Activists Launch Lawsuit Against Spanish Spycops
Activists in Catalonia have discovered more spycops in their ranks.
Those familiar with the British spycops scandal will know how officers infiltrated and undermined campaigns, formed long-term intimate relationships and integrated into partners’ families, and perverted the course of jusitce by infiltrating lawyer-client meetings.
The Spanish State’s spycops have committed each of these outrages in the Catralan towns of Girona and Salt.
A fourth officer has been unmasked. Maria Isern Torres, under the fictitious identity of Maria Perelló Amengual, targeted the independence, anti-racist and housing movements. She deceived activist Òscar Campos into a relationship.
The people targeted, like their British counterparts, are campaiging for truth and justice. On Friday 10 November there was a press conference at which Òscar Campos made this statement:
Less than four months ago we discovered and made public that the Ministry of the Interior of the Spanish State had infiltrated social movements in Girona.
We found that our assemblies and our mobilisations, our meeting spaces and our internal documents; even our defence campaigns and the conversations with the lawyers building the case for the 21 Raons (21 Reasons) defendants, still awaiting trial; and the homes and lives of many of us had been infiltrated to the most intimate extremes by an agent of the National Police Force, Maria Isern Torres, under the false identity Maria Amengual Perelló.
Although we still found ourselves in a state of shock, at that press conference we said that the the Interior Ministry under Grande Marlaska had not only violated its own laws and crossed all moral lines, but it had also made a grave mistake: because we would not be isolated and we would not be afraid; we would not take a single step back in our struggles and we would not hesitate to demand accountability and reparations for these illegal and immoral acts, which will become a boomerang for the State.
That is what we have done. We fought back immediately with a demonstration in Girona that was replicated by comrades in Palma (were the officer was from). The Catalan Parliament has approved the creation of a committee to investigate police infiltration.
The Town Halls of Girona, Salt and many other towns have declared Maria Isern Torres persona non grata, and we have circulated her image and her real identity, and built links with the victims of the other four infiltrators sent by the same Spanish police spying operation into social movements around the Catalan Countries.
Crowd of people with posters about the lawsuit against the Spanish state’s spycops, naming Maria Isern Torres
Today we are taking another step, as we launch our legal case against the officer and her chain of command in the Spanish Police, right up to the Ministry of the Interior which orchestrated this illegal policing operation and maintained it for three years, in violation of our individual and collective rights.
We are not fooling ourselves. We have no trust in the Spanish judicial system. We have suffered that system as activists. It condemns, imprisons and evicts us, and invariably absolves the police for their abuses. It is rife with racism, classism and phobia against the Catalans. It has already thrown out previous attempts to prosecute and investigate Spanish police infiltrations.
Nevertheless, we will not stop. Just as we will not cease to mobilise on the streets, which will always be ours, we will also exhaust all the legal routes to justice, both within and beyond the Spanish State.
We will expose the dark, shameful side of this repressive State, which wants to see us muzzled and silenced, and which will use any means necessary, legal and illegal, to achieve that.
We call for a full investigation of this policing operation because we have the right to know the truth, down to the last details. We demand to know who is responsible, because they need to be removed from those jobs and punished.
We demand reparations for the damage done; and, like our British comrades who suffered infiltration and won a hard battle for the State to recognise the unlawfulness of these operations, we demand that this does not happen again, ever, anywhere, or to anyone.
Further info: article in Directa [in Catalan].
The Spanish state has charged the journalist who uncovered the spycops scandal, Jesus Rodriguez, with terrorism – read more in Rodriguez’s publication Directa [in Catalan]).