Our citizens are dying and our hospitals overwhelmed. Either we respond with unwavering solidarity or our union fails, writes the Spanish prime minister
www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/apr/05/europes-future-is-at-stake-in-this-war-against-coronavirus
Europe is enduring its worst crisis since the second world war. Our citizens are dying, or fighting for their lives in hospitals that are overwhelmed by a pandemic which represents the greatest threat to public health since the 1918 flu pandemic.

The European Union is facing a different war from those we have successfully averted over the past 70 years: a war against an invisible enemy that is putting the future of the European project to the test.

The circumstances are exceptional and call for unwavering positions: either we rise to this challenge or we will fail as a union. We have reached a critical juncture at which even the most fervently pro-European countries and governments, as is Spain’s case, need real proof of commitment. We need unwavering solidarity.

Solidarity between Europeans is a key principle of the EU treaties. And it is shown at times like this. Without solidarity there can be no cohesion, without cohesion there will be disaffection and the credibility of the European project will be severely damaged.

We welcome a number of significant measures that have been announced over the past few weeks, including the European Central Bank’s new temporary emergency purchase programme and the European commission’s SURE plan for those who have lost their jobs. But these measures are not enough on their own. We must go further.

Europe must build a wartime economy and promote European resistance, reconstruction and recovery. It must start doing so as soon as possible with measures to support the public debt that many states, including Spain, are taking on. And it must continue to do so when this health emergency is over, to rebuild the continent’s economies by mobilising significant resources through a plan we are calling the new Marshall plan and which will require the backing of all of the EU’s common institutions.

Europe was born out of the ashes of destruction and conflict. It learned the lessons of history and understood something very simple: if we don’t all win, in the end, we all lose.

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We can turn this crisis into an opportunity to rebuild a much stronger European Union. But to do so, we need to implement ambitious measures. If we continue to think small, we will fail.

The United States responded to the recession of 2008 with a stimulus package, while Europe responded with austerity. We all know the outcome. Today, when we are on the brink of a global economic crisis of an even greater magnitude than that of 2008, the US has implemented the greatest mobilisation of public resources in its history.

Is Europe willing to be left behind?

It is time to break with old, national dogmas. We have entered a new era and we need new responses. Let us hold on to our positive values and reinvent the rest.

In the coming months, the EU member states will inevitably take on greater volumes of debt to deal with the consequences of what is not just a health crisis, but an economic and social crisis. That is why the response cannot be the same as that envisaged for asymmetric economic shocks, such as a financial or banking crisis in a single state or group of states. If the virus does not respect borders, then nor should financing mechanisms.

Provided that it is universal and not subject to conditions, the European Stability Mechanism may be useful in the initial stages to inject liquidity into EU economies through a line of credit. But this is not going to be sufficient in the medium term.

The challenge we face is extraordinary and unprecedented. It calls for a single, united, radical and ambitious response to preserve our economic and social system and protect our citizens.

The Spanish have always protected and defended the European project. It is time for reciprocity. With us, with Italy and with each and every one of the 27 countries of the union.

It is time to act with solidarity in creating a new debt mutualisation mechanism, acting as a single bloc for the purchase of essential medical supplies, establishing coordinated cybersecurity strategies, and preparing a major emergency plan to ensure that the continent’s recovery is rapid and robust.

This solidarity has to ensure that there are no gaps between north and south, that we leave no one behind.

These are very challenging times which require bold decisions. Millions of Europeans believe in the European Union. We must not abandon them. We must give them reasons to keep believing. And we must act now or never, because, right at this moment, Europe itself is at stake.

Pedro Sánchez is the prime minister of Spain

www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/02/a-people-betrayed-by-paul-preston-review-a-magisterial-study-of-spains-turbulent-past
From Primo de Rivera to General Franco … a lively account of corruption, political incompetence and social division in modern Spain

​By Helen Graham, The Guardian, Thursday 2 April 2020

Paul Preston is Britain’s foremost historian of contemporary Spain. A People Betrayed is a magisterial study of its turbulent past, seen through the optic of those apparently ineradicable twins: corruption and political incompetence. Preston’s central argument is that these phenomena undermined the possibility of political and social cohesion in Spain when the country emerged into the 20th century as an urbanising and industrialising society.

While corruption and political incompetence were, and are, prevalent in Spain, they are scarcely unique to it. Yet there has been a pronounced tendency among British authors to write with condescension about Spain’s “troubles”. Preston himself has never done so, and has never engaged in the mythologising of “untroubled” Britain that accompanies it. The fact that he wrote A People Betrayed in the shadow of Brexit, with its home-grown pathology of lies, corruption and eye-popping incompetence, means there is much in his acute analysis of another country’s ills to illuminate our own present malaise.

The book’s dual valency – past and present – is a helpful bonus, though not a surprising one. For the corruption Preston investigates in Spain, especially its tentacular embeddedness, comes with the territory of modern states and societies. Their ever greater complexity creates new opportunities for dishonesty and manipulation, notably now at the opaque interface between government and private and corporate interest. Reading Preston on the state as milch cow for the privileged in 19th- and early 20th-century Spain has a depressing present-day ring to it. (Even though for some decades we have lived with the neoliberal paradox that rightwingers are happy to milk the state but now do so while lambasting it as “expensive”, restrictive and a bad thing all round.)
In Spain, the milch cow state was challenged to some extent in the 1930s, as Preston relates, by a new political project of social levelling. Some republican leaders had begun to think in terms of an inclusive nation and of politics as a form of public service. These ideas were defeated when the republic lost the war of 1936-39 – fought against Franco, and against the interventions of Hitler and Mussolini.

The war was triggered by a military coup against republican reforms, and was largely bankrolled by the Mallorcan smuggler and speculator Juan March, then one of the richest men in the world. His image as no-holds-barred, can-do, “made in Spain”, is stripped down by Preston’s observation that he wasn’t so much the epitome of Spanish super-hombre, as just one more robber baron, an epitome of capitalism tout court. He had earlier been implicated in the assassination of a business rival who’d also been his wife’s lover. After intimidating journalists and investigating magistrates, March finally had the case shelved, in consummate oligarch fashion, via the unbeatable combination of money and high political connections.

