Black roses

"Don't get your hopes up:
power changes hands,
but he rarely hesitates."
Joan Fuster,Aphorisms

On the unconstitutional eve of another momentous anniversary, it must be remembered once again that the last police officer of the Franco dictatorship was the first of the democratic era. There's no need to look for examples; they all are; and all of them mean one; and this includes everyone from the first to the last. Unfortunately, the same logic applies to the murky figure of the police infiltrator driven by state-sanctioned psychosis: the last one still serving under the dictatorship—for example, Mikel Lejarza.Wolf—he was also the first mole of democracy. And so on in so many orders of disorder, with the unfortunate providence that in the case of infiltrators in two seemingly distinct stages—dictatorship and dictatorship—they share a common trait, a trait that is a blessing to any possibility of democracy: the same state impunity. Under both regimes, at such different times, it turns out that they are planned and orchestrated systematically in the same way and from the depths of depravity: in the most absolute and shadowy illegality. Following journalistic investigations by The DirectIt will soon be a year since the documentary Infiltrators broadcast in 30 minutes It awakened us from that opaque figure, unregulated everywhere, calledintelligence agentQuite different from an undercover agent acting under judicial mandate and monitoring, legally permitted under certain circumstances. But the supposed democracy, in that blind spot, draws on a vein of true dictatorship: in the name of the law but always outside of it, without any kind of control, only at the gray whim of the food chain of repression and under the same order: the bottomless pit of national security.

It's always worth mentioning, to avoid any self-deception, that all of this has happened—is happening—under the most progressive government in history and under the leadership of Grande-Marlaska's ministry. At this point, it can be said that this is the period in which the most police infiltrators have been discovered within social movements and political dissident groups. There are a dozen, half of them in the Catalan Countries. It's worth remembering that the most recent cases brought to light the extreme of using interpersonal and romantic relationships as a source of information gathering. At that time, rivers of ink flowed and Twitter spewed forth, especially sadistic, patriarchal, and vicious in this age of digital cesspools. It's worth remembering this today, on this anniversary. constitutionalbecause the book has just been published The Shadow of the State: A Collective Testimony on Police Infiltration(Out of Control, 2025). And it's worth it—literally—to read it and immerse yourself in it. Like all reality, far beyond the sensational headline and banal commentary, you'll find the full multifaceted complexity of a shudder that is both personal and collective. You'll delve into the thick density of the State's authoritarian web and grasp an immeasurable testimonial value that lies in the fact that it is written and reflected upon in the first person. By the very people who have been victims of this state espionage that, to its ultimate consequences, broke down every door, reaching the most intimate corners of each life. Even their own room. Even their own bed.

Although it wasn't the primary objective, given that many more people were outraged and showed solidarity from the outset, the book also serves as an educational response to all those comments that, lurking in the depths of digital cannibalism, resorted to facile judgment, sexist stigmatization, and stupid condemnation. Those same loudmouths who laughed must be the same ones who, surely, have never been and never will be targeted by the shadowy state and its blacklists. The same ones who, dispensing supposed lessons from the mobile phones on which they pontificate, give away all their data—their entire lives—to technological feudalism, free of charge and every single day.–But this is neither the primary nor the ultimate reason for a publication that is simultaneously a collective dictionary, a collective assessment, an antidote of memory against forgetting, a manual for future generations, a solid alternative, and an essential reflection from diverse perspectives, ranging from anti-repression to psychosocial. Written by Roses Negres, the anonymous collective that gathers and shelters those who suffered those infiltrations, it contains a twofold added value worth considering: the ongoing dialogue with English social movements—because not only is repression globalized, but so is solidarity—and the certainty that the struggles it investigated remain alive. With a point of resistant convergence: both here and there, the state has been exposed in its perversion.

The difference between Spain and the United Kingdom is that there, after years of struggle and activism against a mass surveillance scandal, there have been official public apologies, policies guaranteeing access to the documentation of the assault on privacy, and court rulings establishing that rights, guarantees, and privacy were violated. Any comparison with the Kingdom of Spain is deafening. Because it turns out that the same people who refuse here and there—neither Isla nor Marlaska, let's put it bluntly—to allow the Via Laietana police station's museum of horrors to be transformed into a center of democratic memory are the same ones who, despite having the means to investigate, refuse to shed light on illegal police infiltrations. The other consideration, when you finish the book shaken and shaken, is much more profound and strikes at the heart of the book: the crude and brutal use of sexual relations as a tool of savage espionage against political dissent, which leaves a legal vacuum that is filled with savage evidence. It might be argued that, at the time of the deceitful events, the people didn't know it was the State intruding into their lives. But, in inverse proportion, the agents—following orders and directives—did know every single detail of what they were violating—and that, without a doubt, makes them violators.–And no final judgment will ever be necessary to certify it. Remembering it on December 6th, supposedly a constitutional day, is not in vain either. It's simply urgently necessary. As necessary as remembering, the watchful observer, that if we're talking about it today, it's because collective intelligence managed to catch them out yesterday. Hoping it will again tomorrow.