The trial of Miquel Buch, former Catalan interior minister, and Lluís Escolà, Mossos officer who was head of president Carles Puigdemont's police bodyguards until December 2017, began this Wednesday at the provincial court, the Barcelona Audience. Both Buch and Escolà are defendants in the case, the first for hiring the police officer as an advisor, when in reality he was allegedly acting as an undercover bodyguard for the president in exile, and the second as a collaborator in the ex-minister's plans. The sentence demand from the prosecutor is outrageous and can only be explained in a context in which the judicial persecution of the Catalan independence movement goes on. Thus, for Miquel Buch, prosecutor Pedro Ariche is calling for six years in prison and a 15-year ban on office holding for an alleged crime of misuse of public funds, in addition to another 12-year ban for abuse of his office. For police officer Lluís Escolà, the demand is for 4 years and 6 months in prison and bans on public employment for 13 years and 10 years respectively for the same crimes as Buch. The case centres on alleged events from the period between June 2018 and May 2019.
Although there is no record of any agreement or document between Miquel Buch and Carles Puigdemont - be it e-mail, WhatsApp messages or any other kind of text - that supports the public prosecutor's thesis, that the policeman acted as bodyguard for the Catalan leader once he was in exile in Waterloo - and this absence of evidence was highlighted by the Mossos superintendant, Antoni Rodríguez, who led the police investigation, the public prosecutor, who already knew this position, has come to the trial with a call for a disproportionate sentence. We will see if in subsequent days he is able to provide enough evidence to avoid the clear signs of judicial persecution given on the first day.
The independence movement has left many stories along the way, during these years of governing the Catalan institutions or, simply, defending its political positions, and each is a story on its own. The Miquel Buch case is paradigmatic of a pro-independence politician who accepted the Catalan interior portfolio in June 2018, under the presidency of Quim Torra, and held it for 27 months. He was dismissed after several public disagreements and because of the actions taken by the Mossos as a police force, which the minister backed. Thus, president and minister clashed in private and in public, which made the situation of the latter untenable in public while he was defended internally by the Mossos corps in opposing the purge of the body that Torra demanded of him.
In a division between pragmatists and radicals within the Together for Catalonia (Junts), he would be in the former bloc, and between ministers who rule from the office or from the protest marches, also in the first category. In his political career as mayor of Premià for ten years, his management obtained many more successes than reproaches. At a time when Catalan politics was operating under the banner of unity between Junts, ERC and the CUP, the last-named of this group called for his removal, which explains the always difficult complexity of an alliance which theoretically existed, but really only did so on paper. Today, in addition to the role Buch has played as a loyal politician and public servant, he adds the condition of being persecuted by justice. A kind of public flogging aimed at keeping the best people out of political life.