“They have presented as a success what is the failure of the Catalan Generalitat government and its party (referring to former governing party CiU, now PDeCat). Two out of three Catalans, under-age minors and foreigners, have ignored them.” On the 9th of November, known as 9-N, 2,344,828 people —over the age of 16— participated in a non-binding poll on the independence of Catalonia. With that statement, an arithmetic stab in the back, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría dispatched the issue at the Senate in Madrid. The Deputy Prime Minister of Spain, in her role as the guardian of Constitutionalist Orthodoxy —which in Spain means nationalism— thus passed over PM Mariano Rajoy’s vacuous silence in the hours following the conclusion of the poll.
After their initial stupefaction, the apparatus of State activated all of its judicial machinery. And the media. The Catalan “failure” as they considered it, was surprisingly raised to the category of a crime of a diabolical nature. The judicialisation of the ballot was also to be that of the so-called Catalan process, the denial of politics and of democratic values. Spain —with its Hispanic testosterone, as described by Spanish author Unamuno— showed Catalonia and the world that the inquisitorial habits that had clothed its history had not been eaten away by the moths of time. Mas (along with ministers Ortega and Rigau) would be tried as the President of Catalonia and labelled a heretic. It was not the first time a President of Catalonia would be tried. In modern history Macià and Companys preceded him.
Three Catalan presidents tried in recent history: Francesc Macià, Lluís Companys and Artur Mas
1927: Macià and the Prats de Molló plot
In 1926 Catalonia lived under the boot of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. The Catalan Mancomunitat or Commonwealth —the proto-autonomous body created in 1914— had been shut down. The Spanish government, in full reactionary offensive, had unleashed a systematic, brutal persecution of any Catalan expression—whether political or cultural. In this context Francesc Macià devised a plan to free Catalonia: independence. For months, he sought funding in the Americas amongst the Catalans who had made their fortunes there. He managed to gather over 8 million pesetas, the equivalent today of €50 million. He created a powerful clandestine propaganda apparatus, bought weapons and instructed 500 volunteers who were to initiate the revolution for independence in the Pyrenean region of La Garrotxa.
Francesc Macià, right, at the trial in Paris in 1927
Macià's romantic dream came to nothing. As they were about to cross the border —at Prats de Molló— a nephew of Italian hero Garibaldi, who had infiltrated the volunteers, betrayed the operation to Il Duce Mussolini. French gendarmes deactivated the plot, and Macià and 16 activist leaders of the Estat Català party were arrested and tried in Paris. France did not want problems with Madrid and Rome’s authoritarian regimes and so finished the affair off with a quick trial (January 20-22, 1927) and a judgement of Solomon, a symbolic condemnation. From then on, the figure of Macià would become mythical, and this led him to win a landslide victory in the first Republican elections. On April 14, 1931, he restored Catalonia’s Generalitat government and became its 122nd President.
1934: Companys, the events of the 6th of October
In 1934, there had been a sea change in the distribution of political forces in the Republic. In Madrid, government was ruled by a right-wing alliance that brought together bourgeois capital, agricultural patronage, a doctrinal clergy, and the most reactionary and grotesque Spanish nationalism. The government in Madrid executed an operation to harass and wreck Catalan home rule, with continuous references to the war and independence of Cuba (1898). A scenario with inflamatory threats and conflict fuelled on purpose by Madrid, with the aim of provoking the fall of the Catalan cabinet and the collapse of the Generalitat government. In this context of crisis, Companys reacted with the recovery of the Republican spirit —both Catalan and Spanish— by proclaiming the Catalan State within the Spanish Federal Republic.
The Spanish government mobilised the army and Barcelona —on that 6th of October— became a battlefield. Military intervention and subsequent repression led to 74 dead, 252 injured and 3,400 detainees. President Companys and his cabinet were arrested, tried and sentenced to 30 years in prison. An explosion of Hispanic testosterone diametrically opposed to the sense of opportunity of French politics. The Generalitat was literally emptied out and turned into a medieval relic. Between 1934 and 1936 —the black biennium— all Catalan social policies were suspended. In jail Companys would attain a mythical standing that the exercise of politics had denied him. And in 1936 Catalonia became the tomb of the Spanish right and Companys won the high office of president democratically.
Companys and his ministers, arrested after the events of October 1934
1940: Companys, the trial of Catalonia
Companys’ court martial deserves a chapter apart. Arrested in French exile by the Nazi occupation army and handed over to Franco’s police, the trial and execution of Companys by a firing squad are the culmination of frenzied Spanish nationalism in the war of destruction of Catalonia. He was charged with sedition and rebellion, paradoxically, by those who had borne arms and rebelled, causing a tragic Civil War. Just in Catalonia, a country with 2 million inhabitants, there had been 90,000 dead and 500,000 exiles. Companys, who between 1936 and 1939 had exercised policy with ups and downs eroding his figure, finally gained the mythical status of a martyr. He is the only democratically elected president in European history to have been executed by a firing squad. It is revealing that the Spanish democratic governments have systematically refused to annul the trial.
2017: Mas, the 9-N poll: cardboard ballot boxes
“We deserve to lose Catalonia. That filthy Madrid press is doing the same job as with Cuba. They just don’t get it. It is the barbarian Castilian mentality, their ballsy brains—they have testicles in their skulls, instead of grey matter.” This passage by Spanish author Unamuno is from a letter sent to journalist, novelist and literary critic Azorín in 1907. After 110 years the quotation is still perfectly valid, and if we keep in mind that the Madrid media are the Brunete Armoured Division of Spanish media power, it is perfectly applicable —with honourable exceptions— to the whole of the Spanish political class. The trial of Mas, Ortega and Rigau can only be explained through the visceral attitude that has presided over Spanish politics, at least since the independence of Cuba. Hispanic and Hispanising reactionary implications have always been the common denominator in the crises between Catalonia and Spain.
Prime Minister Rajoy’s telling silences, deputy PM Soraya’s bizarre arithmetic, or the lapses by the Public Prosecutor —who in his conclusions did not know what the charges were or how long he was requesting for the barring of the defendants— are three examples, three little details, if you like, of what the true nature of the judicial process is. Against Mas, Ortega and Rigau, meaning against the people’s 9-N poll, meaning against the democratic will of the people of Catalonia. On the pretext of law and the rule of law —in a country with 120,000 corpses still lying in mass graves waiting to be exhumed and dignified with proper burials— Spain has tried and judged Catalonia and the popular mandate of its citizens. Just as in Cuba, the Philippines or Puerto Rico, during the processes that would lead to independence. Catalonia is the last colony in the Spanish Empire.
Joana Ortega, Artur Mas and Irene Rigau during the trial for the 9-N ballot