The subspecies pretentious point of view affirms that any political analysis of a terror attack cannot be made too soon, so as not to instrumentalize the pain of the victims with the daily partisan debates. I would say, on the contrary, and with all respect (to the dead or whoever it is), that it helps to place the facts of the events in an enlightening frame, and after the attack in Barcelona, the calls for a political analysis are more timely than ever. Today it is relevant, for example, to recall that the Catalan government (and the European police union!) had already warned the Spanish government that keeping the Mossos (Catalan police) out of the information systems of Europol was dangerous nonsense. It is also relevant to remember at the same time that Jorge Fernández Díaz (Spain's former Interior minister) got tired of attending anti-jihad summits that excluded the Mossos police, and that Juan Ignacio Zoido (his successor) delayed participating in any meeting of the Security Council of Catalonia as much as he could, despite the persistence of the Catalan government.
This is not political trivia, these are facts that underline the attempts to isolate the Mossos from the first line of European police, and as such, playing with the security of all its citizens. As is also indisputable is the fact that yesterday the leaders of the Spanish state were absent from Catalonia until dawn (seven hours after the attack, seven!) - until Mariano Rajoy came to the fore to remind us compulsively that we all have to be “united" in front of the barbarity. Seven hours - four hundred and twenty minutes, it took! Neither Rajoy, nor his deputy prime minister (who is capable of sneaking ahead almost like a spy for any secessionist declaration, just to counteract it a few seconds later), nor King Felipe VI of Bourbon were present, whilst Carles Puigdemont and Ada Colau had already rolled up their sleeves and had set to work for their citizens, condemning the attack and behaving like two authentic leaders of the nation.
Yesterday Catalonia lived a rehearsal of independence for seven hours, and this is, and will be – regardless of what anyone says – one of the memorable facts of this historical 17th August. Many had fed the sentiment that the Mossos were a shoddy police force; many had speculated that Barcelona would be a city incapable of responding to a terrorist attack, since it couldn't even control an issue of vandalism on a tourist bus; many fuelled the feeling that the capital had lost its capacity to welcome foreigners and was lacking a cosmopolitan spirit. All of them, my poor little things, have had to swallow not only how the city has reacted to terror with an unprecedented maturity and solidarity unheard of on the planet, but that the people from Barcelona have applauded their own police and their emergency services, conscious of having a public service of first division quality. Meanwhile, Rajoy took a walk of his own.
Yesterday, as I already anticipated in El Nacional, some tribal journalists, as innumerable as disgusting, took advantage of things to point out the (hypothetical) instability of Catalan politics as an enabling source for this terrorist attack. What hurts them most, symptomatically, is that the Catalan authorities reacted precisely as one should to the attack. What they can't accept, the poor things, is how the Mossos cleared the centre of Barcelona within minutes, that the emergency services were attending the injured within such a short time that would be the envy of New York, and that families from all over the world, despite their grief, are saying great things about how they have been cared for in Catalonia during the most traumatic day of their lives. They can't bear that the country has acted as an authentic power, nor that citizens are applauding police officers who they never wanted to be born. They can't.
They are annoyed by the simple fact of independence, even if it provokes signs of pride and of worldwide appreciation. They cannot bear it, not even for seven hours!