Franco’s military victory produced nearly four decades of a personal dictatorship (1939-75), which Preston rightly assesses as the most corrupt, violent and unequal era in modern Spanish history. Francoism, underpinned by the military and proclaiming its mission as “saving the nation”, ended up serving the interests of a very small sector of society while violently reinforcing social and political hierarchies and expanding state nepotism. Around Franco (who amassed a vast personal fortune) revolved generals, Falangists, “national Catholics” and his own family, all enriching themselves – the family members via notorious property speculation. His sister Pilar, who presented herself as a widow rendered penniless by her honesty, in fact made a fortune in illegal property deals, all based on elaborate swindles and massive subornment, and all dependent on her connections. Franco’s rule solidified Spain’s historic divide between the people and the governing political class, not least because, in the end, his support in the poor rural heartlands was the source in the 1960s of migrants for Spain’s expanding industrial centres. All of this Franco achieved on the basis of a military victory underwritten by Hitler; the Nazis’ ferocious dream of irreversible hierarchy lived on in Francoism.
Elsewhere in western Europe the scale of human destruction involved in the overthrow of the Third Reich made it hard for the opponents of social democracy to argue against states becoming more socially inclusive. Those opponents did not disappear: instead they focused their critiques on the easier target of “totalitarianism”, while also going to ground to await a more propitious moment. That moment is now fully upon us, and has taken the form of an ideologically driven, and violent “austerity”. Aside from assuring the personal enrichment of the “well-placed”, this austerity seems otherwise to be imposing the restoration of pre-1914 forms of politics, social hierarchy and patronage. In the UK we face something reminiscent of the earlier Spanish model, described in terms both colourful and bleak by Preston, in which the state enacts sectarian policies that cause very large sectors of the population to look on it as alien and illegitimate.

But if corruption and enduring forms of nepotistic state practice and social behaviour have never by themselves made Spain, or Franco, “different” then something about its powerful military once did. In July 1936, longstanding mistrust between army and civil society led ultra-conservative sectors within the officer corps, angry at civilian politicians they blamed for the end of empire, to “colonise” Spain itself, thus triggering the civil war. Preston points to the many ways in which the military itself had long been corrupt, before this reached new levels under Francoism. Since Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 70s the army has been transformed. But the severe limits on how much change was possible also mean that corruption and nepotism remain embedded in the Spanish state and society, just as much of Francoism does.

 A People Betrayed races along in riveting fashion, replete with eye-catching and often blackly humorous anecdotes
The history recounted in A People Betrayed is a long one, but it races along in riveting fashion, replete with eye-catching and often blackly humorous anecdotes – especially for the Franco period and after, involving politicians, bankers, policemen and the royal family. Preston’s narrative combines his gift for cogent, summarising clarity and for telling detail – that the traffic in monopolies included one for rat extermination will stick in many readers’ minds. So too will his account of the ongoing and celebrated Gürtel case. As a stratospheric example of crony capitalism, Gürtel has it all – extensive bribery, traffic in public posts, embezzlement, money laundering and tax evasion, involving top conservative party politicians (from the Partido Popular) as well as moguls, fixers, consultants and city councillors. Gürtel’s unravelling also exposes levels of acquisitiveness bordering on the psychotic

Preston’s most original chapter is on the Primo de Rivera military dictatorship of the 1920s (the rat extermination scam era). De Rivera had a taste for making off-the-wall public pronouncements – a tweeting Trump of his times. Franco learned much from him, especially about kleptocracy laced with patriotic spin: both dictators siphoned off coerced “national” subscriptions to their personal coffers, and De Rivera even funded a new house for himself by ordering deductions to be taken from people’s pay. It was under De Rivera too, as this admirable book makes clear, that the key ideas of national Catholicism were honed, which later underpinned Franco’s fascist state. Preston has written an admirable book – a lively, comprehensive history of modern Spain, but also, at barely one remove, a compelling essay on contemporary corruption, which is especially worthy of attention today, as we confront an emergency that underlines what states are really for.

Helen Graham is the author of The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction
OUP Oxford, Mar 24, 2005 - History - 192 pages

Rafael Gómez Nieto, who has died from coronavirus, was last survivor of WW2 La Nueve force


www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/ex-soldier-death-casts-light-spaniards-helped-liberate-paris-rafael-gomez-nieto

The death from coronavirus of a 99-year-old former soldier who was the last surviving member of a company of predominantly Spanish troops who helped liberate Paris from Nazi occupation has thrown a spotlight on one of the lesser-known events in French history.

Rafael Gómez Nieto, who fought against Franco in the Spanish civil war before joining the allied war effort, died after contracting Covid-19 in a nursing home in Strasbourg.

Gómez Nieto grew up in a town in the Almería region of Andalucía, the son of a career soldier who had been part of the royal guard to the Spanish king Alfonso XIII.

After fighting as part of the republican forces in the civil war – and seeing action in the four-month Battle of the Ebro, considered to be the conflict’s longest and bloodiest battle – he crossed the border into France along with about 500,000 of his compatriots.
Following a brief internment he travelled to north Africa, where he joined the 9th company of the Régiment de Marche du Tchad, part of the 2nd Armoured Division, commanded by Gen Philippe Leclerc. Not for nothing was the company known by its Spanish name – La Nueve or La Española.

One hundred and forty-six of the company’s 160 men were Spanish and, despite serving in the French army and under a French commanding officer, they were permitted to stitch the red, yellow and purple flag of Spain’s second republic on to their uniforms.

They were also allowed to paint the flag on their vehicles, which rolled into Paris emblazoned with names such as Guernica and Don Quichotte (Don Quixote). Spanish was the common language within the company and all had fought during the liberation of French north Africa.

The company, led by the Spanish Lt Amado Granell, was the first to enter Paris on 24 August 1944 through the Porte d’Italie, in the south of the city. As they awaited the official surrender of the German governor of occupied Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz, La Nueve troops were sent to occupy public buildings and those taken over by the German military command, as well as Place de la Concorde.

Granell entered City Hall at about 8.40pm local time and met with the head of the national council of the French resistance. Captain, later colonel, Raymond Dronne, the commander of La Nueve, wrote in his memoirs that he fell asleep in the early hours of the morning to the sound of Spanish songs.

Allied troops led by Gen Charles de Gaulle entered Paris the following day. More than 50 members of La Nueve received the Croix de Guerre for bravery.

In his victory speech a day later on 26 August 1944 , De Gaulle did not mention the Spanish soldiers.

“Paris is outraged. Paris is destroyed. Paris is martyred. But Paris is liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France,” he said.

La Nueve’s contribution to the city’s liberation has only recently been recognised. The company was forgotten or left out of the French history books for political reasons – with the liberation presented as an exclusively French triumph. It was only in August 2004 – 60 years later – that Paris officially paid homage to the division with a plaque.

Granell died in 1972 in a road accident on his way to the French consulate in Valencia, Spain, where was going to claim his veteran’s salary.

“They liberated Paris, but not just Paris,” the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has said. “The liberation of this city was celebrated all over the world as a victory for freedom. Although much lay ahead in the struggle to defeat Nazism, people say the bells rang out as far away as Buenos Aires when they entered Paris.”

