The Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) detected yesterday morning a large-scale deployment of Civil Guard agents in Girona, where the Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, lives, to prevent him from being able to vote. Some fifty anti-riot vehicles of the gendarmerie had been dedicated to the task, El Nacional has learnt. This was to be the first great hit of the operation to repress the referendum.
The president was meant to vote in the sports centre in Sant Julià de Ramis, the polling stations corresponding to his usual residence. It wasn't a secret. The Catalan government had announced, as before any vote, the time and place the president would vote. They did the same for the other members of the executive. In fact, the vice-president, Oriol Junqueras', polling station was found in the morning to have the locks covered with silicon, forcing the set up of an alternative.
Puigdemont's plan was to vote first thing in the morning, almost as soon as polling started, specifically at 9:30am, to then head to Barcelona. When his vehicle was getting ready to set off, however, the news arrived that the police operation had started in Sant Julià.
In fact, Sant Julià saw one of the first and most violent operations by the Civil Guard, who smashed the front doors of a building with sledgehammers, indeed, who smashed many doors they found in their path.
It was due to this that the president's security detail immediately put into action one of the alternative plans they had prepared, for him to vote in Cornellà de Terri, a village just 5.5km from Sant Julià. The Catalan government had just announced the switch to a universal census, which allowed voters to go to any centre.
The local council in Cornellà was alerted that they might receive a visit from Puigdemont and activated their own resources to secure the president's polling station. This had to happen without anyone realising who was about to arrive to avoid the news spreading and reaching the Spanish state's forces. Maximum speed was needed to escape the enormous operation deployed so nearby.
It wasn't the only alternative plan. There were others, but to carry out any of them, they needed to throw off a helicopter from the state's forces that was monitoring the president's movements.
To achieve this, the president's vehicle and his escort stopped for just seconds under a bridge, it has emerged. There, Puigdemont and his wife, Marcela Topor, got out of the official car and changed into one of the other vehicles.
The official car turned around and doubled back to the president's private home, whilst the escort car, with Puigdemont and his wife aboard, headed to Cornellà. There, they were waiting for him, and within mere minutes the president had already placed his vote into the ballot box and the image had been immortalised by the cameras present.
From that moment, the work to keep the ballot box safe fell to the local council, who had already prepared a hiding place for it in case the centre saw the kind of invasion others suffered.
This could be the plot of a spy movie, but, in reality, it was nothing more than one of the many scenes played out during the day of the referendum.