If the shameful spectacle being staged by the Spanish political parties over the parliamentary commission into Operation Catalonia is useful for anything, it is to verify that uncovering the truth of the state's actions and the use of all its machinery of dirty warfare is only of interest to the Catalan independence movement. No one else wants to even come close to the great mass of illegal actions launched by the PP and the PSOE starting in 2012 and which involved the different institutions of the Spanish state in a political operation aimed at the civil extermination of the movement's leaders through political elimination and economic ruin. Since the excrement hidden under the official carpets is abundant and all who took part are engaging in mutual protection so that we do not find out anything, they veto essential appearances and try to turn the parliamentary commission into an irrelevant and inconsequential political event.
The fact that they have only been able to agree on calling former police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and the former owner of the expropriated Banca Privada d'Andorra (BPA) is, moreover, an especially obvious sign that the PSOE and PP do not want to open up the issue at all. In the case of Villarejo, whose main activity in recent years has been to talk, his agendas and statements have already provided multiple headlines and it seems difficult to imagine that he can add anything new. In addition, the ex-commissioner is a character of at least dubious reputation, since he has played countless roles, and thus his testimonies do not make it easy to follow the trail of truth. In any case, what is true is that he was aware of everything, that he was not acting as a free agent and that he was the interlocutor in the dirty war.
In fact, Villarejo has already placed Mariano Rajoy at the top of Operation Catalonia, and, raising the bar beyond the former Spanish interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, the ex-defence minister and former PP secretary general, María Dolores de Cospedal and former deputy PM of Spain, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, it is the prime minister of the government between the years 2011 and 2018 who should be summoned by the parliamentary commission, as the pro-independence parties have requested. It is inexcusable for this not to happen and there must be insistence on it, although the Socialists will work to ensure there are barriers making it impossible with just as much zeal as the PP does.
This is because, at the point we have reached, everyone knows that it was not an operation by the Spanish government, but rather, an operation by the Spanish state and that all the powers that represent the state were informed of it. That it was cooked up by Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and the late Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba and that the king emeritus knew of it and took it for granted, necessary as it was to reinforce his loss of prestige and popularity. In April 2012 it was known that he had a lover, Corinna Larsen, and that he spent long periods of time with her. In one of these interludes he had an accident hunting elephants in Botswana and after recovering in a hospital in Madrid he made the statements that certified his irreversible demise: "I'm very sorry, it won't happen again." Coincidences of life, the quest goes on to find out the truth of what happened in those years with the emeritus himself about to touch down in Sanxenxo, arriving from his golden exile in the United Arab Emirates and after a stopover in London.
Ultimately, what will end up being left of the commission on Operation Catalonia will not be more than fluff. Dignifying this as anything other than an authentic swindle should not be attempted, at least in Catalonia. At least as long as politics has not definitively mutated into vaudeville.