Later, Gómez Nieto was awarded the Grande Médaille de Vermeil and the Légion d’Honneur.

José María “Chato” Galante, a veteran campaigner for truth, justice and historical memory in Spain who was imprisoned and tortured under the Franco dictatorship, also died recently from coronavirus.

On learning of Galante’s death, Spain’s deputy prime minister, Pablo Iglesias, tweeted: “Covid-19 has taken Chato Galante, freedom fighter, political prisoner during the dictatorship, campaigner for universal justice and against torturers – one of Brecht’s indispensables. My heart is broken. So long, comrade.”

Sam Jones in Madrid and Kim Willsher in Charny-Orée-de-Puisaye

Wed 1 Apr 2020

​
Poor and vulnerable hardest hit by pandemic in Spain
Rate of infection in and around working class near Barcelona is nearly seven times higher than upmarket areas
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/poor-and-vulnerable-hardest-hit-by-pandemic-in-spain
The Guardian
Stephen Burgen in Barcelona and Sam Jones in Madrid
Wed 1 Apr 2020

The coronavirus pandemic in Spain is taking a disproportionate toll on the poor, the elderly, the marginalised – and those working in low-paid but vital jobs – experts have warned.

An interactive map produced by the Catalan regional government showing the distribution of the virus reveals that residents of poor Barcelona neighbourhoods are six or seven times more likely to contract the virus than those in wealthy areas.

While much of Spain has bounced back from the 2008 economic crisis, many parts of the country suffered deep, lingering cuts. The unemployment rate, which stands at 13.7%, is more than double the EU average, while youth unemployment is at 30.6%. About half the population has some difficulty making ends meet, and poverty is persistently higher for children, migrants, and Roma populations.

According to the Catalan government figures, the rate of infection in working-class Roquetes is 533 per 100,000 inhabitants, while in upmarket Sant Gervasi it’s only 77. Similarly high rates are found in the satellite towns of El Prat de Llobregat (604) and Badalona (597).

Dr Nani Vall-llosera, a GP in Bon Pastor, a low-income Barcelona neighbourhood, and former president of the Catalan primary care forum, points out that many of those deemed essential workers by the government work in low-status, poorly paid jobs where they have high exposure to the virus.

“People who work in shopping centres, supermarkets and old people’s homes, as well as cleaners, are working without protection, often without masks,” she said. “These people get infected, they go home and infect those around them because there’s little possibility of self-isolating if you live in a small apartment.”


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She added: “Furthermore, poverty and poor health are a vicious circle – the poorer you are the more likely you are to have health problems. And so the chances of becoming seriously ill with the virus are concentrated in poor neighbourhoods.”

Like many colleagues, Vall-llosera, is in no doubt that the ability of the health system to react has been “debilitated” by years of spending cuts in public health, especially in Madrid and Catalonia, adding that “those parts of Spain where there have been least cuts are dealing with the virus better”.

The doctor also warns of the distortion to the health system caused by the epidemic. “While we focus all our resources on the coronavirus, which is probably what we have to do, it’s also reducing our capacity to deal with other issues,” she said.

Manuel Franco, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Alcalá in Madrid and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (USA), agrees that austerity measures – particularly around Madrid – have weakened the healthcare system.

He also says that inequalities in income, gender, education and country of origin are becoming increasingly apparent as the pandemic continues.

“In many societies, care work – cleaning, looking after children and the elderly - is mostly carried out by foreign women,” said Franco. “A lot of them are not on the payroll so they have no rights when it comes to unemployment pay. They also probably live in the worst housing conditions in a city like Madrid.”

He said that homeless people were also at risk and the NGOs and charities that helped them were forced to close.

“How do these people get the minimum they need to survive? We don’t have really good maps or ways to track these people and know what their living conditions are like,” said Franco.

As Spain experiences its third week of lockdown, with all but essential workers ordered to remain at home, income disparities are becoming more apparent.

People need to heat their homes as they stay away from work. But they also have to home-school their children, which usually means a computer, tablet or smartphone is needed for distance classes – as is a good internet connection.

Franco said that while Spain’s socialist-led coalition government was working to minimise the economic impact of the health crisis and protect the most vulnerable, basic structural inequalities were persisting and worsening.

“I think there’s a will to protect those who will be hardest hit and to cover the gaps that are becoming wider and wider,” he said.

“But there are many small details of daily life and the social determinants of health are becoming more relevant: housing, income, education.”

Franco said the global epidemic, which has so far claimed 8,189 lives in Spain, called for action that went well beyond improving health systems.

“Of course healthcare workers are in a very tough situation, dealing with overstretched intensive care units but there are also people working in food stores, police officers, paramedics, firefighters – they’re also suffering the same lack of equipment,” he said.

“We never thought about that; we never thought that we could have such a big public health crisis – and mortality crisis in cities like Madrid, where the usual morgues can’t cope with this situation. But I think that almost every decision that we have to take right now should be taken from the point of view of these social inequalities.”

A report published by Oxfam Intermon last year showed that, as well as a wide disparity of income, there is a difference of life expectancy of nearly 11 years between Barcelona’s richest and poorest neighbourhoods, and seven years in Madrid.

​




On this day, 30 March 1915, Francesc Sabaté Llopart, anti-fascist resistance fighter, and the most tenacious of the anti-Franco guerrillas, was born in Hospitalet de Llobregat, Catalonia. 
With the outbreak of the civil war in 1936, Sabaté joined the anarchist Young Eagles column and fought against General Franco's Nationalists on the Aragon front. After the defeat of the Republic, Sabaté was interned in a concentration camp in France, and later joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation. 

Following the end of World War II he re-entered Spain and joined the growing underground resistance the regime. Amongst his many legendary exploits he freed other imprisoned activists, robbed banks, assassinated fascist leaders and cheated death on many occasions.
​
After robbing the home of a wealthy Franco supporter, Manuel Garriga, Sabaté left a note which read: 
​
"We are not robbers, we are libertarian resistance fighters. What we have just taken will help in a small way to feed the orphaned and starving children of those anti-fascists who you and your kind have shot. We are people who have never and will never beg for what is ours. So long as we have the strength to do so we shall fight for the freedom of the Spanish working class. As for you, Garriga, although you are a murderer and a thief, we have spared you, because we as libertarians appreciate the value of human life, something which you never have, nor are likely to, understand." 
Sabaté outlived nearly all of the other active resistance fighters, only eventually succumbing to the bullets of the Civil Guard in 1960. 
In this podcast we tell the story of the Spanish civil war: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/07/29/spanish-civil-war-podcast/
To access this hyperlink, click our link in bio then click this photo

Overburdened hospitals, a shortage of protective gear and testing kits that never arrive. The pandemic is reaching its peak without enough resources or a real picture of the true spread of the disease

El Pais Sunday 29 March 2020
english.elpais.com/society/2020-03-27/coronavirus-in-spain-five-crises-rolled-into-one.html

​As Spain approaches – or perhaps has already reached – the peak of the curve of coronavirus infections, hospitals are filling up with patients requiring hospitalization and intensive care, and health workers are feeling increasingly defenseless.

