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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.

Time to Bury the Dead

2/4/2019

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A portrait of Federico Garcia Lorca hangs from a wall in a restaurant near the site where archaeologists are searching for a mass grave of victims of the civil war on November 19, 2014 in Alfacar, near Granada, Spain. Pablo Blazquez Dominguez / Getty

​A
N INTERVIEW WITH IAN GIBSON, from Jacobin magazine. 2 April 2019
INTERVIEW BY
Tommy Greene
Eoghan Gilmartin

Eighty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of Franco's victims still lie in unmarked graves. Identifying the dead is a vital means of providing Spain with closure — and making sure fascism doesn't rear its head again.


The Spanish Civil War came to an end on April 1, 1939, only days after Francisco Franco’s Nationalist troops entered Madrid. By the time the capital fell, following a long siege, the war’s body count had reached nearly half a million. About 150,000 of those deaths directly owed to the Francoite terror; a further 20,000 Republican prisoners would be executed in the immediate wake of the Nationalists’ victory. Thousands more died in concentration camps across the country or in refugee camps over the border in southern France.

In the words of Francoite general Queipo de Llano, it was “necessary to spread terror … to create the impression of mastery, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do.” Historian Paul Preston later called it the “Spanish Holocaust.” Yet it seems difficult for the country to reflect on the dead and those who orchestrated the mass killings. The bloodbath at the foundation of the Franco regime now lies decades in the past; Spanish democracy was re-founded in the 1970s precisely on the “pact to forget” and a bipartisan amnesty.

Nonetheless, since Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist-led government assumed office last summer, historical memory has returned to the forefront of the political agenda. Just a month into his term as premier, Sánchez announced that Franco’s remains, along with those of Falange founder Antonio Primo de Rivera, would be exhumed from the shrine built for the two at the Valley of the Fallen, just north of Madrid. The dictator built the monument for himself with the forced labor of thousands of Republican prisoners, who all now lie in unmarked graves. Decades later, the site is finally to be “resignified” in a belated effort to tackle this dark chapter of Spanish history.

While Franco organized the bloodbath, on the other side of the political divide this monstrous legacy is also embodied by the poet Federico García Lorca, killed at the beginning of the Civil War. In the words of journalist Antonio Maestre, Lorca “was left to rot in an unmarked pit in the hills outside Granada after his assassination by Falangists.”

Lorca’s work, his life and tragic death have been a major focus of the Irish writer Ian Gibson’s career. A vocal critic of the Spanish right’s treatment of Franco’s dictatorship and its painful legacy, Gibson has been at the forefront of efforts to locate and exhume modern Spain’s most celebrated poet.

Eoghan Gilmartin and Tommy Greene sat down with the internationally renowned Hispanist to discuss what this historic anniversary means to Spain, as well as the challenges facing it at another important juncture in its democratic history.
One of the discourses perpetuated around the Civil War on the Spanish right is that everyone is guilty for what happens in war — that neither side’s hands were clean. As the longtime leader of the Popular Party (PP) in Madrid Esperanza Aguirre put it “there were heroes and villains on both sides.” Yet it was not only the scale of the killing that differentiates Nationalist violence from that on the Republican side but also its systematic nature. It was the planned extermination of all political opposition.

IG
Yes, it was a deliberate policy engineered before the war. Prior to the Nationalists launching their military uprising, they had come to the decision that if the coup failed, they were going to wipe out half of Spain. The American journalist Jay Allen conducted an interview with Franco just before he crossed over to the Spanish mainland [from Spanish territory in Morocco in July 1936]. In it Allen tells Franco that victory would require killing half of Spain, and Franco’s answer was he was willing to “pay any price.” He viewed the war as a crusade against communism.

From the beginning, the fascists initiated a campaign of mass terror. In the first weeks of the war came the massacre in the Southern city of Badajoz. As Franco’s troops approached Madrid, the ordinary people knew what was going to happen and so naturally, their reaction was violent. They killed priests and anyone wearing a tie. And yet you cannot compare the two sides’ behavior. There was brutality on both sides, but on the fascist side it was methodical and systematic. The numbers are terrible — there are still 115,000 bodies in unmarked graves.

