the large crowds that had gathered "because that was Utopian".
The police denied riot officers charged in the technical sense of that phrase, although "there was a use of force", Mr. Nieto confirmed.
The aim at all times was to try to comply with the court order to seize the election materials, and all of the witnesses characterised the use of force as proportional.
Colonel Pérez de los Cobos said units were deployed throughout the day, "there was no order to stop acting", although there were fewer deployments in the evening.
Decisions to withdraw were made by the unit commanders depending on the situation at each polling station. Mr. Trapote confirmed this was also the case with the National Police.
Mr. Nieto explained that it was also due to "a physical issue", as officers had been out on the streets since five in the morning: "There was no political order to withdraw police units on the evening of October 1".
General Gozalo, asked about the use of "pepper spray" in the town of Aiguaviva, denied it was any such thing, "no Civil Guard officer used pepper spray", but rather "a personal defence spray", one of the tools officers have at their disposal.
"It was about officers getting inside [...] trying to open a passage for the team that was going to carry out the court order."
The colonel said 93 Civil Guard officers were injured that day, and Mr. Trapote added 65 national police officers. Neither of them were officially informed of the number of civilians injured, although they both saw the figure of 800 or 850 mentioned in the media.
Asked by Vox, the private prosecution, how many Mossos officers had been injured, Superintendent Castellví replied: "I cannot answer that because it is not my area of expertise".
There were "a dozen or so" arrests on October 1, according to Mr. Nieto: "not even that".
Both Mr. Trapote and General Gozalo described a hostile environment at the polling stations.
"They were organised, they blocked us, they attacked us," said Trapote: "virulence, aggression, even making human chains in order to block access to the polling stations".
Asked why they had not mediated with the groups outside, he answered "Mediate with who? […] They were not letting us into the polling stations, how were we going to mediate?".
Gozalo described how there could be "a group of people who harmonically brought themselves together" at the door to block access but "then that resistance mutated into a greater degree of virulence".
Of the 2,259 polling stations opened on October 1, Superintendent Castellví estimated at 110 or 134 those were closed by the Mossos, and hid rhetorically behind the use of the pairs of officers again: "Throughout the day, there was a pair, at least, at those polling stations".
"The action plan was not changed, there was that increase [...] and there were no more modifications, I seem to remember".
"The perception of reality the Catalan government had was completely different from the one we had", said Mr. Nieto: "everything was quite surreal".
He added that a climate of "parallel legality, almost a parallel reality" had been created.
"The world was a bit upside down", Mr. Millo said. Catalan institutions had called the referendum and then called people out to "defend our institutions".
"Under the rule of law, civic coexistence is impossible without respect for the law", said Colonel Pérez de los Cobos.
http://www.thespainreport.es/articl...le-of-law-and-cheated-spain-on-october-1-2017
Ostras, ¿otra que tampoco tiene permiso de citarte?
Ahora me autoflagelo, por haberte citado, pero es que a veces mi deseo de citarte es más fuerte que el impacto de tu prohibición...
O que te paguen unos catalinos fraccionados por cada post
Paquita, ¿no te acuerdas de lo que nos reíamos con la Yenka por aquellos días? Hasta pusimos el vídeo de la canción.
¿De los catalanes? Creía que era solo cosa de los políticos - Pujol el más experto en ello pero otros lo han hecho también - de identificar "los catalanes" con "yo" o "algunos catalanes".
Lo que veo en este hilo es que hay varios foreros muy críticos con el independentismo que son catalanes. Así que no tiene sentido identificar "los catalanes" con "las personas que creen que la ley se respeta solo mientras nos guste".
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¡Aquí una! Y más catalana que el Virolai.
Me pregunto qué responsabilidad ha vulnerado el Rey. ¿Esto va por el discurso del 3 de octubre? A mí me pareció que era lo que tenía que hacer, salir en defensa de la constitución y decir a los catalanes no independentistas que el Estado no les va a dejar solos.
Que tenía que haberse hecho antes? Probablemente, aunque no por el Rey.
Timing perfecto, y palabras absolutamente dentro de la Constitución. Como debe hacer (porque la ley está por encima de todos, no solo de Torra, Junqueras, etc. sino también del Rey).