Through social media and labor union representatives, these workers are offering daily examples of ingenuity as they craft protective gowns out of surgical bedsheets or reutilize disposable face masks. Meanwhile, the fast testing kits that the government has been promising for days have yet to be introduced in hospitals, which are still using the slower but more reliable polymerase chain reaction (PCR) system. In the hardest hit regions such as Madrid and Cataluña, only seriously ill patients and health personnel are being tested, making it impossible to know how many people are really infected.

On Thursday it emerged that the fast coronavirus tests that the Spanish government has purchased from a Chinese supplier do not work properly. The tests, which were manufactured by the Chinese company Bioeasy, have a sensitivity level of 30% when this should be 80%, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Meanwhile, workers specializing in the care of dependents have been requesting protective gear and equipment for weeks. Senior homes in particular have become a hotspot for coronavirus transmission.
Face masks

A large hospital can use as many as 5,000 surgical masks (the simplest type of facial protection) in a single day. This illustrates the magnitude of the need for this kind of material, as well as gowns, gloves and protective eye gear, which medical personnel need to treat infected patients.

On Wednesday, associations of physicians, pharmacists, nurses, dentists and veterinarians issued a joint statement in which they said that the 721,000 professionals they represent are in a situation of “complete defenselessness,” working in “inadequate and very risky sanitary conditions” because of the supply shortage.

According to Health Minister Illa, 550 million face masks and 11 million gloves will be shipped to Spain over the coming eight weeks. The question on everyone’s lips these days is, why did Spain not have a strategic reserve of healthcare material to prepare for such an eventuality? Experts consulted by this newspaper, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that it is not only Spain but all European countries in general that failed to take note of the SARS and MERS outbreaks, unlike Asian nations. There was no stock of medical equipment to face a pandemic, and by the time the latter broke out, the global demand for supplies made it very difficult to make last-minute purchases. In an interview on the television network Telecinco, Madrid regional premier Isabel Díaz Ayuso admitted that “purchasing material from other countries right now is frankly complicated.”

Test kits
Despite promises that new, faster testing kits would be rolled out days ago, when the material finally did arrive it emerged that its reliability was too poor to be an effective tool of detection. In the meantime, overburdened microbiology labs at public hospitals are still handling up to 800 samples a day using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) system, which is very reliable but takes around four hours and requires highly specialized equipment and personnel.

The new, faster testing kits that do not need to go through a lab and provide results in 10 to 15 minutes were supposed to signal a turning point in the effort to determine the real extent of the coronavirus in Spain.

Ventilators
Many intensive care units in the Madrid region are already at twice their theoretical capacity, and hospitals have been forced to set up critical care beds in other units or even inside surgery rooms, which are hardly being used now that all non-essential operations have been placed on hold.

But the beds and the furniture are just the most simple elements of an intensive care unit. Coronavirus patients in serious condition typically develop bilateral pneumonia, which requires the use of a ventilator to help them breathe. But no hospital has the number of ventilators required by the current crisis, and thus they have become one of the most sought-after medical devices in the international market.

But there are many buyers and few ventilators in stock, as countries scramble to acquire medical equipment. Minister Illa has said that more ventilators will be shipped to Spain between now and June.

In the meantime, some hospitals are making their own purchases without going through regional or central health authorities. Madrid’s La Paz hospital has used an emergency provision to acquire Philips ventilators, electrocardiography equipment and other material, directly and without tender. In documents that EL PAÍS has seen, the hospital says that “the number of patients suspected [of coronavirus] is growing exponentially” and that “it is of vital importance to have a stock of [ventilators] in our facilities.”

Care homes
Many workers at care homes are being quarantined in a sector that is also in dire need of more protective gear and testing kits. After senior residences became hotspots of coronavirus outbreaks, the government said that their situation has become a priority and that employees will be tested. But on Wednesday the order had yet to be published in the Official Gazette.

Official figures from 2018 show 5,457 residences in Spain serving nearly 277,000 people. Unions and associations have been requesting resources for weeks. “We’ve reached this point very late in the game, if we had acted earlier, this could have been prevented,” said Antonio Cabrera, a health officer with the labor union CCOO.

“Residences are social centers, not health centers. Companies have protection equipment against infectious diseases to treat a few patients, but we could not possibly be prepared for an epidemic,” said Jesús Cubero, secretary general of the industry association Aeste. “And we are having problems sending material to our centers. Last week we had material confiscated at [Madrid’s] Barajas airport when we were going to send it to Tenerife and Gran Canaria.”

Home assistance
Over 450,000 elderly people receive home assistance, according to 2018 figures from the public social services agency Imserso. Unions have also been demanding protective gear for the workers who go to seniors’ homes to help them with cleaning, cooking and personal hygiene. The fear of contagion goes both ways: some elderly people are refusing to let the workers in. And some of the latter are quarantined in their own homes.

Antonio Cabrera, of CCOO, believes these services should be reorganized in order to keep serving only the most essential needs while minimizing the risks.

English version by Susana Urra.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/11/la-movida-madrilena-spain-post-franco-anarchists-alaska-pedro-almodovar

Formed after a free punk concert in 1980, an influential collection of musicians, artists and film-makers including Pedro Almodavar exploded punk counterculture in Madrid – and changed their nation for ever.

Stephen Phelan, The Gusardian, Tue 11 Feb 2020 








Peluqueria, 1979, by Ouka Leele. Photograph: 1996-98 AccuSoft Inc.



General Franco had been dead for a while before those he repressed in Spain felt brave enough to celebrate in public. The dictator’s four-decade rule did not neatly expire in 1975, when he died. The country was still being effectively run by soldiers and priests when a ragged lineup of young punks staged a free concert at Madrid Polytechnic on 9 February 1980. Forty years later, that night is remembered as the event that launched La Movida Madrileña, a countercultural eruption in the city during the country’s volatile “transition” to democracy.

