Judicial timelines dictated that the final session of the trial against the national police officers who blinded the eye of the activist Roger Español would be held on October 1st, seven years after the day of the referendum in which the pro-independence activist was mutilated. The session began with a delay: it was suspended until one in the afternoon because the accused inspector had alleged "a health problem" and resumed when he returned from the hospital. All this has caused the trial to finally end on Friday. Thursday's session included statements from the inspector in charge of the operation, two sub-inspectors, and the officer who fired at Español. However, these statements were overshadowed by the final speech of Español's defense, which even resorted to a sentence by Manuel Marchena and another handed down for the Esther Quintana case, to dismantle the police version of 1-O.

"It was one in the morning when my phone rang. One without internet that I bought just for that." This is how Salvador Cardona from Sabadell recalls the moment he accepted being one of the clandestine gears that made the October 1st referendum possible. In the darkness of the night, he spent more than an hour and a half sorting messy electoral envelopes next to his barbecue. On the eve of the referendum, they still didn't have ballots. "We had everything ready for Sunday, but the ballots still weren't there. We had a facsimile in PDF that had been sent to us and a couple of paper cutters located and some photocopiers prepared outside the town hall," he explains to ARA nine years later, still with the adrenaline intact.

The final stretch of the trial of four police officers for blinding Roger Español in one eye during the 1-O has begun with one goal: to clarify as many details as possible about how the shot was fired by the National Police riot officer who now sits in the dock with three commanders. This Wednesday, specialists from the Photography and Audiovisual Unit of the Mossos d'Esquadra's Scientific Police explained their conclusions to the court after viewing all the footage of the day. The officers explained that a frame from the images shows that the shooter did not aim directly at Español, but rather fired towards the ground. The images also show a "black spot," the bullet, which bounces off the ground before striking Roger Español in the face.

Since the referendum of October 1, 2017, in which a great popular victory ended in political failure, all kinds of culprits have been sought. Thus, everything from threats, dirty war, and state repression to supposed fears, cowardice, and internal betrayals have been considered. And while the gravity of external aggressions against the right to self-determination has been progressively relativized, if not forgotten altogether, internal weaknesses have been exaggerated to the point of creating an unbreathable climate of collective self-flagellation.

Roger Español (Tarragona, 1974) was one of the thousands of activists who, on October 1, 2017, defended the ballot boxes and polling stations where the independence referendum was being held. He suffered the worst of it when one of the rubber bullets fired by the National Police in Barcelona blinded his right eye. Today, nine years later, he is still seeking justice and has managed to bring four of the police officers who participated in those charges to the defendants' bench, including the riot officer who shot him. They will be the only officers tried for the police violence of October 1st.

The commanders and police officers testifying at the trial for the loss of an eye of Roger Español on 1-O have shielded the actions of the four national police officers sitting in the dock, the only ones who will face trial for the charges from nine years ago. The colleagues of the accused have insisted on the "violence" and "aggressiveness" of the protesters with statements that in many points were identical to one another, and which the court did not allow to be contrasted at the time with the videos of that day. On the second day of the trial, a superior of the riot police also downplayed the possibility that the shotgunner fired directly at the body, with the weapon parallel to the ground, and asserted that the operation was similar to other actions: "It did not differ at all from a Champions League or Copa Libertadores final, a visit from the Pope, or going to help with the DANA or any other catastrophe".

Nine years after the police charges of October 1st, Roger Español explained before a court how and when a rubber bullet emptied his eye. His testimony opened the trial of the only four police officers who will be judged for the October 1st charges. A shotgunner and three commanders face 13 years in prison for an operation that the head of the riot police described as "absolutely perfect," while several witnesses have explained that the agents were shooting directly at people's bodies, not at the ground for the rubber balls to bounce. Español believes the shot was "a reprisal" for having thrown a fence when an officer had hit him with a baton.

Nine years after the 1-O, four national police officers sit this Wednesday in the dock for the rubber bullet that blinded Roger Español in one eye. They are the only officers who will be tried for the charges of a day with a thousand injured. The Prosecutor's Office has requested their acquittal because it believes they were doing their job and the State Attorney's Office is defending them. Even so, Español's complaint and the popular accusations of Irídia, the ANC and Òmnium have caused the case to reach the trial that begins this Wednesday, in which the officers face sentences of up to 13 years in prison and disqualification for the crimes of torture and injuries with the loss of an organ.

In October 2017, thousands of young people who were then between 18 and 22 years old experienced their great vital and political baptism by defending the ballot boxes in the street. Today, the "1-O Generation", born between 1995 and 1999, is reaching their thirties, has left the shelter of student life and has begun to face the harshness of labor precariousness and the serious housing crisis. But, how has their perspective evolved in this decade?

The Supreme Court continues to apply the amnesty law drop by drop and after many months of waiting. The high court has now applied it to the first minister of the 1-O government: Meritxell Serret, who was convicted by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) to one year of disqualification and a fine of 12,000 euros for her participation in the organization of the October 1st referendum. In 2017, Serret was Minister of Agriculture. She later became Minister of Foreign Action with the government of Pere Aragonès and, subsequently, was the Government's delegate in Brussels while in exile. She returned to Catalonia in March 2021. “This chamber has decided that the acts for which she has been accused are declared amnestied,” concludes the Supreme Court's order to which ARA has had access. In this way, the former minister is exempted from all criminal responsibilities attributed to her.