The Nationalist side then hardened into a brutal dictatorship. Something dreadful that people who lived through this told me is that the prisoners all thought in 1944 the Allies were going to liberate Spain from Franco. That was the hope that they held onto. But then the truth dawned that that was not going to happen, and it meant they were going to be there for forever, as it were, with the threat of death and torture hanging over them.

TG
You are known internationally for your work on the murdered poet Federico García Lorca — probably the most famous victim of Franco’s terror. Your first book investigated his death, placing it in the wider context of the Nationalist killings in Granada. What is the significance of his death here?

I went to Granada to work on my PhD in 1965. Franco still had ten more years to live and it was the first time I experienced a police state. You could feel the sense of fear everywhere. People were always worried about who was listening. I was originally there to do research into the rural roots of Lorca’s poetry but after a few months the peasants started to open up about what had happened there at the beginning of the Civil War. You are talking about the murder of thousands of people in a very small city. I realized I had an opportunity to write something important — to document the terror in the region and so putting aside my thesis, I wrote The Death of Lorca.

For me, Lorca symbolizes all the disappeared people of Spain. We are talking about a poetic genius — one of the greatest poets that Europe has produced. Everything he wrote was created in the twenty years before he was murdered at thirty-eight. He is the national poet of this country and yet they have not been able to find his body. And so I see him as symbolizing all those who lie out there in unmarked graves. After Cambodia, Spain is the country with highest number of disappeared people in the world. Even the Pope, in an interview on Spanish television just this week, has said that the country cannot hope to look to the future until it buries its dead.

All ancient cultures knew you cannot leave people out to be eaten by the vultures and rats. The issue could be dealt with if the Right was able to be a bit magnanimous instead of telling us we are “reopening old wounds” or that it is an evil leftist plot. They were able to bury their dead eighty years ago but the other side were not even allowed to look for the graves of their loved ones.

The only place where this has happened is in Malaga. At the beginning of war, the Italian fascists went in with Franco’s troops and there was absolute butchery. They killed something like 4,000 people — of which they have exhumed 3,000 bodies. The conservative Popular Party mayor Francisco de la Torre spoke at the exhumation, underlining that what had happened was a crime and has to be acknowledged as such. This should not be that difficult for the Right.

EG
Yet if anything the Spanish right seem to be going in the opposite direction. The emergence of the extremist Vox party is now dragging other right-wing parties in an ever more reactionary direction. It has vehemently opposed policies around historical memory in places like Andalusia. How do you view their trajectory?

IG
Vox is very interesting. Before its breakthrough, the extreme right found its place within the Popular Party — the party of government on the Right. Now, with Vox, it has gained its own autonomous expression. For me this is better as we can see who they are, what they look like, and how they express themselves without any of the subterfuge there was before.

There has always been a part of the Spanish right whose allegiance to democracy is skin-deep. I remember one PP minister who said that “a lot of us lived very well under Franco.” Of course they bloody did! There was nowhere in Europe that the rich lived so well. Their kids were the only ones who could afford to pay for university — to study law, etc. — while at the same time a huge amount of wealth was amassed and stashed away outside of Spain. This was the result of forty years of unchallenged oligarchy.

When I see the footage of Vox’s leader Santiago Abascal astride his horse, like a Spanish version of Putin, I am reminded of some the old Falangists that I met in the 1960s — this sense of machismo gone mad. All that matters are the muscles and, of course, the prick, while women are mere objects.

I remember meeting Ernesto Giménez Caballero, who published The Spanish Genius in 1934. It is a fascist manual. In works like that you get a sense of a basic evil built into fascism. It is an ideology about the weak and the strong — essentially about eliminating the weak and degenerate from society.

TG
A recent investigation by Spanish journalist Carlos Hernandez has uncovered the existence of almost three hundred concentration camps in Spain — about 50 percent more than previously thought — in which over a million Spaniards were imprisoned. There have also been revelations surrounding Francoite eugenics programs. How much more of this kind of information do you think is yet to come to light?

IG
You are right that more and more information has come to light in recent years. The terrible thing, though, is that many of the older generation are going to die before the remains of their loved ones are found. Part of the difference with the Hitler and Mussolini regimes, is that this was a forty-year dictatorship — and that is a long time. The Amnesty Law in 1975 [i.e., at the end of the Franco regime] aimed simply to turn the page on the past. This made any kind of investigation into the atrocities very difficult.

