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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.









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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.

“The Silence of Others”: New Film Warns Against Spain’s Fascist History Repeating Itself

26/1/2019

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www.democracynow.org/2018/12/6/the_silence_of_others_new_film?fbclid=IwAR00WrOKSpxASgkOkdKQTgoVVGh25pFITH4ieegW0ei_XjRr6dJ_nUqtOKA

A far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion political party in Spain has made gains in regional elections, prompting protests in the streets. Members of Spain’s younger generation are too young to remember the brutal 40-year military dictatorship under General Francisco Franco. But a remarkable new documentary titled “The Silence of Others,” or “El Silencio de Otros,” hopes to remind Spaniards of the country’s fascist past, lest history repeat itself. The film follows several survivors of the Franco regime in their pursuit of justice. We speak with Spanish filmmaker Almudena Carracedo, who, along with Robert Bahar, wrote, produced and directed “The Silence of Others.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: On Monday, thousands marched across southern Spain to protest the rise of the far-right Vox party, which recently won multiple seats in a regional parliamentary election in Andalusia. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon threw his support behind Vox earlier this year and has apparently been advising the far-right party. Vox campaigned on an anti-immigrant, anti-abortion platform and has many worried about the rise of far-right political populism in Spain. This is Ana Gonzalez, a resident of Madrid.

ANA GONZALEZ: [translated] Unfortunately, I think they will keep on rising. And I think it’s like a marketing technique, as the one Trump had. I think it’s very dangerous, because it’s a marketing technique which is gathering people and taking them on its side, people that perhaps don’t have a very clear ideology.

AMY GOODMAN: Vox’s victory marks the first successful election for the far right in Spain since the country returned to democracy in the '70s after the death of the fascist military dictator Francisco Franco. Today, many Spaniards are too young to remember General Franco's brutal 40-year dictatorship, but a remarkable new film hopes to remind the younger generation of Spain’s past, lest history repeat itself. The film is called The Silence of Others. It follows a number of survivors of General Franco’s regime in their pursuit of justice as they organize an international lawsuit to investigate crimes against humanity. This is the film’s trailer.

XABIER ARZALLUZ [translated] It’s simply a forgetting, an amnesty for all, by all, a forgetting for all, by all.

MARÍA MARTÍN: [translated] I was 6 years old when they came for my mother. This is the gravesite. This is the mass grave.

JOSÉ MARÍA GALANTE: [translated] I lived just meters from the person who tortured me.

MARÍA MARTÍN: [translated] The thing is, all this has been covered up until now.

CARLOS SLEPOY: [translated] There’s not a town in Spain without victims of the Franco regime, right?

UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] We want our children, alive or dead.

JOSÉ MARÍA GALANTE: [translated] This is not about looking at the past. We’re fighting for the future.

PAQUI MAQUEDA: [translated] It’s the first time the voice of the victims will be heard before a court—10,000 kilometers away from our country.

ASCENSIÓN MENDIETA: [translated] In this case, there are several protagonists. Time is one of them.

JOSÉ MARÍA GALANTE: [translated] We, and hundreds of thousands of victims, have been denied the right to justice.

UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] Perhaps all of us, perhaps we have all collaborated in that silence.

MARÍA MARTÍN: [translated] How unjust life is. Not life. We humans, we are unjust.

AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for the new film The Silence of Others.

For more, we’re going to Los Angeles, where we’re joined by the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Almudena Carracedo, who, along with Robert Bahar, wrote, produced and directed The Silence of Others.

Almudena Carracedo, welcome to Democracy Now! I know you’re headed back to Spain, where you live. This is just an astonishing film. But before we go deeply into the film, if you could comment on what’s taken place in Spain and how it so directly relates to what you cover in this film?

ALMUDENA CARRACEDO: Right. Well, thank you, Amy, and thank you for having me on the show. It really is beautiful to be here to share the story of the film.

