The fact that seven of the eight extreme rightists convicted of the assault on the Catalan government's Blanquerna centre in Madrid, already have an open prison regime and one of them has been granted it less than a month entering prison has no explanation. And what it has instead, as you can all imagine or suspect, is a sense of immorality so great that it's hard to believe that justice could be so ideologically biased. There are clearly many examples in Catalonia in which the situation is the utter opposite: without going any further, all that it took before the pro-independence prisoners were allowed an open prison regime and the speed with which the Supreme Court then moved to revoke it.
Indeed, the case of the far rightists who stormed the Blanquerna bookstore is a textbook tale that from the very outset can only be explained through ideological reasons. We are talking about events that took place in September 2013 and that after tortuous legal comings and goings - with a ruling by the Constitutional Court that forced the Supreme Court to redraft its judgment, leaving out the aggravating factor of ideological discrimination - obtained a final sentence in July 2020. Thus, seven years went by from the moment that those fanatics violently entered the bookshop and cultural centre to disrupt the celebration of September 11th, the National Day of Catalonia, which was taking place there.
But it didn't end there. Through several further courtroom moves, the Supreme Court's final sentence was avoided and the sentence was changed to a little short of three years in prison for offences of public disorder. It took more than a year for the first of the extremists to enter prison and the last of them, Pedro Chaparro, head of the neo-Nazi party Democracia Nacional, who went into prison custody in mid-March, has now also received open prison privileges. This regime means that prisoners are only required to spend nights in the prison, and indeed, only those from Sunday to Thursday - because for the rest of the time, including the whole weekend, they are free.
Although we have known for a long time that justice in Spain is not the same for everyone and the Catalan pro-independence leaders and the 3,000 other people targeted by state retaliation know this directly, such situations must not be accepted without even lodging a complaint. Not because it implies different treatment for Catalan independence supporters, but because what can be concluded from how the almost-nine years of the Blanquerna case have passed is that the far right has played this legal battle with marked cards. Knowing that, ultimately, it would find refuge during the judicial process. And that is serious and worrying. How can you not expect Vox to grow if the ground has been made fertile and this Spain in black and white ends up controlling the main resources of the state?