With many of them hiding their faces behind masks, the police officers of the Jusapol trade union, who staged a protest outside the Spanish Congress on Tuesday, must have felt very safe. A small group - who knows, perhaps, some of those who had chanted "Let's go get 'em" a little over two years ago as they travelled to Barcelona to crack down on the October 1st referendum - recognized and pursued the JxCat parliamentary deputy Laura Borràs in Carrera de San Jerónimo, the very street that contains the Spanish parliament. "Let's go get her" might perhaps have been what some among them called, camouflaged behind masks as they approached her yelling "Catalan trash", "bitch", "fucking Catalans"...
It's normal that they should have felt very comfortable and at their leisure, since those controlling the security cordons allowed them to do what they wanted at all times and treated them more as colleagues than as protesters: letting off fireworks in front of the Congress as if it was nothing, combined with the pursuit of Borràs while she was treated to insults, threats and coertion by people wearing disguises. For doing much less, here in Catalonia, legal proceedings have been opened and pro-independence leaders have been persecuted to the point of trying to ruin their lives. It's hard to imagine the silence in Madrid that surrounds all these far-right groups.
I don't even want to think about how many front pages would be taken up, how many minutes of television time would be allocated and how much would be said by parties like the PP, Ciudadanos, Vox or the PSOE if, for example, a collective from the Catalan Mossos d'Esquadra police had acted in this way with one of those parties' representatives in the Parliament of Catalonia. But of course, the members of Jusapol must have carte blanche since nobody seems to have regarded the action as punishable. There must even be the odd one who goes as far as to say that Borràs should think herself lucky to be an independence supporter and to dare to walk the streets of Madrid. Somebody - interior minister Marlaska, for example - should be very seriously examining how such shameful behaviour from the police officers on duty at the Congress was possible or why the officers who were called to assist the MP remained passive, as if it wasn't their problem. Not like this - and this must also be said - was the reaction of staff members of the Spanish lower house, who arrived speedily at the scene.
Actions are never accidental and no one will delve any further into the behaviour of Jusapol since they must have a licence to act freely for the mere fact of the credit gained through the violent actions of 1st October 2017 against the Catalan referendum or via the tribute that was made to the officers who performed in Catalonia that October. Those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind, and from those who allow silences or, even worse, outrageous complicities, this attitude of protection is as incomprehensible as it is shameful.