So, what’s happened in Spain is that, yes, for the first time since the death of Franco in 1975, the far right has taken over certain parcels of power. What we tried to do in the film was precisely to bring back the past, to make a film about the legacy of the Franco regime in the present, so that new generations could actually learn what had happened, because if you don’t know what happened in the past, it is very hard to fight for your future and for your present. We just never understood that the future that we were trying to avoid was going to become present, like so fast.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about your film, the lawsuit that it is based on, and who the people are who have brought this lawsuit.

ALMUDENA CARRACEDO: Right. So, the film follows, for six years—we filmed for six years—the journey of a group of survivors, victims and survivors, who decide to take on this international lawsuit. It is based on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows courts in any part of the world to prosecute crimes in other parts of the world, if the country where they occurred refuses to do so. This is actually the same principle that was used to detain Augusto Pinochet in London and to start trying some of the military junta in Argentina. And so, based on the same principle, but with the reversal that now it is Argentina that is trying Spain, is that the characters in the film embarked on this journey.

And so, the film tries to actually get into their skin and understand, you know, to feel what it feels like to be them, you know, go through their moments of success and their moments of sadness and moments of frustration, so that people can actually understand what it feels like to be a victim and survivor in Spain, 40 years in silence, and with their—even with their status as victims completely denied, you know?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Almudena, you mentioned this issue of universal jurisdiction. Spain passed an amnesty law in 1977. Part of the reason that Spain can’t try people who were associated with Franco’s dictatorship is because of this amnesty law. But as you point out in the film, this law was followed by many in Latin America, but once countries in Latin America became democratic, they overturned this amnesty law. Spain did not. Could you explain why, and then this issue of universal jurisdiction and this case taking place in Argentina?

ALMUDENA CARRACEDO: Right. So, there are all these reversals that are played in the film, right? Because Spain was a pioneer in the application of universal jurisdiction, but when it was the turn of Spain to judge its own crimes, then the judge that started to do that, Judge Garzón, was actually disbarred. And so, what’s really sort of fascinating now is that Spain is an outlier in international law right now, because it breaks international law.

So, all these countries, yes, modeled after Spain; Spain’s sort of model of transition and amnesty law was very much a model in many other countries transitioning from a past dictator. But now a lot of these countries have actually, as you well mentioned, have put it behind, and they have overturned their amnesty laws and are dealing with their past differently.

And this is kind of something that the film tries to do. It actually puts a mirror to many other countries, as well, and say, you know, there are many ways to deal with your past and with the legacy of the past in the present. And so, it actually allows people to think about those past crimes that their countries or those dark shadows that the country has and that project themselves into the present, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s really interesting that the way this law is referred to by many in Spain is called the pact of forgetting, the idea—and you see this repeated over and over in the film, Spanish officials saying, “We must move forward. We must forget together.”

ALMUDENA CARRACEDO: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a clip from The Silence of Others, the first few minutes of your film, in which an 84-year-old woman, María Martín, walks through her village to lay flowers at the side of a road, a highway. Martín’s mother was killed when she was 6 years old.

MARÍA MARTÍN: [translated] This is the gravesite. This is the mass grave. Look, there, in those brambles. They threw the clothes and left the women naked. How unjust life is. Not life. We humans, we are unjust.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s María Martín, and we follow her story throughout, this haunting, breathless, whispery voice of this elder sick woman, who could not make it to Argentina to testify with the others. Tell us what happened to her mother.

ALMUDENA CARRACEDO: So, María Martín’s mother was captured. Her hair was shaved, and she was eventually executed along thousands and thousands of Spaniards at the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War, in areas, actually, were not experiencing war. They were areas that had been taken over by Franco in his coup d’état.

María has been fighting since she was little. And then, you know, when her father passed away, he asked her, in his bed—that we would call it the—you know, he was dying—to please bring his wife to him. And she fought all her life for that. And, you know, her case really represents the case of so many thousands and thousands of people in Spain who are passing away without seeing something so fundamental as to be able to bury your loved ones in a dignified way.

