Nieto’s “parallel reality”

At the Cata­lan ref­er­en­dum on Oc­to­ber 1 2017 “there were no po­lice charges” and on Sep­tem­ber 20 there were vi­o­lent dis­tur­bances and who­ever thinks dif­fer­ently lives in a “par­al­lel re­al­ity” cre­ated by the media and pro-in­de­pen­dence or­ga­ni­za­tions. These were some of the ar­gu­ments made by the for­mer se­cu­rity sec­re­tary, José An­to­nio Nieto, when he was ques­tioned at the ref­er­en­dum trial in the supreme court yes­ter­day. Un­like Mar­i­ano Rajoy, So­raya Sáenz de San­ta­maría and Juan Igna­cio Zoido, he took re­spon­si­bil­ity for his role in the op­er­a­tion to try to stop the ref­er­en­dum tak­ing place. He said he made de­ci­sions as “co­or­di­na­tor” of the op­er­a­tion, “with the sup­port of Zoido and other min­is­ters”. He was the one who pro­posed the ship­ment of 6,000 Civil Guard and Na­tional Po­lice of­fi­cers to Cat­alo­nia, but ac­cord­ing to him, “the min­i­mum in­dis­pens­able vi­o­lence” was used against the vot­ers and the of­fi­cers’ per­for­mance was “ex­em­plary”. He said he is not aware that any­one was struck above the waist, but in any case in­di­cated that this is not “pro­hib­ited”. Nieto blamed the Cata­lan po­lice force for not hav­ing done their job and re­marked that if they had in­di­cated “their will­ing­ness to com­ply with the ju­di­cial man­date, the ref­er­en­dum on Oc­to­ber 1 would not have been cel­e­brated, it would have been called off”.

“The story put about by the in­de­pen­dence move­ment meant that the news was about the dog bit­ing the man rather than the man bit­ing the dog. Re­al­ity was turned on its head ... in this case, it was the po­lice who were seen to be doing some­thing wrong, when they were de­fend­ing the law, and not those who were try­ing to break it” he said. He did have to admit how­ever that no Span­ish po­lice of­fi­cer was hos­pi­tal­ized or had to leave the op­er­a­tion to be treated in med­ical ve­hi­cles.