The show was put together as a rock’n’roll memorial for José Cano, a drummer in the band Tos, who had been killed in a car crash. His bandmates, soon to re-form as Los Secretos, invited friends and peers to play, including Nacha Pop, Mermelada, and Alaska y las Pegamoides – the latter fronted by a 17-year-old girl. Alaska, AKA María Olvido Gara Jova, would become perhaps the biggest icon of La Movida. None of them looked like good Catholics. Their songs sounded insolent, anti-romantic, aggressively secular.
“They played poorly, but with passion,” wrote DJ and music critic Diego Manrique, who added that their sheer loudness, both in volume and colour, contrasted wildly with “the greyness of the Franco regime.” The event was similar in mythology to the fabled Sex Pistols gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976: everyone who wasn’t there would later claim they were, and anyone who was there would start a band. And while Johnny Rotten asserted dubious poetic licence in rhyming “Queen” with “fascist regime”, to sing about anarchy in the kingdom of Spain was to risk being taken literally.

Servando Carballar says he was and still is an anarchist. His record label, DRO (Discos Radioactivos Organizados), founded in 1982, came to represent “about 50%” of the bands linked to La Movida, starting with his own sci-fi synthpop group Aviador Dro and His Specialised Workers. “None of the major labels would even look at us,” says Carballar. “Though we were pretty bad musicians back then.”
Sitting in a Madrid branch of Generation X, his Spanish chain of comic book and board game stores, Carballar remembers the concert as having an impact because it was broadcast on TV and radio – a signal that times had changed, in the capital at least. The first stirrings, however, came a few years earlier, he says, in the city’s El Rastro flea market, where teenagers sold their own fanzines and dug out precious finds on vinyl.

“Some records were like trophies. They were so hard to get here it was almost easier to go to London and bring them back.” Never Mind the Bollocks, and the DIY-ethos behind it, “was like a renaissance in all of our minds.” Taking additional influences from dadaism and futurism, Carballar formed Aviador Dro in 1979, adopting the stage name Biovac-N and styling the band as techno-mutants behind analogue keyboards. They were promptly arrested when they stepped outside for their first photo shoot, wearing aeronautic goggles and homemade hazmat suits.
People forget, he says, just how long the practices of church-sanctioned military rule persisted, after Franco. Homosexuality was only decriminalised in 1979. Spanish women, including Carballar’s bandmate and future wife Marta Cervera (AKA Arcoiris), had long been subject to a patrician curfew, which made most streets and bars an entirely male domain by 9pm. The country’s Civil Guard could still break up any gathering of more than three people, and detain anyone whose clothes, hair, or face gave them the flimsiest pretext under the prevailing law of “dangerousness and social rehabilitation”.

Guardsmen later raided an Aviador Dro gig, while the band were playing Anarchy in the Planet, their quasi-cover of the Sex Pistols single that had first fired them up. Their friend Ger Espada, vocalist of Oviformia Sci, was hauled away for wearing makeup.

“We sang about the future,” says Carballar, “but only in the abstract. An equal society seemed a utopian fantasy, like Star Trek. In reality, we thought all of it could end any second. Maybe with a nuclear war, maybe with a military coup.”

On 23 February 1981, 200 armed officers tried and failed to force a return to Francoism by seizing the Congress of Deputies building in Madrid. The transition process was too far along, and the city council was now led by Marxist mayor Enrique Tierno Galván, whose cultural policies became increasingly permissive. Galvan came to be known as “the Mayor of La Movida”, subsidising underground art to promote a new paradigm at the former core of fascist Spain. “Bless the chaos,” he said, “because it is a sign of freedom.”

That chaos spread to street fashion and photography, cartoonists and muralists, the burgeoning queer community and the flourishing drug trade. The name “movida” itself was supposedly derived from a slang term for hash and heroin transactions, and a new dialect known as cheli coopted words from prison inmates and prostitutes: “Cutre,” for example, meaning seedy in a good way.

Pedro Almodóvar’s early short films, and his 1980 debut feature Pepi, Luci, Bom (starring Alaska as lesbian rocker Bom) were shot in and around the hangouts of the era, against a backdrop of drag shows and dick-measuring contests. Almodóvar’s own story was like a ballad of La Movida – country boy comes out in the big city, trading his religious education for sex and self-expression – but he never seemed sure how to define the context he emerged from.

“We weren’t an artistic movement, we weren’t a group with a concrete ideology,” Almodóvar said in retrospect. “We were just a bunch of people who coincided with an explosive moment.” The photographer Ouka Leele begs to differ with her old friend. Sitting in a quiet cafe in Madrid’s Malasaña area, around the corner from El Penta and La Vía Láctea, the rock bars that once hosted all the key players, Leele remembers feeling part of something that might have been as big as surrealism. The late painter and illustrator Carlos Sánchez Pérez, better known as Ceesepe, “used to say we were the new Picassos”, she recalls.

Born Bárbara Allende and raised in a cautiously liberal household, Leele was just starting art school when Franco died. “The cage door was opened and we all got out,” says Leele. “So, we had this new sense of freedom but we also had Eta setting bombs off, police persecuting students, ultra-right groups coming into bars with guns and singing [fascist anthem] Cara Al Sol. We were sick of all that and we thought of art as medicine, as a cure.” This was acutely the case for Leele herself.

Diagnosed with lymphoma in her early 20s, she had her own perspective on the hedonism of those times. “When you’re so young and suddenly death is there, the future disappears, which is not a bad thing. You live in the present, and every minute is a wonder.” Leele’s work became emblematic of La Movida – highly theatrical portraits and tableaus on monochrome film that she hand-painted over with lurid watercolours.

Peluqueria, 1979, by Ouka Leele.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Peluqueria, 1979, by Ouka Leele. Photograph: 1996-98 AccuSoft Inc., All rights reserved/Ouka Leele
She drew on ancient myths, classic images of the Spanish Golden Age, and the mild subversions of her childhood, when kids would wear fluorescent green, pink, or orange socks to set against the orthodox blacks, whites and browns of their grandparents. Later, she “rebelled against the rebels, too.” “When they all dressed like punks, I dressed like a nun.”

As things turned out, Leele survived, while many others did not. By the mid-1980s, Malasaña was a hot zone of Aids deaths and overdoses. Leele thought Mayor Galvan hugely irresponsible when he famously told a rock festival crowd in 1984: “Whoever is not high, get high now.”

Galvan himself died two years later, and Leele felt her art was “used” by his successor, Juan Barranco. In 1987, he appropriated her masterpiece, a monumental work of photographic performance art around the Cibeles Fountain in the city, based on the myth of Hippomenes and Atalanta, to make a kind of campaign poster. “He thought it would help him win re-election,” she says. “It didn’t. That photo marked the end of La Movida for me. It began with the artists and it was destroyed by the politicians.”

Today, Madrid is run by a rightwing coalition who refer to that period, if at all, as a brief spell of leftist decadence. Its prominent names have since become establishment figures in their own ways – Ouka Leele is an artist on commission for big fashion houses, Alaska is a reality TV star, Almodóvar is a beloved auteur of world cinema, and Carballar is a board-game entrepreneur, who featured on a recent cover of Forbes. “Strange place for an anarchist,” he admits.

