The National Court Prosecutor’s Office, commanded by Chief Prosecutor Jesús Alonso, is the competent body to investigate open cases for crimes of terrorism throughout the country. Their work sheet usually includes procedures related to the terrorist organization ETA and the jihadist cells dismantled by the State Security Forces and Bodies. But in the list of causes “most relevant in the area of terrorism” also appear the so-called “actions against violent independence in Catalonia”, as specified in the annual report of the Public Ministry released this Thursday.
This protagonism of the “violent independence movement” for the Prosecutor’s Office is not minor, since it demonstrates its priorities with respect to the rest of the actions against terrorism. It does so, moreover, in a context where matters relating to Catalonia and the ‘procés’ have transcended from the judicial to the political and have become a touchstone for achieving governability in the country after the general elections of 23 of July.
The reason is that the possible investiture of Pedro Sánchez, in the event that the popular Alberto Núñez Feijóo fails, depends on the result of the negotiation that the PSOE maintains with Junts, the party of Carles Puigdemont, whose seven seats are decisive to avoid a electoral repetition on January 14. A debate that last Tuesday already saw the catalog of claims, as detailed from Brussels by the fugitive independence leader from the Spanish Justice for the cause of the ‘procés’.
Puigdemont’s main request is the “dejudicialization” of the ‘procés’, that is, to approve an amnesty law that annuls the dozens of cases derived from the 2017 sovereignist process, which have some 700 investigated in the courts and tribunals. And at the center of these issues is, precisely, one of the cases that the Prosecutor of the National Court considers “relevant”: the ‘operation Judas’ against the so-called Committees for the Defense of the Republic (CDR).
“Selected Targets”
At least since autumn 2017, after the illegal referendum in Catalonia was held, the Civil Guard identified the existence and proliferation of these radical groups as a threat. This hypothesis was reinforced after the violent acts produced after the judgment of the ‘procés’ was known two years later. As a consequence of the foregoing, 12 individuals were arrested, seven of whom are currently being prosecuted for crimes of terrorism and manufacturing explosives. They integrated, within the CDR, the so-called Tactical Response Teams (ERT).
The last known resolution on this cause is from last June. The Prosecutor’s Office urged the examining magistrate to sit the defendants on the bench for forming “a clandestine group” willing to carry out actions that required “violence at its best” to force the institutions to “concede by means of the facts of the separation of Catalonia from the rest of Spain”.
Judge Manuel García Castellón maintains that this group came to constitute “a parallel terrorist organization, clandestine and stable, whose objective would be to carry out violent actions or attacks against previously selected targets.”
This strategy was embodied in “motorway cuts, occupation of symbolic buildings, airport blockade and general mobilizations” and in “actions against critical infrastructures” (motorways and El Prat airport). But where the CDR had a greater role was in the most violent protests against the sentence of the ‘procés’, when they staged road blocks, the spill of oil on the road of the C-55, a place of obligatory passage of the procession that the independence leaders were transferred from the Lledoners prison on February 1, 2019, the lifting of the toll barriers or the acts of protest against the holding of a Council of Ministers in Barcelona.
In short, the “relevance” that the Prosecutor’s Office attributes to this cause of terrorism contrasts with the possibility that all these events end up being amnestied, by virtue of the result of the negotiation between PSOE and Junts, which is clear that all actions must be annulled. judicialized against the CDR to give their parliamentary support to Sánchez.
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