How many times have we offered our hand and shown our willingness to create a broad consensus and talk with everyone? Despite long pre-trial imprisonments, the regression of rights and freedoms and the systematic application by the Spanish government of economic and political measures that damage our society as a whole, we have kept a door open to dialogue. We have never stood up from the table, ever. We precipitated the fall of the Popular Party government, responsible for an ignominious police operation that on October 1st 2017 battered peaceful citizens who were only exercising the right to vote. All of the Catalan democrats offered an opportunity to the Spanish Socialists (PSOE) and at the same time to the Catalan Socialists (PSC) to open a process of frank, calm dialogue, to talk about everything. In return all we have received is growing contempt. Until when?
When the PSC demands that we respect the most unjust of sentences, it is also demanding respect for the fact that Dolors Bassa has been convicted for, among other reasons, opening schools on October 1st, 2017, despite Dolors Bassa not having been the Catalan minister of education, but rather the minister of labour and social affairs. Until when?
The PSC says that it defends dialogue while applauding the cruelty of its courts against Carme Forcadell precisely for defending dialogue in Parliament. When the PSC says that it wants to promote social harmony in Catalonia, does it refer to the harmony of all the innocent people imprisoned with our children at home? Until when?
Do you remember, Miquel Iceta, when in 2012 you backed a referendum on independence? "It has to be possible to do it", you said, "because in advanced democracies it can be done". Well, today, here and now, we are in prison for having carried out a referendum while you today will be walking, once again, side by side with the right which refuses to condemn Francoism and which makes pacts with the extreme right. Until when?
If Miquel Iceta and his colleagues have clear consciences they should come to prison to tell me what's just about this sentence, looking me in the eyes, and looking our families and friends in the eyes. Will you come, Miquel? Your friends in the Supreme Court say you have 13 years to decide.
We have to make this country among all of us, assuming the will of the majority, not locking up ideas, reducing rights and freedoms, and preventing the Catalans from being what they democratically and peacefully want to be.
Lledoners, October 2019