And that’s exactly what we try to do. We didn’t want to deal with this issue from a political point of view. It’s a fundamentally political film, because it deals with issues that are around us, but we wanted to deal with it through the human stories, right? It transcends politics in that way, to be able to understand what it feels like to be María Martín, when you have to go for all your life to sit by the side of the road to put flowers to your mother.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Almudena, I want to ask about, you know, what Amy mentioned earlier, which is the fact that in the film you show, repeatedly, government officials saying that it’s their collective responsibility to focus on the future and to not dwell on the past. One of the most striking moments in the film itself is when you take your cameraman and go into a square and ask all of these young people, you know, what they know of Franco, and they say—you know, and whether anything should be done, and they say either they don’t know or that it’s not relevant. So, could you talk about the significance of that, and also the fact that the executive producer of your film is this world-renowned director, award-winning director, Pedro Almodóvar? So, you know, how many people give this moment significance? And is it a generational thing?

ALMUDENA CARRACEDO: Right. So, in the transition to democracy in Spain, there was this pact of forgetting, el pacto del olvido, el pacto de silencio, this pact of silence, that basically forced people or basically stated that it was much better to leave things behind. Let’s put everything under the carpet. Let’s start over. And obviously, the problem is that you cannot legislate forgetting. You know, forgetting is something individual, and people have the right to memory, precisely so we learn about the past so we can avoid future issues the same, right?

And so, during the whole transition—and it’s been 40 years of democracy in Spain right now, where, essentially, it’s taken all this time for new generations to actually come into the political sphere or come into a position where they can actually demand to know and to learn. This is not taught in schools. It’s not taught in the streets. It’s not talked about in the families. And a lot of people under 40 come to us very indignant and say, “They stole my history,” you know?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s--

ALMUDENA CARRACEDO: And so, it is a different--

AMY GOODMAN: You illustrate this so--

ALMUDENA CARRACEDO: Yes, go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: —so well in the film, and we want to go to two more clips. This is the first, from The Silence of Others.

CARLOS SLEPOY: [translated] There’s not a town in Spain without victims of the Franco regime, right?

JOSÉ MARÍA GALANTE: [translated] This is not about looking at the past. We’re fighting for the future.

UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] We’re joining as Lora del Rio’s Historic Memory Association.

UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] We’re joining this project, with great enthusiasm.

JOSÉ MARÍA GALANTE: [translated] We want to bring this to little towns, to gather signatures and also statements of support from town halls, one town hall at a time.

CARLOS SLEPOY: [translated] If the judge decides to issue international arrest warrants for these people, our possibilities open up completely. All this is going to snowball.

AMY GOODMAN: So, this lawsuit continues, interestingly, being brought in Argentina, which has universal jurisdiction, the very place where Human Rights Watch attempted to get the crown prince of Saudi Arabia arrested, Mohammed bin Sultan [sic], when he went there—Mohammed bin Salman, when he went there for the G20, for crimes against humanity. In this last 10 seconds, Almudena, the response in Spain to this film?

ALMUDENA CARRACEDO: We really feel like Spain was needing a tool, another tool, but like a really powerful, emotional tool, to be able to discuss, for families to talk about it, for people to bring their parents into the theaters. Theaters keep filling out. We’re in our fourth week in theaters. And there’s been viral videos that are seen millions of times. So, it’s been a really amazing and beautiful moment to bring the film in to the people.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. I thank you so much. Almudena Carracedo, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, together with Robert Bahar, produced and directed The Silence of Others. Thank you so much.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.


1 Comment
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4/5/2019 04:21:58

Since you have mentioned the importance of this film towards our society, I might watch it anytime soon. There are still societal issues that are bothering me about Spain. It seems like their leaders are becoming inhumane with all the rules they are going to impose, particularly to non-Spanish who live in the country. If that is the case, then might as well leave the country and go back where you came from; a country where you can have your freedom and and your right as an individual.

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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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