But the work is now being done. A huge study has just been published on the terror in the La Mancha region. A group of researchers spent four years tracking down all the families, seeking documentation, filling in the gaps, etc. The Right refuses to acknowledge the genocide and cannot accept the thesis of Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust. But there was a holocaust. It happened and the evidence is mounting up.

TG
You have been critical of former Socialist (PSOE) prime minister Felipe González’s inaction on addressing the issue of historical memory during his fourteen years in power. Do the Socialists have to assume a certain responsibility here?

IG
Yes, I think that when the PSOE was elected in 1982 with a huge overall majority, that was the time to act — to put into motion a serious process of historical memory and reconciliation. In an interview with the former El País editor Juan Luis Cebrián, González said a leading general had implored him not to touch the issue of Francoite repression because the army was still very dangerous and likely to retaliate. He then told Cebrián that he realized now he should and could have acted, but that this was not clear at the time.

I do not fully accept this excuse. They had this massive mandate from the Spanish people for change. But they did not risk it, did not have the moral courage to push ahead. At least the whole process could have been gotten under way — for example getting rid of the symbols, such as the fascist street names and statues of Franco that were dotted around the country. Some Socialist mayors did this in their towns and there were only mild protests, but González’s government never risked even going that far.

Now we are in a situation in which Franco is still in his mausoleum at the Valle de los Caídos in 2019. It is an outrage. There is no other equivalent monument to a fascist dictator in Europe. It is something they should be ashamed of, but shame is not a feeling which comes easy in this country, particularly to those on the Right. [Current Socialist prime minister] Pedro Sánchez decided to remove his remains last June but we are [still] waiting and waiting — there are endless delays and legal challenges. Now they are saying the exhumation will be May 10, but we do not know if that will be possible or not.

EG
Sánchez also recently became the first head of government to visit the graves of two of the most famous Republican exiles — poet Antonio Machado and the last president of the Second Republic, Manuel Azaña. What was the significance of this gesture?

IG
It was very important. Obviously, there was an electoral element to the visit, but it was more than that. Machado in particular has come to symbolize the half-million exiles who fled to France after Barcelona fell to Franco. This mass exodus, made up predominantly of ordinary people, were bombarded from ships in the Mediterranean and machine-gunned by German and Italian planes as they made their way to the border. On the eightieth anniversary of what is known as the Retirada (the withdrawal), it was important that Sánchez made this gesture.

EG
The early years of the Second Republic were an incredible moment culturally for Spain. The country was beginning to move in a more secular direction while you had a real flourishing of the arts as symbolized by the “Generation of ‘27” poets — the likes of Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, and even Pablo Neruda who was living in Madrid before the war. The fall of the Republic marks a break with this. How do you view this loss?

IG
The Republic was under threat from the word go, with the Church firmly against it and the fascists already plotting together with Mussolini’s regime. But that did not stop the incredible flowering that took place. Beginning in the 1920s, there was an extraordinary cultural scene in Madrid: foreign painters, the arrival of cinema, a booming theater scene, and this group of incredible poets and novelists known as the generation of ‘27. These young writers were also in contact with the previous generation, which included the likes of Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, and Antonio Machado. Madrid was a small city — everyone knew everyone else and you just had this exciting mix.

Then the military uprising wrecked it. It was an absolute cultural disaster — when you think of what was lost. We will never know what Spain could have been. Most of the country’s intellectuals were forced into exile or had been killed. You had the loss of documents and cultural artifacts — in the case of Lorca, his correspondence with Salvador Dalí. He was infatuated with Dalí and so in his letters tried to impress the painter. The few that remain are extraordinary documents. And this is the same with so many writers and intellectuals. There are important holes in and gaps in their works and archives.

The result is a kind of truncated culture. It is truly heartbreaking.


jacobinmag.com/2019/04/franco-fascism-poets-federico-garcia-lorca?fbclid=IwAR1fgU6yuV0JtPnqmxJ5wE6c9qNbVHNidVQxUBy7gSvwSsnOBK5siXo78Xo

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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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