LEFT IN SPAIN - THE OCCASIONAL RAMBLINGS OF AN OLD LEFTIE
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

Pro-Independence parties win Catalan elections
Jordi Oriola Folch    Off_Guardian , 17 February 2021
off-guardian.org/2021/02/16/pro-independence-parties-win-catalan-elections/


For the third time in a row, the Catalan pro-independence movement wins with an absolute majority in the Catalan elections. It has won resoundingly with 74 seats, more than the 68 that establishes the majority (in the previous elections it had won with 70). This time also with 51.22% of the votes, making it the majority among the voters.

The elections were due next year, but they were brought forward because the Spanish courts overthrew Catalan President Joaquim Torra for having disobeyed an electoral board that ordered him to take down a banner criticising the imprisonment of Catalan politicians. The President refused, citing freedom of expression, and the Spanish judiciary considered that the contempt was sufficient to force the removal of the President of the Parliament of Catalonia and cause the elections to be brought forward.

Furthermore, after consulting experts on the pandemic, the provisional Catalan executive decided to postpone the elections for five months until the third wave of Covid-19 had subsided. However, yet again, the Spanish judiciary interfered forcing the elections to be held on 14th February.

This is the same Spanish Justice that keeps 9 Catalan politicians and activists in prison, that has issued search and arrest warrants against 7 exiled Catalan politicians (which the German and Belgian courts rejected because they did not see the accusations as justified or because they understood that there were no guarantees of a fair trial in Spain), it is the same Spanish Justice that maintains the search and arrest warrant against a Majorcan musician –exiled in Belgium– for singing against the King of Spain and that is imminently going to imprison another Catalan musician, Pablo Hasel, for also having sung against the King.

In this context, and despite having the entire state apparatus and the Spanish press against them, independence has won again, and has done so obtaining a larger absolute majority than ever and with over 51% of the votes. In front of the pro-independence movement, we have the former Spanish socialist health minister during the pandemic, who has had the full support of the state, the press and unionism in general, and also the Spanish extreme-right of VOX, which has burst onto the Catalan Parliament with 11 seats.

Given this scenario, the Spanish state and the European Union cannot deny the right of self-determination of Catalan society, which must be expressed in a referendum with democratic guarantees, transparency and without foul play.

All in all, democracy is about allowing citizens to decide at the ballot box, not about violating their will with the application of laws that should in fact serve to guarantee there is a framework that respects what societies want for themselves.

Jordi Oriola i Folch is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Transforma Films. His work has been broadcast on television stations around the world and touches on issues of human rights, sustainability, democratic participation and community work, historical memory and the economic crisis. He has also taught audiovisual classes in the Basque Country, Catalonia, South America and Africa. He can be reached through his website or twitter.



https://english.elpais.com/society/2021-02-08/spain-approaches-end-of-phase-1-of-covid-vaccination-campaign.html

El Pais - PABLO LINDE
Madrid - 08 FEB 2021 
Spain approaches end of phase 1 of Covid vaccination campaign

Spain’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign is entering the final stages of the process of immunizing residents of senior residences, while the majority of healthcare workers have also received their first jab – many have also got the second. Meanwhile, the final part of this first phase, inoculating adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care, has begun in the Canary Islands, Murcia and Navarre. This process is expected to get going in the rest of the country before the middle of February.

EL PAÍS has collected statistics in an attempt to take a snapshot of where the vaccination process has got to in Spain and these are the principal conclusions. Despite a year having passed since the first coronavirus infections having been detected in the country, the system for collecting data on the health crisis is still deficient. The Health Ministry has not centralized the collection of information on the vaccination process and just 11 of the country’s 17 autonomous regions have supplied sufficiently detailed figures.
The process is both complex and flexible. The first three groups in phase 1 of the campaign overlap in order to optimize the process, and so that it continues without pause. Healthcare workers started receiving the vaccine before the process finished in senior residences, and adults with need for daily assistance will start being immunized before all healthcare staff have had their doses.

Along the same lines, some regions are already planning for the over-80s – who are the first group in phase 2 – to start the process before phase 1 has finished. There are around 380,000 adults with need for daily assistance, and they are a complicated group to vaccinate given that home visits are often needed. It could be more efficient to vaccinate non-dependent seniors at the same time – this group is made up of 2.8 million people and accounts for six in every 10 Covid deaths in Spain. In January of this year, more than 1,300 people over the age of 80 died every week with the disease.

To complicate the situation further, not all of the approved vaccines are going to be administered to everyone. The AstraZeneca vaccines, which will start arriving in Spain this week, will only be given to people aged between 18 and 55, given that this is the group where clinical trials have proved it to be effective. For now, the Health Ministry has decided that it will be used to immunize healthcare workers who are not on the front line, and next week a decision will be made on which section of the population to prioritize – it could be essential workers or young people with underlying health conditions.
This, in effect, is what some regions are already doing. It is not completely clear which healthcare workers are being immunized in phase 1, and in many cases, the authorities have opted to give all staff in hospitals their doses, independently of their role. In Madrid, for example, a higher percentage of healthcare workers have received the second dose of the vaccine than among seniors who live in residences. This is despite the fact that senior residences – where more than half of official Covid deaths took place in Spain, according to the Health Ministry’s figures – were the absolute priority of the central government’s vaccination plan.

That said, the available data suggests that immunity is not far off for residents of the country’s senior residences. With the information supplied by the regions, nearly all residents and staff have got their first dose, and the majority of regions have administered the second dose to more than half of the recipients.

The process in residences is being delayed due to outbreaks in some of these centers. According to regional health departments consulted by EL PAÍS, this is not presenting a problem given that the process is simply being postponed where there is a high number of people infected.
Data supplied last week by the Catalan regional authorities show that the vaccines are starting to have an effect, and that number of new infections is rising less inside such residences compared to outside. Fernando Simón, the director of the Health Ministry’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts (CCAES), also said on Thursday that outbreaks in these centers are falling and that comparisons made by the ministry between the over-65s who live in residences and those who do not show a lower infection rate among the former.

The full protection offered by the vaccines, however, does not arrive until a week after the second dose. With the extreme levels of transmission that are currently being seen in Spain – the 14-day cumulative number of coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants is around 750 – it is no surprise that the virus is finding its way into senior residences during this process, infecting inhabitants, and even claiming the lives of those who have been inoculated. The risk after the first shot is low, but it still exists.
The latest data from the Health Ministry shows that all regions have administered more than 70% of the doses that they have received. The authorities insist that the problem now will not be the capacity to deliver the vaccines, but rather the number that Spain will receive. From this weekend onward, that number will rise, with, for example, AstraZeneca sending 1.8 million doses this month. And it will go up even more in March, which is when a new vaccine – from Janssen – may be added to the list. The vaccination process for adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care will be a good means to measure the agility of the system.
With reporting by María Sosa, Isabel Valdés and Lucía Bohórquez.
English version by Simon Hunter.









Leftinspain
I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view.

Ex-soldier's death casts light on Spaniards who helped liberate Paris

1/4/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
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



0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view. 

    Archives

    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly