The photo that illustrates this information was taken on October 28, 2017 by the EFE agency photographer, Andreu Dalmau. “I estimate that between 8 and 8:30”, he specifies. Dalmau took a photo for the story. The Plaza de Sant Jaume is deserted.
Fifteen hours earlier, very close, in the Parliament of Catalonia, the resolution unilaterally declaring Catalonia an independent republic had been approved.
But that morning in Plaça de Sant Jaume, in front of the Palau de la Generalitat, which was supposed to be the seat of the last government born within old Europe, nothing happened. Nobody came. There was nothing. And there was the flag of Spain.
Carles Puigdemont himself has explained that they gave up going forward to avoid a bloodbath. Simultaneously with the declaration of independence, the Spanish government had suspended Catalan autonomy while the Justice was preparing the charges that led – and may still lead – many independence leaders to jail.
In the blind spot of independence – the blind spot when we look back through the rearview mirror – the task of building the so-called state structures was abandoned.
For five long years, from 2012 –under the mandate of Artur Mas– until October 2017 –under the presidency of Carles Puigdemont–, the successive Catalan governments worked tirelessly on the conception and construction of the structures on which it was going to be built. a new state of Europe. In October 2017 they vanished.
There are thousands and thousands of documents (only the documentation accumulated to prepare this article adds up to 270 megabytes), huge hours of work by public employees and specialists in each subject who worked –many voluntarily– to decide, for example, how pensions would be paid, what would happen to the nuclear waste, in what census would the members of the new Catalan nation appear or how international commercial transactions would be guaranteed in a new country that did not want to be disconnected from the world… It was about building a rational, convincing, that accompanied the epic of the moment. It was not a fudge and they were not bluffing, that was the message that their leaders repeated wherever they went.
Was it all a farce? A few months ago, the then deputy, Gabriela Serra, from the CUP explained in an interview with the journalist Gemma Nierga that shortly before the declaration of independence on the 27th, they were told that “there was nothing and there is no plan to make this possible.” ”.
There was nothing. “It’s not true – replies one of the members of the Puigdemont government who was tried and convicted by the Supreme Court – a lot of work was done, there were many things. But you can do all the roles you want, paper is not enough.”
The vast majority of those who have spoken of their experience to write this article have preferred to do so anonymously. Among other reasons, because even today there are independentistas awaiting trial for having participated in this task. Others because they prefer not to say what they think.
Between 2012, when the government of Artur Mas endorsed the independence discourse, and October 2017, there are at least twenty declarations, motions, and political and institutional agreements that address and commit to the construction of state structures. In fact, the government of Artur Mas in December 2012 started with three parallel commissions. One of them already has the mission to build them. Pere Aragonès, the current president, was one of its members representing ERC.
This is where the Consell Assessor per a la Transitió Nacional was born, a project that Carles Viver Pi Sunyer will lead and that will finish its work in 2014. There, the box of cables of an ideal country was exposed.
“In reality –reasons one of the institutional positions of Artur Mas’s party– it was about having the story with which to tell the Spanish Government: we have a plan. And it was also the way to control it [within the independence movement]. To prevent others from directing it”. Carry the baton. First Mas and then, definitively, Puigdemont would lose it.
When in 2015 Artur Mas was relegated to the dustbin of history and Carles Puigdemont assumed the presidency, Junts pel Sí –the coalition of ERC and CDC– committed to, in 18 months, holding a referendum and… having the structures prepared of State. The consultation –an unprecedented popular and civil mobilization– will take place. State structures will not see the light.
During those months, Viver Pi Sunyer visited the ministers to find out how the task of building the structures was progressing in each area. A minister – also judged by the Supreme Court – who considered that this task was unfeasible, recounts how one of those visits went “I explained to him how he saw things and he went the way he had entered”. Puigdemont, he adds, knew what his position was on the matter. “He never censured me for it,” he points out.
Paradoxically –seen from the current political situation of the independence movement– the departments controlled by ERC in that government –particularly the vice-presidency led by Oriol Junqueras and the Department of Foreign Affairs– were the ones that worked hardest for the construction of the future institutional architecture. And perhaps that explains his more pragmatic vision at the end of the procès. “Then they discovered that ‘fer la independència’ was not so simple” reflects one of those involved.
No source –perhaps because nobody came to have a complete vision– agrees to specify how many decrees should have been published in the Official Gazette of the Generalitat after the declaration of independence to shed light on state structures. There are those who speak of 50. Others of just over twenty. None saw the light. Its content today is still not fully known.
Perhaps the public exposure of all these documents would help make what happened more understandable and would embarrass those who still today continue to preach fast food independence.
Is all that information stored somewhere? A CTTI worker – the Generalitat’s digital service provider – acknowledges having seen that repository somewhere.
On the same day, October 28, the Official State Gazette did publish the decrees of the central government. In them, the Generalitat was liquidated, its powers divided between different ministries and all the delegations abroad of the Generalitat were closed. Until mid-December, the Bulletin successively continued to publish new decisions that dismantled everything that had something to do, even if only indirectly, with state structures. One by one.
