"Difficult times are ahead and we need to have a team of honest, serious and tough people for those Catalan sons of bitches and those Basque sons of bitches. The Basques have been spooked, I know. Because of that they're shit-scared." This sentence from former Spanish police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo while conversing with the government undersecretary for security and number two in the interior ministry, Francisco Martínez, on the subject of Operation Catalonia, was uttered on November 29th, 2012, four days after the Catalan elections in which support for the centre-right Catalanista grouping Convergència i Unió (CiU) fell from 62 to 50 deputies, amid a disinformation campaign by the newspaper El Mundo, which published false police reports on accounts in Switzerland controlled by party leader and Catalan president Artur Mas. Villarejo asks him for money to continue the campaign against the pro-independence forces and Martínez wants to slow down the operation. The manipulation orchestrated by the interior ministry had paid off and CiU had received a torpedo at the waterline, making the coalition vulnerable. It is now known that none of this happened by chance and the electoral twist was a full-fledged political manipulation orchestrated by the Spanish government.
The fact that on a daily basis we are hearing audio recordings of Villarejo speaking with different people, sometimes members of the Spanish government or the second level of the executive of that time, other times with judges of the high judicial authorities - and also with renowned journalists conversing with the ex-commissioner - demonstrates the extent to which a political, judicial and media conspiracy destabilized Catalonia in those years. How everything had turned into a huge mudfight in which the only objective was to stop the pro-independence parties - and if it had to be done with faked evidence of corruption, it was done and there was no problem. The fact that at this late stage no investigation of any kind has been opened by the public prosecutors, even one that was merely informative, to focus on the case, gives an idea of the poor functioning of the Spanish institutions.
We can't wind back the clock and the events that occurred, no matter how many times it is said that they are extremely serious, will not be rewound and we will not return to 2012. At the point at which, as heard in the audios, Villarejo said: "This work [that of Operation Catalonia], one day, someone will write about this because we have changed the history of this country." Today we know that this was the case and that the state operation which was launched altered the political map in such a way that the political balances existing up to that date were destroyed and the Catalan nationalists of CiU lost the political hegemony they had held since 1980. What the ballot boxes were not able to do was achieved by a mafia government with a corrupt police force, to the point of adulterating electoral results and politically and economically destroying people who were thus not able to win the battle of public opinion.
The point was that the machinery for the fabrication of lies was perfectly greased: "I'm the only one who, at eight o'clock in the evening, can say to a fool like Inda: 'Oh, that, why don't you publish that, pa-pa-pa-pa...' And at nine o'clock it's being printed [in El Mundo]," Villarejo recounts in the audio. And it was exactly as he explains it, the story was published and there was no way to reverse the lie, as everyone subscribed to it, some because they believed it and others because they knew they had a lot to gain. Although we have seen, both actively and passively, how they closed ranks with the PP, understandably for Vox and Ciudadanos, and shamefully, the PSOE too on many occasions, so that the free-for-all approach from 2012 has continued, in the form of the police and judicial persecution of the independence movement and, more recently, has led to the scandalous case of espionage known as Catalangate.
This amounts to more than a decade of using any method, no matter how illegal, to remove a country's democratic leaders and a democratic movement. All to save and defend a monolithic idea of Spain. As Villarejo says, to "change the history of Spain" and teach "those Catalan sons of bitches" a lesson.