We will have to revise our thinking: it is not that, in Spain, pro-independence activists are being spied on with Pegasus software with judicial authorization from the Supreme Court, as well as without any authorization, using some of the so-called police sewers to discredit political opponents or obtain information on them; but rather, that the level of sophistication of these sewers, which we now know have also been used to manipulate election results, is absolutely nauseating. It is not that there are sewers in Spain, but rather that Spain is a sewer state where information is obtained through all sorts of illegal channels, police reports are invented in offices at the highest ministerial level and all this is well known by the media who receive this false information and publish it without any complaints.
All this is happening in Spain and the Ombudsman, a figure who should be independent, far from being outraged by the espionage carried out by the CNI intelligence agency, concludes very quickly that it was done "in accordance with the Constitution". Perhaps we will soon know what the rush of the socialist Ángel Gabilondo was due to, and that the reason behind it was less prosaic than a defence of the Constitution. The icing on the cake of this banana España is the return of the fugitive king, Juan Carlos I, with his arrival taking place in Sanxenxo this very Thursday, as was announced by his son's royal house on Wednesday night in a meticulously-timed and prepared official statement. In which they say that he will be in the Galician town until the 23rd, when he will travel to Madrid to see his son Felipe, queen Sofia and other members of his family at the Zarzuela palace, without specifying what is meant by his family, though he does not seem to include his daughter-in-law Letizia and their daughters.
Even though one must note that the publication by El País of these Villarejo tapes is not based on recent material, nor have the audios been obtained recently, and, moreover, the main motivation is to divert attention from the espionage against the Catalan independence movement with Pegasus spyware, there is nevertheless valuable material in them that certifies how the PP government worked to alter the 2012 election results based on the impact of a fake news story prepared by the police. That media manipulation came from the Spanish interior ministry, was run by the newspaper El Mundo, and was then amplified in the media for two weeks - across newspapers, radio, TV and talk shows, centred on bank accounts in Switzerland that didn't exist, in the name of the then-Catalan president Artur Mas. Then came, Xavier Trias' fake account in Switzerland in 2015. That fake news story deprived Trias of the mayoralty in Barcelona, while Mas lost twelve seats, going from 62 to 50, even though a month before the elections, a La Vanguardia poll gave him the absolute majority, at 68 seats. A change really only attributable to the disgraceful campaign carried out by the sewers of the state.
Because of all this, it is impossible to turn the page on what has happened with a mere promise that it won’t happen again. For more than a decade, news stories have been fabricated and people have been spied on with impunity, and this has been done by both PP and PSOE governments. The Catalan independence movement has been the victim of this entire brutal assault. There is no reason to think that it will not continue to happen and, therefore, the commission of inquiry in the Congress of Deputies as requested by the pro-independence parties and Podemos is essential. This is the only transparency that Spanish democracy can accept if it really wants to carry out a proper decontamination process and start to lift itself out of all the putrefaction that the parties of the regime of '78 are determined will never emerge. For centuries.