"Who do you believe, me or your own eyes?" This famous line from Groucho Marx in the movie Goose soup It perfectly sums up the farce of the appearances before the Congress of Deputies committee on Operation Catalunya. The festival of denials, selective forgetting, and textbook cynicism that has featured figures such as Mariano Rajoy, Jorge Fernández Díaz, María Dolores de Cospedal, and Alicia Sánchez-Camacho is the modus operandi of those who feel unpunished and protected by the structures of the State.
Cospedal and Sánchez-Camacho denied before the commission any involvement in or knowledge of dirty operations against the Catalan independence movement, although new recordings made by former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, who is always there when it comes to revealing the truth, were made public early this morning, refuting them with crystal clarity. Despite denying their authenticity, the conversations reveal dirty war strategies, the partisan use of public funds, and the shameless abuse of institutional power.
In the case of Rajoy and Fernández Díaz, the line of defense was forgetfulness and arrogance. Both, with that pose of never having broken a plate, acted surprised when asked about actions they themselves had ordered or authorized. Fernández Díaz, Minister of the Interior at the time of the events, claimed not to remember the meetings and reports. Rajoy, for his part, reiterated that he never gave instructions to attack political adversaries and that if irregularities were committed, he knew nothing. This is the case, for example, with the Spanish Prime Minister's role in sinking the Banca Privada de Andorra, as revealed by the audio recordings published by RAC1 this week.
But, as always, Villarejo's endless audio archive, conceived as a shield for self-defense and a form of blackmail for attack, helps shed light on the darkness. His recordings, which are appearing in dribs and drabs, exposed the misery of a state capable of using the patriotic police, the National Intelligence Center (CNI), and sympathetic media to fabricate crimes, destroy reputations, and falsify evidence, all in the name of Spanish unity.
But the serious thing is not only what was done, but the impunity with which it is carried out. Article 3.2 of Organic Law 5/1984 clearly establishes that if a person appearing in court lies and there are indications of criminality, the commission must inform the Public Prosecutor's Office. And Article 502 of the Penal Code punishes those who falsify the truth in parliament with up to one year in prison. But we have seen many times that lying is free. Not only is it not punished, but it is part of the script. Some parliamentary groups have already requested that the statements be sent to the Prosecutor's Office, but history teaches us that these initiatives always end up on paper.
What does work perfectly is the unwritten manual that José Antonio Sáenz de Santamaría, former director of the Civil Guard, summarized in 1995 during the GAL trials.: "There are things that are not done; if they are done, they are not reported, and if they are confirmed, they are denied." This doctrine is the one followed to the letter by Rajoy, Fernández Díaz, Cospedal, and company. There are also other variations of this doctrine, such as José María Aznar's famous "whoever can do, let them do it," or Rajoy's justification for flouting the rules of the rule of law when he says, unfazed, that "we did what we had to do."
The parliamentary commission now underway in Congress was established a decade late, as a bargaining chip for the Catalan pro-independence parties due to the PSOE's urgent arithmetic, and without much hope of reaching any major conclusions. In 2017, the Catalan Parliament created a similar commission, in which the PSC abstained from participating, but its conclusions remained a memorandum of grievances with no legal basis. At the time, the recordings that emerged of the former director of the Anti-Fraud Office with Minister Fernández Díaz plotting charges and explaining that "the Prosecutor's Office will fine-tune it for you" caused a lot of noise and nothing more. All of this was a repetition of a familiar script: initial outrage, promises of regeneration, and, finally, silence and oblivion.
In short, the story of Operation Catalunya is not only a chronicle of an abuse of power, but also a confirmation that the state's structures act with complete impunity because it's very clear they don't mess around with food. The only certain thing is that, when this is all over, Mariano Rajoy will light up a cigar, like Groucho Marx.
