Trapero: "'Well' very well, 'well' goodbye"

1. Due to a very serious police error, with anti-democratic tics, Salvador Illa has been caught between a rock and a hard place with USTEC. At the end of a heated school year, with seventeen days of strike called ahead —starting with this Tuesday's—, the Government has lost negotiating power with the majority teachers' union. The decision by the General Directorate of Information of the Mossos d'Esquadra to infiltrate two plainclothes agents into a teachers' assembly to supposedly conduct a risk assessment in the face of a labor dispute has backfired. The act of sneaking disguised police officers into a union meeting is characteristic of a fascist state, even if the Catalan police —but no less police for that— maintain that they were acting "within current legislation". They can say whatever they want. Furthermore, the fact that the two policewomen were caught just minutes into the meeting and couldn't even say which school they worked at reveals a level of preparation for the spy squad more suited to a comic book than a professional force. It's too serious not to hold people accountable.

2. Do we remember where we come from? Ten days ago, the controversy was that the Illa-Niubó-Parlon trident had taken the first step to place police in schools that requested it. The idea was already a bad one, because a police officer in a classroom doesn't seem like the best solution. For Donald Trump, perhaps, but not for a left-wing government. School is such a crucial place in our society that it is in constant conflict. In the classroom, language is a mess resolved with absurd percentages dictated by a law we already know the intentions of. In the cafeteria, the crusade against sugar is a headache for the AMPA of each center. On the playground, there are already more screens than balls. In the teachers' room, they are struggling to increase salaries and reduce student-teacher ratios. These are very legitimate demands that the Government, more out of tactic than innocence, negotiates with minority unions. As Esther Vera wrote yesterday, "the education strike is not a labor protest but a diagnosis of the country." Also for being able to capture reality with condensed truths like this, the director of ARA has received the National Communication Award.

3. The PSC government, if it didn't have so many media complicities, would be cornered today. Problems are piling up for it in too many sensitive areas. But the opposition is so weak that, in the case of the infiltrated police, they can't even agree on which resignation to demand. Some want councilor Niubó to resign, others councilor Parlon, and still others are asking for Trapero, the director general of the Police, to resign. He is the weakest link in the chain and, therefore, the first one who should jump... if anyone jumps. But, politically, this storm is already seen how it will end: with a police press conference without questions —another tic of another regime— and with an explanation from President Illa in Parliament, where he will scold us all a little, as usual.

4. Josep Lluís Trapero, as the major of the Mossos, captivated us in 2017. For the firmness he conveyed from the August 17 attacks to the capture and death of Younes Abouyaaqoub in Subirats. In those days, Trapero won local sympathies when, to the journalist who left the press room offended because he was answering in Catalan the questions they were asking him in Catalan, he said “well, then very well, then goodbye”. T-shirts were even made of it. Afterwards, Trapero was a victim of 155 and the State's repression due to October 1st. During the trial of the Procés, when he admitted that the Mossos had everything ready to arrest President Puigdemont if they were ordered to, I know who, from that t-shirt, made rags. Goodbye to the hero. All of a sudden we remembered that a policeman is a policeman.