4f - Catalan Justice

Barcelona, for all its cosmopolitan pretensions, is in many respects nothing more than a middle-sized provincial city, a Mediterranean Bristol. Of course it’s bigger than Bristol, Newcastle or even Leeds, but it suffers from the same narrow parochial mindsets and chippy inferiority complexes. Despite its huge population, you don’t have to live there long before you realise that all the people who matter, the police, the judges the politicians and the press, all go to the same calçotada. The Catalan elite all know each other, and, in the subsidy rich “autonomous” culture, they all eat from the same trough. It is in nobody’s interest to rock the boat.

Which is why you will probably have read very little in the mainstream press about the arrest, torture, 2-year imprisonment and sham trial of 3 men who were brought in to the Nou de la Rambla police station on the night of the 4th of February 2006. What you have read will have been heavily seasoned with reassuring key words like “squatter”, “anti-system”, “anarchist” and, a lovely one this, “of South American origin”. These words send very important signals to the Spanish reader; the arrested men were dirty, drug-taking criminals, they were certainly extremists and probably involved in violent activities, they stole Property with a capital P (“imagina’t! I si venen per el nostre pis?”*), and above all they were foreigners, not real people like us or our children.

The incident for which Juan, Rodrigo and Alex were imprisoned occurred in St Pere Mes Baix street, outside a squat where a party was taking place. Police arrived to move on people who were outside the squat, charging violently against the crowd. The accounts of those in the street that night and of people who lived in the neighbouring flats agree that the police used excessive violence against the partygoers. A good indication of the level of this violence can be found in the fact that Mossos were later dispatched to local casualty departments to pick up anyone “of a squatter aesthetic” reporting severe cuts and bruises or broken bones. They actually arrested two local men who had been involved in cycle accidents, later releasing them without charge. One wonders what offense was written the arrest sheet, “limping under the influence of a Che Guevara t-shirt” perhaps.

Tragically, during the police’s first charge, an officer was struck on the head by a heavy object and left in a coma from which he is unlikely to awake. This crime must clearly be punished, and the individual responsible should face time in prison (as should any policeman striking a defenceless civilian), but there is no reliable evidence indicating that Rodrigo, Juan and Alex had any connection to the policeman’s injuries.

The testimony of police officers present that night is farcical. They sustain that, whilst the police were rampaging through the fleeing crowd, swinging their batons, the three accused climbed a two and half metre fence, picked up stones, climbed back and threw one of them with sufficient force to put a man in a coma, pausing only to establish collective responsibility and mens rea by shouting “A por los maderos!” (a very Spanish expression meaning “let’s get the coppers”). The individual accused of saying this is Argentinean, making the story about as likely as an man from south L.A. crying “Let’s ‘av a go at those ruddy rozzers chaps!” before rushing into the fray. The stone that police allege caused the damage was not retained, a curious oversight from trained police officers, even in extremis.

Early reports from, amongst others, Joan Clos (then mayor of Barcelona) indicated that the wounded officer had been injured by a plant pot dropped from the squat above, an object which would clearly have enough weight and velocity to cause the severe injuries he suffered. The doctor who attended the injured man in the street mentioned seeing a broken plant pot nearby, however no forensic evidence was recovered from the street, and the morning of the incident a cleaning crew washed away any possibility that it could be. Why was this permitted? Perhaps the police had already decided that catching the real culprits was in nobody’s interests.

The accused were held incommunicado for 2 days, during which time they were beaten by Mossos d’Esquadra. The police refused to advise their relatives of their whereabouts, implausibly denying any knowledge of which police station they were being held in. They were then remanded in custody, where they were to remain for two years.

The examples of bias shown by the judge are too numerous to go into here, but their sum was the elimination of all evidence except for the conflicting testimonies of the accused and the police. No statements from residents on the street were considered, and none of those present at the party or in the street came forward to give evidence, as they had been warned by the police that admitting their presence would lead to charges of “atentado a la autoridad”, the Spanish catch-all charge for pissing off a copper. Given this “offence” carries a custodial sentence their reluctance is understandable.

The only evidence accepted in their trial were their statements, the statements of arresting officers, and medical reports as to the extent, but not the cause of the officer’s injuries. Clearly, the case would never have arrived in court in most countries, the police being obliged to provide a tad more evidence than “it was him what done it!”. Despite this, the judge found the three guilty of the lesser charges against them, but innocent of the more serious one. It is difficult to see how the judge decided Officers’ testimony was true in part, not in full, when she had no evidence whatsoever to work with. Coincidentally, she sentenced the men to more or less the exact period of imprisonment that they had already served, removing both the necessity of paying compensation for wrongful detention and the motivation for an expensive appeal to a higher, less biased court.

The judge in this case must have known full well that there was nowhere near enough evidence to convict, and that it was more than likely that the men before her were innocent of the specific charges against them. But they represented a group that was beyond the pale of Barcelonan society, and a decent person had been terribly injured, so of course the scum were going to pay for it.

As I said in a previous post, Spanish culture does not recognise right/wrong and true/false as binary categories, and Catalonia is the most collectivist region of a collectivist nation , where communal experience is prized over individual . In the judge’s verdict these two factors combine; the guilt of the squatter “collective” was clear, and therefore Juan, Rodrigo and Alex were guilty even though they hadn’t committed the crime. The aggressor was a squatter, they were squatters, therefore they were morally culpable (to the tune of two years and a couple of torture sessions in Nou de la Rambla).

Either that or it was just a disgraceful stitch up by a corrupt judge and a legal system still stuck in the Franco era.

* Just imagine! What if they came for our flat?