40 years have passed since the approval of the Statute of Autonomy of the Valencian Country. “40 years making country”, said the official propaganda, without specifying which one it was referring to.
The drafting and subsequent approval of that Statute must be placed in a context of violence that conditioned it from top to bottom. On the one hand, the native violence, fundamentally from 1977, with the political, civic and media instigation of Blaverism – an anti-intellectual, xenophobic and reactionary movement, woven on the solace of an anti-Catalanism that came from the past. On the other, the violence of the state and its sewers, with a Transition always accompanied by the noise of machine guns, and peaking in the coup d’état of 1981. A binomial of explicit violence that the Valencian and Spanish reactionary forces ( pass me the redundancy) they used against the breakaway left and the progressive Valencianism that Joan Fuster had as a reference.
The Statute – a pact between the Francoist right and the reformist left – officializes the end of the proposal for a “quiet revolution” in Valencia: a worldview between radical anti-Francoism and enlightened Valencianism. And the beginning, on the contrary, of an autonomism under centralist control. Contrary to what the official propaganda expresses, the intellectual criminalization of the project that represented that idea of ??”making a country” and the republican memory were the first victims. The last articles published during his lifetime by Joan Fuster and the posthumous Diaries of Rafael Chirbes have documented these resignations, in my opinion useless.
The failure of the statutory route is demonstrated by the fact that none of the most transversal demands of Valencian society for 40 years has come true. The economic backbone of the Mediterranean Axis – with infrastructure that Vicent Ventura already claimed in the 70s -, a fair financing model and the state’s lack of commitment to the inclusion of Valencian Civil Law in the legal system, among others, they continue to be claims in the drawer of scandalous non-compliance.
On the other hand, the diagnosis of the situation cannot be made only with criteria of political institutionalization. Indicators such as the economic and socio-cultural development of the country must be taken into account. Since then, the Valencian Country has made no progress in defining a cohesive or modernizing production model. On the contrary, it continues, on the one hand, the path started by Franco’s development with the exploitation of the territory, often linked to mass tourism. In fact, much of the material destruction of the country is not from the Franco era but from the autonomous region, since many “democratic” councils launched themselves into the irrational exploitation of the land, with incorrigible environmental costs. On the other hand, the weight, in the Valencian economy, of certain transnational companies that, with the blackmail of relocation, act as extractive elites of native public resources. The closure of tens of thousands of small and medium-sized companies that constituted the industrial model of the country and the abandonment of tens of thousands of agricultural farms are consequences of an economic policy without defined strategic objectives. The disappearance of the Valencian banking system – Banc de València, Caixa d’Estalvis de València and CAM – is the icing on a poisoned cake.
As for the socio-cultural model, the statutory route has not even served to design an own media system, entirely in the hands of communication groups outside the country. A subsidiary system of the Mediaset-Atresmedia duopoly facilitated at the time by the Zapatero government, and benefited by successive state governments, as demonstrated by the latest Audiovisual Law. The closure of RTVV and the cutting of TV3 and Catalunya radio broadcasts have turned us into a “satellite culture”, so to speak with the concept of T.S. Eliot. The creation of À punt with a local television budget will never allow it to compete in the audience market and will prevent the maturation of the audiovisual sector and related cultural industries – so important, precisely, to redefine the productive model of we talked
Make no mistake: such a country is just a landscape. Burnt, for more sensibility. Let the propaganda not hide the magnitude of a defeat cultivated for 40 years. As the carpenter’s aphorism says, “failure is not improvised”.