The Tarragona-based filmmaker Anna M. Bofarull premiered on June 11 at the International Catalan Film Festival (FIC-CAT) in Roda de Berà her latest film, Rebel, a documentary with the 1-O referendum as a backdrop and starring Marta Torrecillas. Torrecillas was one of those attacked by the Spanish police, and images of her being dragged by officers down the stairs of the Pau Claris institute in Barcelona went viral, along with her claim that her fingers on one hand had been broken one by one.

Last week, the arrest of the crew of the flotilla arriving in Gaza with humanitarian aid from the Israeli government was the spark that lit all the fires. All over Europe, where there had been demonstrations of rejection of the genocide committed by the Netanyahu government for weeks, people took to the streets following the impulse that arises within each of them, and this is how large collective demonstrations usually arise.

The eighth anniversary of October 1st has passed amidst the normalizing silence of socialism, the chronic convalescence of the pro-independence parties that were the protagonists of 2017, nostalgia for what we were, the malaise of a lost opportunity, and the reality of a world at war that now relativizes all those years filled with effort.

From Cornellà del Terri, where former president Carles Puigdemont voted on 1-O, Junts held its event this Tuesday night to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the October 1 referendum. Under the slogan "Committed to 1-O," the Junts members demanded "the validity of the referendum mandate" after the independence movement lost its majority in the Catalan Parliament and have called for "finishing the job." To this end, Puigdemont called for "protection" of the formula that made 1-O possible and claimed three "ingredients" that, in his opinion, made it possible: unity, transversality—without considering "what those on our side think, what their origins are, or what religion they profess"—and a vision for the future. A message that Puigdemont repeated this Wednesday in a message on X: "It is imperative that we preserve the formula of October 1, because it is the one that leads to victory." Puigdemont defended October 1st as a "historical heritage" and the "foundation stone for building a future of freedom."

The cases of the Banco Sabadell, the La Caixa Foundation and its holding company Criteria, the Molins cement factory Or Laboratorios Ordes, which has returned its registered office to Catalonia after leaving in the wake of the 1-O referendum, is not a one-off; there have been more movements. For the first time, concrete data is available: 681 of the companies that moved their registered offices out of Catalonia at the end of 2017 and during 2018 have already returned. This is evident from the latest report on registered office movements by Informa BD, part of the Cesce group, corresponding to the first quarter of 2025. ~BK_SLT_L~ also shows the return of Catalan companies that left as a result of 1-O. It is true that among those that have not yet returned, there are some that are part of the Ibex 35, such as CaixaBank (although in this case it has returned to its main shareholder, Criteria), Colonial, or Naturgy. In fact, the 681 companies that have returned to Catalonia represent 7.39% of the 9,221 that have left since the fourth quarter of 2017, according to Informa.

Òmnium Cultural, the ANC and Irídia move to annul the agreement the amnesty granted to the 46 national police officers prosecuted for the violence against the voters of the 1-O referendum in Barcelona. The organizations announced this Thursday the filing of several appeals before the Supreme Court to withdraw the pardon for the officers, which was upheld by Barcelona's 7th Court and later confirmed by the Barcelona Court of Appeals. The filings before the high court accuse the police officers of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and emphasize that these are crimes that cannot be protected under the amnesty law.

The repression on October 1st has had many victims, but some who have not suffered either prison or exile have gone more unnoticed. Among them are the nine teachers from the El Palacio Institute in San Andrés de la Barca who were singled out and accused of harassing the children of Civil Guards in the days following the referendum. The accusation could not be sustained and the case was closed, but their name remains tainted. If you search for them on Google, you'll find news stories about the accusations against them and a piece byThe World –which made the front page– where their names and surnames were listed, along with the subject they taught and a photograph of their faces. The court case went nowhere, but the public accusations are still online, accessible to anyone with a couple of clicks on Google. Now they are demanding that the digital trail of the closed case be erased, that the harm done to them be repaired, and that a plan be drawn up to protect teachers from prosecution for what they say in the classroom.

Every September for the past seven years, the nine teachers from the El Palacio Institute in San Andrés de la Barca who were singled out on October 1st relive the legal ordeal they suffered when they were accused of abusing the children of Civil Guards. The reason? If new students search for them on Google, the first results that appear are those of the legal case against them, which has since been closed. Also, the article where The World published his name, surname and photographs and that ended up on a cover that the then Cs leader, Albert Rivera, used to point them out as "separatist teachers." In November 2024 The last judicial file opened against the teachers was closed, who lament the "personal strain" and "enormous suffering" over these years, where they have felt alone and without support from either the Generalitat or the City Council. Now they want justice on two fronts: on the one hand, erasing the "infamous" digital footprint of the accusations against them on the internet and, on the other, achieving moral reparation for the damage that includes a plan to protect teachers from persecution for what they express in the classroom.

Does anyone know what happened to us? Does anyone know exactly what happened in the months before and immediately after the 1-O referendum? It's not that there's a lack of stories that describe, with little or no precision, the most obvious, most visible, most incontrovertible material facts. Nor are there any shortages of simplistic interpretations, conspiratorial approximations, and maliciously biased and self-exculpatory versions. But, of all this, what remains in our collective memory—and in our lack of memory—is a broken mirror of interpretations. A mess that has not only fragmented its memory but is also made up of pieces that don't even fit together. Reconstruction, for now, seems impossible.

The Barcelona Court has sent to trial the four National Police officers prosecuted for a crime of assault in the operation on October 1st in which Roger Español lost an eye due to the impact of a rubber bullet. The court has concluded that the injuries during the charges at the Escola Ramon Llull in Barcelona are not covered by the amnesty law and, instead, it does apply to Español, who was accused of a crime of attacking the officers.