Those now inclined toward nostalgia for Franco will also tend to minimise La Movida as a myth – a nasty, noisy party attended by a hardcore of no more than 100 people. They are not entirely wrong, says Carballar. “But that’s all it takes to make an avant garde. A few people doing the things they feel they must do. History decides if these things are significant. La Movida, or whatever you call it, felt like something then, and it feels like something now.”

• Aviador Dro and His Specialised Workers will perform at The Lexington, London, on 9 May as part of their 40th anniversary tour. Ouka Leele’s pictures from this period are included in the travelling exhibition La Movida: A Chronicle of Turmoil, now at Barcelona’s Foto Colectania.




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(Members of the Madrid Tenants Union protest outside a housing block. Photograph: Denis Doyle/The Guardian)

From Sam Jones in Madrid, The Guardian , Thursday 6 November 2020

C​ountry’s recovery from 2008 economic crisis has masked deeply entrenched socio-economic problems

On what was probably their only day off all week, two dozen Latin American women had gathered in south Madrid to explain to a UN human rights expert the paradox of their invisibility.

They were of different ages and were born in different countries – Bolivia, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, to name a few – but their stories soon entwined to form a single narrative.

As carers or internas (live-in maids), they are underpaid, overworked, unappreciated, trapped, sometimes scared, frequently disdained and often abused. They should be receiving at least the minimum wage of €950 a month, but many make closer to €800 despite working 18-hour days, six days a week.

“We look after old people, we look after children – we’re responsible for all that’s most precious in people’s families,” said Janina Flores, from Peru. “We act as psychologists and confidants, we double up as seamstresses. But we’re not valued.”

Another Peruvian, Adriana Araujo, added cook, butler and pet-sitter to the list. “We do everything you can imagine and more because we’re seen as the right kind of domestic tool,” she said. “But very often we’re valued less than a kitchen blender.”

When the women had finished speaking, Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told them he was well aware of the irony they had outlined – “that people can rely so heavily and so intimately on another person but, at the same time, not really relate to them as a fellow human being.”

While Spain has largely bounced back from the economic crisis of 2008, the internas’ stories, like so many Alston heard on a 12-day fact-finding mission, are a reminder that the recovery masks deeply entrenched socio-economic problems.

According to figures from Spain’s National Statistics Institute, 26.1% of the population lives at risk of poverty or social exclusion, up from 24.7% in 2008, while the unemployment rate of 14.1% is more than double the EU average. About half the population have some difficulty making ends meet, and poverty is persistently higher among children, migrants, and Roma populations.

Blanca Coronel, a 71-year-old Paraguayan woman who had been in Spain since 2006, said that despite her age and a knee injury she would need to work for another 10 years before she would have accrued enough pension contributions to retire.
Sandra Delgadillo, from Bolivia, recalled being interviewed for a job looking after an old man with a broken hip and being told there would be a bonus if she were prepared to be sexually assaulted.
An hour before he sat down with the women, Alston was given a tour of the Centre for the Empowerment of Domestic and Care Workers, where the meeting was to be held. For the past six months the centre has relied on a €200,000 grant awarded by the last Madrid city council, led by the leftwing former mayor Manuela Carmena.

The money has allowed it to provide legal advice, psychological support, tai chi and drama classes and lessons in cooking Spanish food to hundreds of migrant workers. The centre is also a place where the workers can come to meet so they do not end up isolated and alone.

This year the new city council, led by two rightwing parties and propped up by the far-right Vox party, decided not to renew the subsidy, throwing the centre’s future into doubt.

A spokeswoman for the council said the money had always been a one-year grant that was not eligible for renewal, adding: “There are dozens of local associations that offer charitable support to neighbours and which are able to apply for different kinds of subsidies to fund their activities or running costs. It is in the interest of the new council to ensure that competition for them is free and competitive.”

Before heading off for his next visit, Alston said he hoped the funding “will be reconsidered or replaced by a more enlightened source”. He counselled the internas to be realistic in their hopes. “I don’t think any government in Spain or in most other countries is suddenly going to transform your status because you provide a very low-cost, indispensable service,” he said.

He advised them to choose their issues and battles carefully. “You need a political campaign that will go step by step and identify certain priorities, because to ask for everything usually results in getting nothing.” He paused. “At least until the revolution comes.” The women laughed.

Half an hour later, Alston arrived at a housing estate in Torrejón de Ardoz, a town a little north-east of the capital, where he was offered concrete proof of Spain’s housing crisis. He had always expected the issue to loom large in his research, telling the Guardian – with more than a little understatement – that the country’s economic recovery was more complex than it might appear and that “anyone who reads reports will know that there’s something of a housing crisis in Spain”.

Homemade banners decrying soaring rents hung from balconies, and dozens of locals people had turned out to tell the UN expert how they had been affected by the arrival of investment funds that bought up billions of euros’ worth of housing stock during the crisis.

Rents have risen 50% since 2014, and some residents say they are now being asked to pay big increases by their multinational landlords. The situation has led to the formation of tenants’ groups and the eruption of bloques en lucha – entire blocks where residents are protesting by staying put, paying the previous rental rates and refusing to sign new contracts that they consider to be grotesquely unfair.

A woman from Móstoles, south-west of Madrid, told Alston that most people had to rent as they did not have the savings to put down a deposit to buy. And besides, she added, most of the housing had already been bought up by the vulture funds.

“I’ve got four kids,” she said. “Where does the government want us to go and live? On the streets? Under a bridge? All we’re asking is that they keep the rent at the level it was before.”
Jesús Alcocer, 58, a private hire driver from Torrejón, said he couldn’t hang on much longer. His last flat was repossessed during the crash and he and his partner, Manoli Navarro, were sharing their current one with their three daughters and a granddaughter.

He made around €900 a month, Navarro worked part-time at a nursery, and their children gave what they could. But their rent had jumped from €816 a month to €1,400.

“I just can’t afford it,” said Alcocer. “All I can do is keep paying the rent at the old rate and hope that they’ll agree to that. I’ve always paid but I just can’t afford the rise.”

Alston told the crowd that “something drastic needs to be done”, adding: “Successive Spanish governments have done very little when it comes to housing rights.” His promise to include the issue in his report was greeted with a loud cheer.

What happens next will depend in large part on Spain’s new coalition government. The Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has pledged to bring about a transformation in equality and social justice, and has already moved to cap rent rises. His partner in government, the Podemos party, meanwhile, was born of widespread anger over austerity, inequality and the old political status quo that had dominated Spain for decades.

