Commissioner Josep Maria Estela left his home in Segrià early yesterday with two empty bags in the trunk of the official car. He dispatched the business of the day with his team at headquarters and appeared at eleven o’clock in the office of the Minister of the Interior, Joan Ignasi Elena. Until the last moment, Estela, the man who has been head of the Mossos d’Esquadra for the last nine months, held out the hope of convincing the politician that the only way to redirect the crisis and restore stability in the organization was to keep him and dismiss the commissioner Eduard Sallent and the director of the Police, Pere Ferrer. He could not.
The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes. Estela practically spoke and their tone was friendly. The chief commissioner conveyed her refusal to resign: “I’m not resigning because I haven’t done or stopped doing anything for which I have to leave.” Immediately afterwards, the Minister dismissed him and the Commissioner asked him for the reasons. The conseller responded by offering to choose her new destination. “The time has come to return home,” replied the Mosso; the police region of Ponent.
They said goodbye and Estela left the office, leaving a Minister “very touched personally, but convinced of the step”, the politician transferred to his team. In this way, Elena struck down the one who has been the seventh head of the Mossos in just five years. She and she did not give reasons to Estela in her meeting, nor did anyone from the department offer them during the rest of the day. Neither from the Government did they make a comment about a crisis that is falsely closed.
In the afternoon, Commissioner Sallent was provisionally appointed chief of the body, until the end of the course that the new six commissioners began yesterday on December 2nd. If Elena’s plans are not altered, one of the four newly promoted women, probably Rosa Maria Bosch, will be elected head of the Mossos.
Once it was over, Estela left Interior and went to her office in Egara. She wanted to be alone to collect the four things that she had gathered in these nine months and for which in the end she only needed one of the bags. She phoned her people at home to tell them that she was fine and wrote a long message to Major Josep Lluís Trapero.
Estela, who did not prevent the day of the Squads from being humiliated, forced to sit outside the presidential table and who allowed the highest authority of the organization to settle in a warehouse as an office, has ended up in recent weeks empathizing with the commissioner Miquel Esquius and with Trapero. Understanding that, like him, the previous two were separated for marking insurmountable red lines of autonomy of the body against partisan interference incompatible with the impartiality of the police.
What did Estela stop doing to stop being ERC’s trusted man in the Mossos? “Say enough. Stop pretending that he was in charge when in reality Sallent and Ferrer were leading the organization, meddling in any decision of an operational nature with political criteria, ”explains a curator.
In Interior the reflection is different: ” Estela stopped being in charge, she was not capable of leading and ended up more concerned with her permanence than with the day-to-day of the body.”
Be that as it may, Estela, the policeman trained in the territory, the son of a farmer who had never set foot in the corridors of Egara, soon discovered that he was not in charge, nor was he going to be allowed to do so. And understand by having his team chosen, being able to design communication policy or make politicians understand that in matters of judicial police, there is no valid political criterion.
The friction with Sallent did not take long to arrive and Estela still had a few weeks in which she tried to govern the police by isolating her deputy, who was left out of the commissioner election court. But the die was already cast and the decision made. Between Sallent and Estela, ERC chose the former, leading the organization to a new crisis whose consequences will soon emerge. Just yesterday in the City of Justice a few prosecutors did not hide their concern.
While Elena dismissed Estela, in the RAC1 studios the former Minister of the Interior, Miquel Sàmper, accused the Sallent boss of holding back police investigations: “We have commanders who are obstructing investigations.”
Estela turned off the phone in the afternoon and was working in the orchard. Before, she wrote a farewell letter to the Mossos asking them for “maximum and radical political neutrality” and to move away from “meanness.” Today she will join her office in Lleida.
