Under the guise of ending an official secrets law approved under Franco's dictatorship, during the time of admiral Carrero Blanco, and revised in October 1978, a little before the Spanish Constitution was passed, the government of Pedro Sánchez is about to approve the draft bill on classified information that aims to cover up - in a layer of opacity, silence and darkness - the key events that have taken place in Spain for 50 years after they occur, with possible extension in exceptional cases for another 10 years. In other words, in practice, we will never find out anything in the lifetime of those who took significant actions and everything will be left in the hands of historians.
This will happen, for example, with the 23-F attempted military coup of 1981, which would be declassified - if the maximum deadline was applied - in 2041; or the events of the post-Franco transition or the GAL state death squads, for which we might be waiting for the official information to be declassified until the year 2035, and it could be extended into the decade of the 2040s. Franco's famous phrase atado y bien atado - "everything very well secured" - applies here once again, since such a long period is not common in the democracies around us. In the United States, for example, all secrecy is declassified after 20 years at the most, as an exercise in a certain transparency, and the president can thus be tried in his lifetime by public opinion. In other countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Portugal or Italy the usual term is about half of what the new law seeks to implement in Spain.
Regarding the decade of the independence movement in Catalonia, which began in 2012, we will have to wait until 2072 to find out what the official decisions were regarding Operation Catalonia and the state's will to crush the sovereignty movement. Even if there is a lot of dirty business to be buried by the Spanish state - what we have known about ex-police commissioner Villarejo must be just an appetizer, however scandalous it may seem to us to hear audios from members of the Spanish cabinet that Mariano Rajoy presided over - what Pedro Sánchez's executive is trying to do is completely outrageous.
Surely it must be connected to the People's Party, Vox and Ciudadanos, this alternative majority with which the government pushes things forward when it does not have the majority of the investiture, the one which included Unidas Podemos, the Catalan Republican Left, Bildu and the Basque Nationalists. The ease with which Sánchez manoeuvres when it comes to protecting things that matter to the deep state clearly reflects that there is a majority of the '78 regime that exceeds any electoral result, that is always at the service of an idea of Spain and is capable of always protecting itself. Whatever the cost.