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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.

No Beauty in Defeat BY ANTONIO MAESTRE

1/4/2019

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​jacobinmag.com/2019/04/spain-civil-war-franco-nationalist-fascism?fbclid=IwAR3yLqw2bDjQ8SqAJwwE4PsQIljxFth22oFOm-jcVmZ1t8If9ldFX_-Sdog


The Spanish Civil War ended eighty years today with Franco's victory. But for opponents of Spanish fascism, the brutal repression of popular culture and democracy was only beginning.

André Malraux had called it a “lyrical illusion.” But the fall of Madrid marked the end of the dream. In his novel Man’s Hope, Malraux had told of the moment in which the romantic revolutionaries believed that they could do anything. But after Franco’s troops came, the aesthetic of resistance lingered on only in the idyllic memory of the banner across the Calle Toledo proclaiming “No pasaràn.” Such fine words had found an insuperable enemy in the more prosaic reality of the steel dropped by the German and Italian planes.

April 1 marks eighty years since the end of the Spanish Civil War. The pain and drama of that tragedy have not changed one iota. For this finale was not the end of things, but the next stage in the cultural and political genocide that had begun with the military uprising in 1936. Franco’s victory was but the beginning of the repression of a more advanced Spain that had been taking its first baby steps — the incipient ideas, consciousness, and morality that had provided an illusion of progress to the popular classes, to women, for culture and the arts.

Still today, we are living amid the moral rubble of that defeat. Indeed, the Francoite dictatorship prioritized the elimination of any trace of progressive mores or dissent. For four decades, national-Catholic culture subjugated freedom, literature, theater, critical thought, and educated thinking. Through this effort, the regime introduced the virus of what we call “sociological Francoism,” still today present in wide layers of Spanish society.

The regime’s continuing influence is expressed in the mindset that, notwithstanding the political and cultural genocide, the dictatorship was not so bad, because it brought good levels of economic growth and a Spain of order and security. In this sense, the social-engineering process which began some eighty years ago has proven very successful.

With the triumphal fascist parade through Madrid on March 28, 1939, there immediately began the burial of the voice of the defeated, of the democrats who had fought with such daring to resist the black stain spreading across Republican memory. The national-Catholic jackboots left footprints on the souls of the defeated, ploughing invisible scars on their skins. Despair spread among all those Spaniards who now had to hide their tears from the victors. They could be bitterly certain of the pain that would now be piled onto that of the past. It was a rage stripped of any epic element. For there is nothing heroic about just being able to survive.

Those Who Remained
After Franco’s victory, Madrid became a city of over a million cadavers. A silent and subdued fear won ground: tellingly of the population’s hunger, the pigeons and cats started to disappear. The rosary beads and the yoke and the arrows of the Falangist flag starved the dissenting of any oxygen. Hanging one’s head and stifling one’s thoughts became the everyday existence for all those liable to be considered “anti-Spanish elements.”

There were those who could not bear the stench: the maquis, the guerrilla fighters who took to the mountains to continue the fight against the regime and wait for some Falangist squads or the Guardia Civil to come hunting for them in the woodlands. There were the so-called topos (literally “moles”: those who hid away), of less military ardor and courage, who concealed their fear of being caught in one of the night-time raids, constantly watching themselves. They became “disappeared people” who dug their hideouts behind a trapdoor or within the walls of the kitchen where their wives and children lived.

There were men like Protasio Montalvo, who spent some thirty-eight years hidden in a basement. There were those who spent almost three decades buried alive behind a trapdoor, with a shotgun on hand — if the Falangists came, they would thus be prepared to kill themselves before they were arrested. A human metaphor for the history of the losers: always hidden, alone, silent, in the dark.

This darkness was unbearable even for some of the more humanist Falangists who rapidly lost their illusions, like the poet Luis Felipe Vivanco, weighed down by the error of his rapid support for the Francoite uprising. His sadness stained even the pages of his poetry:

How much more Spanish is our life

And more traditional our monstrosity

Greater the cruelty of the plan

That keeps us in this much-suffered peace.

As for the Spanish right, the victory of April 1, 1939 would harden it in a policy of constant aggression.

Indeed, this attitude has made itself felt in Spanish politics even in recent months, in a concrete and grotesque form. The increasingly unhinged right embodied in the Partido Popular and Ciudadanos, and its far-right excrescence Vox, are direct inheritors of this hostile approach to public life, still today beating their political adversaries over the head with national symbols. For them, anything that stands outside the norm must surely be an enemy.

Those Who Left
March 1939 was the end of the Spain that could have been. The national tale — the real one, not the fascist one — was written in the blood in the best of Spanish society, and the ink of those who could narrate its sorrow from exile. This sentiment was grasped better than anyone by Antonio Machado. Heading from Barcelona to Colliure (France) in December 1938 he expressed a grief-stricken but nonetheless razor-sharp sentiment: “For the strategists, for the politicians, for the historians, all this will be clear: we lost the war. But at a human level I am not so sure: perhaps we won.”

He was right on that count. The words of writers like Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, María Teresa León, and Max Aub would write the collective memory of the just Spain, of the homeland that had been stolen from us with the consent of the United States, Britain, and France.

In the Spanish case, too, there were collaborationist powers who looked the other way during the dictatorship, tarnished the memory of the heroes of the International Brigades, and doomed decent Spaniards to forty years of darkness. This was well-recorded by María Teresa León, the proud and melancholic poet who wore a fantastical military uniform in order to look good at political rallies: “They sacrificed us. We were the Spain with torn clothes and heads held high.”

Those Who Would Not Return
“I will never go back and set foot in that country of shit,” said Federico García Rodríguez, Lorca’s father. As for the son, he could never leave the land that buried him in some unknown place. It was a sorrow shared by those who carried the voice of the victims of the reprisals — those who left never to return. The bitterness of what had been, was no longer, and would never be, brought grief to all those struck by exile.

It is a wish of any exile to return to the yearned-for homeland. This same feeling ran through all those forced to leave as the victorious fascists entered Madrid. But there was to be no return to an idealized Spain, even if they could tread the same streets they had abandoned as the invading troops defiled the last Republican holdout. Max Aub described this heartbreak in 1969, when he was able to walk through lands that had now become strange to him: “I have come, but I have not returned.”

During his visit Aub asked to be taken to the Valley of the Fallen, the mausoleum in honor of Franco standing a few miles from Madrid. His travel companions did not understand why he wanted to visit the site honoring the very dictator who forced him to abandon his homeland, his friends, and family. Aub replied simply: “It’s not to honor him, but those [the Republican prisoners] who died building it.”

The memory kept alive by those who left Spain is still today absent in wide layers of Spanish society. Indeed, many of its leaders cruelly dismiss those who seek historic memory and restitution for Franco’s victims, accusing them of “digging up old bones.” The debate on the need to pay penance for what began rotting on April 1, 1939 remains a live issue in Spanish public life. The heirs to the political culture that won the war continue to reject an even symbolic recognition of the worst crimes perpetrated in twentieth-century Spain. Still now, they keep winning by erasing our memories. They fake pride in order to hide their shame.

In April 1939, a Spain that brought up its citizens through schooling, arts, and literatures was buried by a rancid Catholic traditionalism and the savage repression of all that was different. Eighty years have passed, and still today the Right want to deny us of our identity, of what reminds us of what could have been and wasn’t. Luis Cernuda provided an antidote to this forgetting when he paid tribute to the International Brigades who lost their lives so that we would not lose ours: “Remember it, and remind others, when you are disgusted of human baseness and angered by human harshness: This man alone, this act alone, this faith alone. Remember it and remind others.”​
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    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. 

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