As the crowd thinned and Alston headed off to his next appointment, Navarro began to cry and then apologised for doing so. The frustration and anger, the injustice and humiliation, were just too much.

“People don’t realise what we’re living through or what it’s like to get back on your feet only to be crushed all over again,” she said. “I just don’t know what’s going on in Spain these days, things are getting worse and worse. We’ve got politicians up to our eyeballs but none of them do anything. It’s just so hard. But I won’t put up with them trying to put my daughters and granddaughter out of our flat. I don’t want to leave. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.”






www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/un-poverty-experts-visit-shines-light-on-struggles-of-spains-poor

​https://novaramedia.com/2019/11/05/spains-coming-election-will-determine-the-next-phase-of-its-constitutional-crisis/?fbclid=IwAR2_1CqtD3zLy3u418RrPgUzMMn86pgXwFcO5pMVrsTHlQZzY9H-BcF7uT0

On Sunday 10 November, Spain will hold its fourth general election in as many years, in what is essentially a re-run of April’s vote.

The streets of Barcelona may now be clear of the barricades that followed the recent sentencing of the organisers of 2017’s illegal independence referendum – for the time being – but the Catalan crisis is itself a symptom of a broader malaise: a crisis of the state inaugurated by the post-crisis revolts of 2011 which, in the absence of decisive constitutional reform, keeps flaring up in different forms: from the indignados and Podemos to the Catalan revolt, to the emergence of the far-right party Vox.

Back in 2015, this crisis managed to erode the two-party system that had defined Spain’s modern democracy post-dictatorship. Since then, a consistently unstable balance of forces has manifested at the parliamentary level, with the proliferation of new parties reflecting the increasing polarisation of Spain’s main political axes: left/right and centralist/federalist.

In this election, voters will decide how the next phase of Spain’s constitutional crisis will unfold. Will it be presided over by a centrist restoration, a dying old order finding life-support in Spanish nationalism? Or will it be steered by a left-wing government in alliance with the Catalan left, a new order hinted at in recent years but which so far struggles to be born? Or will events take Spain down an alternative, more morbid path of a hard-right coalition with authoritarian features?

The Catalan question.
The politics surrounding Spain’s national minorities divide the Spanish left. Correspondingly, for the past 20 years the Spanish right has adopted an aggressive rhetoric along these lines as a strategy to galvanise the conservative electorate, while simultaneously dividing the working class. In the wake of the mass anti-austerity protests of 2011, the Catalan right began to reciprocate this strategy and both sides became locked in a process of escalation that culminated in the unilateral referendum of 2017, which was dramatically repressed by the Spanish state.

The Catalan issue was at the heart of the failed government negotiations of 2015-6, when the two largest parties on the left, the centre-left PSOE and radical left Podemos, couldn’t reach agreement on the issue of Catalan self-determination. Though harbouring broad federalist sympathies, PSOE is a firmly unionist party that won’t contemplate the idea of an independent Catalonia. Podemos, by contrast, is the only Spanish party open to the idea of holding a Scotland-style referendum in order to find a route out of the crisis.

Following the most recent general election in April, the problem arose again. The parliamentary arithmetic created the possibility of a PSOE-Podemos government pact, yet PSOE insisted a coalition was impossible due to insurmountable differences over the Catalan question. Short of a PSOE landslide majority in Sunday’s election – an option that simply isn’t on the cards – the potential formation of a left-leaning government seems bound to keep running into this obstacle.

PSOE’s balancing act.
Over the course of government negotiations this summer, Podemos kept calling PSOE’s bluff on demands ranging from ensuring the absence of Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias from a potential coalition government to a joint position on Catalonia along PSOE’s party line. Over time, PSOE’s excuses made it evident the party was motivated by a reluctance to acquiesce to Podemos’s key demand for ministries with competences over social policy, particularly with the prospect of a recession looming.

PSOE figureheads were occasionally afflicted with bouts of honesty, such as publicly admitting to additional reservations including Podemos’s housing policies and the pressure exerted by nervous employers’ associations. Rather than a full-on government coalition, PSOE’s preference was a confidence-and-supply agreement, presumably so it could break an agreement more easily should the government deem austerity measures necessary. Podemos stuck to its guns, leading to this month’s re-election.

Podemos bore the brunt of the electorate’s anger over the 2016 re-election, when the party was perceived to have been too intransigent following the initial election in 2015. This time, however, it seems the tables have turned. When negotiations broke down over the summer, PSOE had a widening majority in the polls; something that has only fed the perception that fresh elections are to be blamed on PSOE’s opportunism. Moreover, the party’s reluctance to join forces with Podemos will likely come as a disappointment to the party’s more left-leaning membership, which propped up Pedro Sánchez as party leader back in 2017 amid promises of a left-wing turn and talk of recognising Spain’s ‘plurinationality’.

PSOE is determined to govern alone rather than as part of a coalition, which has led to it pursuing a delicate balancing act to court potential confidence-and-supply arrangements. On one hand, the Sánchez administration has decided to exhume Francisco Franco’s remains from his sinister mausoleum and relocate them to a less ‘honourable’ place – a timely gesture to the left on a symbolic issue which has prompted far-right outrage.

On the other hand, the election has been timed to happen in the wake of the imprisonment of the Catalan leaders, the Sánchez administration having quickly ruled out a pardon in an attempt to disable right-wing accusations that PSOE is weak on the national question, which have persisted nonetheless. One problem remains: the scale of the uprising in the streets of Barcelona, which seems to have caught the government off-guard, may well end up throwing the party’s strategy off balance if it turns out to have galvanised the Spanish right and Catalan nationalist parties instead.

More of the same?
After a decisive defeat in the 2016 re-election, Podemos broke ranks and descended into infighting. The party split along two main factions. On one side, the supporters of the party leader, Pablo Iglesias, who had pushed for a hard line against PSOE in favour of an electoral pact with the old far-left party Izquierda Unida (United Left). On the other side, supporters of Íñigo Errejón, the party’s chief strategist, who advocated for a more collaborative stance with PSOE in order to capture a greater share of centre-left votes.

Iglesias won a decisive victory at Podemos’s 2017 party congress, but it did little to halt factional struggles. In response, Iglesias’s leadership style accentuated its Bonapartist features: banking on his charisma, he sought to quell internal dissent through all-or-nothing membership votes. Since then, and in the absence of effective channels of deliberation, internal crises quickly escalated into high-profile desertions, including that of Errejón himself. With internal democracy reduced to confirmationist exercises in ‘clicktivism’, the grassroots lost its dynamism. Subsequently, the party has lost its charm for many former supporters and voters have continued to drift away.

