When everyone was suspicious

Ob­ses­sive per­se­cu­tion

The Brigade was ob­ses­sive in its es­pi­onage. Batista’s re­search into po­lice records found, for ex­am­ple, that the “Group II of Anti-Cata­lan Ac­tiv­i­ties” had a file on such a dan­ger­ous fig­ure as the Cata­lan poet Sal­vador Es­priu. The doc­u­ment stressed that “he en­joys great pres­tige among pro-Cata­lan el­e­ments” and that “he has al­ways shown him­self to be a pro­gres­sive Cata­lan na­tion­al­ist, at­tack­ing the Regime. He en­joys spe­cial pres­tige for his book La pell de brau, in which in­sult­ing con­cepts against the Regime ap­pear.” In re­al­ity, the in­sult­ing con­cepts were re­quests for di­a­logue be­tween Cat­alo­nia and Spain. An­other note re­ferred to a lec­ture given by Josep Maria Castell on Es­priu, stat­ing that the of­fence they were both guilty of was that “they speak Cata­lan”.

Sal­vador Es­priu is an ex­am­ple of the sys­tem­atic per­se­cu­tion to which artists, work­ers, politi­cians and even clergy were sub­ject. Es­priu’s records were in the files of “Cata­lan-sep­a­ratists” along with Josep Benet, Joan Manuel Ser­rat, Oriol Bo­hi­gas, Alexan­dre Cirici, Joan Brossa, Romà Gu­bern and Quico Pi de la Serra, among oth­ers. An­other fig­ure under sus­pi­cion was the singer-song­writer Lluís Llach. One of the many re­ports in his file pointed out that “the lyrics of his songs, all of which are in the ver­nac­u­lar lan­guage, are of a marked Cata­lan sep­a­ratist char­ac­ter, hint­ing in his verses at the op­pres­sion to which Cat­alo­nia is sub­jected, and that the mo­ment of its re­lease is ap­proach­ing.” Yet what wor­ried them most was that “be­fore and dur­ing the per­for­mance of his songs, he ex­cites the au­di­ence, who often in­ter­rupt him with ap­plause.”

Cata­lan music was sys­tem­at­i­cally mon­i­tored, as it was seen as a plat­form for mo­bil­is­ing the masses, and what hap­pened at con­certs and the lyrics of songs caused the regime great dis­tress. A good ex­am­ple is found in the re­port of the well-known con­cert that Rai­mon gave at the Palau d’Es­ports in Barcelona on Oc­to­ber 30, 1975, only a month after the ex­e­cu­tion of Basque mil­i­tant, Txiki. The some­what para­noid-sound­ing po­lice re­port said the event was at­tended by about 10,000 peo­ple “mostly young peo­ple be­tween 20 and 22 years old, all of them hairy”. And that dur­ing the songs, peo­ple “ap­plauded and shouted ’Free­dom, free­dom’ and ’Down with the regime’. The au­di­ence re­acted like an en­raged crowd.”

The clergy were also per­se­cuted, in­clud­ing some well-known cases such as Lluís Hernández, who was mayor of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Lluís Maria Xiri­nachs, a sen­a­tor and a lead­ing fig­ure in favour of in­de­pen­dence, and Joan Subirà, who com­bined teach­ing with jour­nal­ism. Subirà’s file in­di­cated that he had an “openly Marx­ist and sep­a­ratist ide­ol­ogy hos­tile to the Regime”, with a “back­ground re­lated to el­e­ments of Work­ers’ Com­mis­sions”. And, above all, he was ac­cused of mak­ing such dan­ger­ous re­quests as “send sweets to the de­tainees”.

Some fail­ures

The Brigade also had some re­sound­ing fail­ures, such as op­po­si­tion ac­tions they were un­able to pre­vent or oth­ers where they ar­rived too late. One of these was what hap­pened at the meet­ing in 1966 known as La Ca­putx­i­nada, in which the au­thor­i­ties were too late to pre­vent the act of con­sti­tu­tion of the De­mo­c­ra­tic Union of Stu­dents of the Uni­ver­sity of Barcelona. The regime sent the Brigade in force along with a squad of armed po­lice, who made a lot of ar­rests. Yet to do so they were forced to vi­o­late the Con­cor­dat agree­ment with the Catholic Church and suf­fer the bad pub­lic­ity that came with it. On top of that, a team from French tele­vi­sion that had come to do a re­port on Rai­mon hap­pened to be there and filmed a cav­alry charge against a group of Ca­puchin priests sit­ting peace­fully on the con­vent es­planade.

The Brigade also failed to stop the con­stituent ses­sion of the As­sem­bly of Cat­alo­nia, the main plat­form of the anti-Franco op­po­si­tion, which of­fi­cial re­ports de­scribed as a “con­stant con­cern” of the Chief of Po­lice. On Sun­day, No­vem­ber 7, 1971, politi­cians of all per­sua­sions and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of so­cial move­ments man­aged to gather to­gether in the church of St. Au­gus­tine and draw up a man­i­festo for democ­racy and au­ton­omy.

How­ever, two years later, the Po­lit­i­cal-So­cial Brigade, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with groups of armed po­lice, man­aged to ar­rest the Par­lia­men­tary Com­mis­sion; some 113 peo­ple gath­ered in the church of Maria Mit­jancera. In this case, a net­work of po­lice in­form­ers had told the Brigade the day of the meet­ing. Based on the in­tel­li­gence, they set up sur­veil­lance in re­li­gious cen­tres, the usual meet­ing places for the As­sem­bly. The Brigade closely fol­lowed the move­ments of the As­sem­bly of Cat­alo­nia and man­aged to frus­trate the first ses­sion thanks to re­ports from an in­for­mant, who pro­vided them with the place and the pass­word. From then on they lis­tened in on the tele­phone calls of Dr. Joan Colomines,, who they con­sid­ered to be the “or­gan­is­ing soul” of the move­ment, as well as other fig­ures like Josep An­dreu Abelló, An­toni Gutiérrez Díaz, Marià d’Abadal and Joan Raventós, to whom they at­trib­uted the re­spon­si­bil­ity “of no­ti­fy­ing peo­ple to at­tend the As­sem­bly of Cat­alo­nia”.