The Prosecutor’s Office sees how the violent actions of pro-independence groups in Catalonia are reducing exponentially. In his opinion, this decrease is mainly due to the “exhaustion of the militancy and the lack of facts relevant to their imaginary that can be used as a revulsion for the call for large demonstrations and action campaigns.”
These movements reached their peak following the process in 2017 and especially after the ruling handed down by the Supreme Court, in October 2019, in which nine independence leaders were convicted of sedition, which caused a violent reaction in Catalonia.
“The loss of the initiative by these violent groups, also motivated in part by the action of justice, has caused a large part of their activity to focus on the so-called ‘Anti-repression’. The mobilization in response to judicial processes detracts the greatest amount of resources from these groups, with the execution of graffiti campaigns or on social networks ”, the Prosecutor’s Office collects in its 2022 report made public today.
According to the data collected, last year only one case was opened for damage to political headquarters; three for damages to private companies; eight for public damage and disobedience; eleven for inciting hatred and one for glorifying terrorism, making a total of 24 proceedings opened in one year.
Among the cases included in the report as “most relevant procedures in the area of ??terrorism”, appears the case opened in the National Court by the Committees for the Defense of the Republic (CDR), for which nine people were arrested in the so-called ‘Operation Judas’ for preparing an act of “terrorism” in response to the ruling of the process.
The judge of the National Court Manuel García Castellón has already concluded the case against 12 members of “a parallel terrorist organization, of a clandestine and stable nature, whose objective would be to carry out violent actions or attacks against previously selected targets” using explosives and incendiary substances manufactured in clandestine laboratories.
According to the instructor, those investigated were allegedly grouped into the self-styled Tactical Response Team (ERT), a radical cell of the CDRs created out of the need to have a clandestine group of maximum confidence, totally devoted to “the cause”, to the that they were entrusted with the most sensitive actions.
In the event that the text for a possible amnesty law goes ahead, the independentists demand that the authors of this type of acts also be exempt from criminal proceedings as their actions are considered a response to police and Spanish State repression.