Earlier this year, Errejón founded a new political party – becoming what is now standing as Más País (‘More Country’) – taking prominent members of his former faction with him. His electoral strategy seeks to re-energise a section of the electorate to the left of PSOE but disenchanted with Podemos. His supporters argue that far from dividing the left, it is a strategy that will attract voters who might otherwise have abstained, thereby compounding the left’s electoral share.

But it is unclear whether Errejón is really offering anything new. So far, his party has largely been centred around his own charisma and that of other figureheads and experts, somewhat mirroring the cult of personality he has criticised in others. The role of the grassroots for Más País remains unclear, as does the distinctiveness of its electoral programme, which essentially resembles that of Podemos. More importantly, perhaps, it is equally unclear whether his strategy might actually work. When it was trialled earlier this year during the Madrid regional election, Errejón’s party vastly overtook Podemos, but failed to produce a left majority – the city and region of Madrid falling to a hard-right coalition instead.

Plausible scenarios.
While all polls predict a PSOE victory, the question remains whether a parliamentary left bloc will be able to stack up. Even if the arithmetic allows it, it remains likely that PSOE and Podemos will nonetheless get locked into battle over a potential coalition once again. One variant of this scenario is if the Catalan nationalist left ends up acting as kingmaker; a scenario in which it will predictably demand a pardon for secessionist leaders in return.

One alternative is the formation of an untested ‘centrist bloc’, with PSOE turning to its right and striking a government deal with the neoliberal centrist party Ciudadanos (Citizens), currently plummeting in the polls. More drastic yet would be if PSOE reached even further right to the conservative Partido Popular (Popular party). In 2016, PSOE abstained in a crucial parliamentary vote which allowed Mariano Rajoy’s PP to form a minority government with something just short of a confidence-and-supply agreement. Although both parties are officially denying the possibility that a similar arrangement could be repeated, various Spanish news outlets have referred to off-the-record conversations about it with government officials.

Though less likely at the moment, it is nonetheless possible that a perfect storm of fragmentation and demoralisation on the left, coupled with tactical voting and high turnout on the right, could lead to an upset like the one dealt in Madrid earlier this year. Indeed, if the combustion of nationalist fervour around the Catalan question continues apace, a disastrous scenario in which a radical right-wing coalition ascends to government (likely combining PP, Ciudadanos and the far-right Vox) will become more likely. Several polls are now predicting a considerable surge for Vox, which is advocating the declaration of a state of exception in Catalonia, with some projecting a vote share which surpasses Ciudadanos and potentially even Podemos.

Whatever the result, it will determine the next phase of Spain’s unfolding constitutional crisis.

Javier Moreno Zacarés is a research fellow at the University of Warwick.

Published 5th November 2019​

As we learned in the Basque country, true democracy requires there to be peace on both sides
From The Guardian, Wednesday 23 October 2019
• Arnaldo Otegi is the leader of the Basque independence party EH Bildu

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/23/spanish-state-repression-catalonia-democracy-basque






 
Protest outside the Spanish government’s regional office in Barcelona on 21 October. Photograph: Pau Barrena/AFP via Getty

The Spanish supreme court’s deeply unjust verdict, handing out harsh prison sentences to nine Catalan government and civil society leaders for organising a peaceful referendum on self-determination in Catalonia, is for many the sign of a country slipping towards authoritarianism and away from western European-style democracy. But truth be told, for us Basques, this kind of behaviour is nothing new.

For years Spain was able to disguise its undemocratic essence under the cloak of the “fight against Basque terrorism”. Denial and rejection of the political nature of the armed conflict in the Basque country became quite easy for them, especially after 9/11. The line was that there was not a political problem in Spain, just a criminal one. “Spain is a democracy,” they used to tell us. “Everything is possible without violence” was the repeated mantra. We still remember the words of Spanish home secretary Alfredo P Rubalcaba: “They must decide: bombs or votes.”

 The truth is Basque violence was ended not thanks to the government's efforts but despite its persistent obstructions
Yet when some of us in the pro-independence Basque movement began to convince those who still believed in violence to continue our struggle for self-determination by peaceful and democratic means, we were arrested and sentenced to lengthy jail terms.

The truth is that Basque violence ended –not thanks to Spanish government efforts – but in spite of its persistent obstructions. (It is probably important here to clarify my position: many wrongs were done by the Basque side, many things happened that should not have done. We have acknowledged our share of the blame for the violence that was committed by both sides during years of conflict). My arrest – along with others – happened 10 years before the Catalan politicians were convicted of sedition, and it was only after we had served our prison term that the European court of human rights ruled our trial had been unfair (the second time the ECHR had ruled against Spain). The same could easily happen to the Catalans. The fact that the Spanish state still holds more than 240 Basque political prisoners in jail despite ETA ending its armed campaign in 2011 shows its lack of interest in a lasting peace.

The verdict against the Catalan pro-independence leadership for organising a democratic and peaceful referendum, and the subsequent violence the Spanish police used against peaceful Catalan demonstrations, shows us what we always knew: the Spanish state is not interested in democracy and will use violence to conceal its undemocratic nature.
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This is why the state plays up, and at times instigates, violence in the region. The Spanish media and courts have even started talking about “terrorism” in the Catalan case. Spain will not hesitate to use this lie. Its government would love to transform Catalans’ legitimate and peaceful demand for self-determination into violence. That is what the police and military forces have been trying to do the last few days with their violent tactics.

Fortunately, the Catalan nationalist movement is committed to peace. As we are in the Basque country. We know that our “force of reason” is stronger than their “reason of force”. At the same time we both are committed to achieving our fundamental democratic rights – Catalan and Basque demands for democracy will now only get louder. It is time to complete the unfinished business of Spain’s phoney transition to democracy – and there will not be real democracy in Spain until its plurinational character is recognised, just as in the UK or Canada.

Rather predictably, Spain is going in the opposite direction: the direction of authoritarianism, counter-reform, the recentralisation of powers and responding to democratic demands with an iron fist. All this gives wings to the fascist extreme right. History shows us where this leads in the end.

Repression, imprisonment and centralisation will not work. Like in most similar cases around the world there is no lasting solution to this kind of conflict without dialogue. Like in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Quebec, the only way to solve these tensions is through democracy. And anyone with a bit of political sense knows that the state needs to engage with legitimate Catalan representatives. A policy of repression with no talks and no negotiation is unacceptable.

All the while, European institutions and states look the other way. Other European governments should be encouraging Spain to change track. Yet at the moment a desire to maintain internal stability within the bloc trumps all, and that means blind loyalty to Spain. This conflict can only be resolved internationally – European institutions and states should raise their voices in favour of a negotiated solution, before it is too late.
 Spanish politicians are spinning the Catalan crisis to suit their own interests