Sitting in a wheelchair, a victim cries with a photo of her son on her lap as she waits for the act to begin. She is Jumarie Querimit Cadman, mother of the seven-year-old Australian boy who died in the August 17 terrorist attack on La Rambla. Other victims from different backgrounds surround her to hug her. They shake her hand as a sign of encouragement and finally, after a few minutes, the woman, who wears a splint on her foot, perhaps still the aftermath of the attack, smiles with an expression of gratitude. She has gone from disconsolate crying to apparent comfort, but the tears return to her face every so often. Her pain is inconsolable. The mayor arrives and her spotlights turn on her. They spread white flowers. Carnations. Ada Colau takes one. She also the woman who cries. Other victims continue to surround her. Colau approaches her and hugs her, they talk for a few moments. The mayor crouches down to be at her height. She holds her hands. Even with sunglasses, the woman's gaze does not hide her immense sadness.
Screams are heard demanding justice. There is a group that wants to attract attention. These are pro-independence platforms that continue to blame the Spanish state for the attacks and have counterprogrammed the institutional tribute with a protest rally. The political struggle once again deafens the painful silence.
At ten o'clock the act begins in the mosaic of the painter Joan Miró, where the van that ran over hundreds of people stopped and where a memorial was placed in honor of the victims. The Veus choir sings a song by Txarango, Agafant l'horitzó, without being able to silence the cries of the small group of demonstrators. The first row is for the victims and relatives, the politicians are behind, with the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, in the center. The screams return. Respect does not win. “We want the truth”, is heard when Fatima Saheb begins to speak. Silence finally falls and the poet can remember the phrase in different languages that prays in the monument of remembrance: "May peace cover you, oh, city of peace." Peace that the act, to which the screams return again , does not have.
The ceremony continues with a second song, the traditional Irish An Irish Blessing, and Saheb announces the wreath and asks for a moment of silence. El cant dels ocells begins to play. The protest does not stop: “Spain is a state of murderers! We want the truth, hypocrites!” The chords of the cello manage to impose a precarious silence while the victims deposit the flowers in the containers prepared for it. The Australian woman gets up from the wheelchair and leaves a flower after kissing her and bursting into tears. They help her to withdraw from it. She walks with difficulty and leans on a crutch.
It is the turn of politicians and security forces. The screams intensify. There is no silence. “Shame”, she hears. But it is the impossibility of a minimum consensus that marks the act. The beeps and screams overshadow the tribute. The victims arriving from outside show their enormous bewilderment.
Representing the Parliament is the second vice president of the Chamber, Assumpta Escarp, but Laura Borràs, who has not resigned from the position of president despite having been suspended as a deputy, is in the fourth institutional row as president of Junts. Towards the end, she approaches the alternative demonstration on the other side of the cordon and is hailed with shouts of "president, president!".
At the end of the offering, the atmosphere is tense. While the demonstrators sing Els segadors, Robert Manrique, adviser to the victims, laments the political use of an act that, in his opinion, should not fall into this show. "How do you explain it to the victims who have come from outside?" he asks himself.
The Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta, planned to make statements but cancels contact with journalists. In parallel, some attendees to the institutional act disfigure the attitude of those who demonstrate. There is tension. They argue loudly. A few minutes later, the relatives of one of the victims confront a man who has broken the minute of silence shouting: "The murderers have already been tried," they tell him, to which he and some of his companions reply: "They came here to kill Catalans."
Ada Colau, after sympathizing with the victims, has called for a "critical reflection" on the "boycott" carried out by a "small group" of people who have not even "respected something as sacred" as a minute of silence for a barbarity like 17-A "will never happen again". "It seems to me a profound lack of respect", added the mayor of Barcelona, who recalled that some of the families came from far away and did not understand anything. "They didn't deserve a single shout." "Everyone can protest, but today was not the place, nor the form, nor the moment", argued Colau, who without wanting to personalize the criticism, asked about Laura Borràs's attitude, considered that using the boycott at the minute of silence "on a partisan basis is the height of shame".
Borràs herself has reappeared at noon in the demonstration called before the delegation of the European Commission in Barcelona. Some three hundred people have acclaimed his presence after the reading of a manifesto in which Europe's mediation is requested so that the Spanish Government, which is branded an "executioner" and "assassin" and is accused of having "attacked against its own population", purge those responsible for the attack, which in the opinion of the demonstrators are the Spanish secret services and security forces, and hand them over to justice.
Platform 17-A, organizer of the protest, considers that the State is the "intellectual author" and that it "provided the means" for the attacks to be committed and has delivered a manifesto to the delegation in which the terrorist acts in Barcelona and Cambrils are described as "an attack against Catalonia" orchestrated by Spain to prevent the independence referendum called for October 1 of that same year from being held. "The State knew it", "17-A, State crime", reads some banners. Shouts of "Aragonès, botifler! (traitor)" are heard and it is affirmed that the 17-A attack was a "false flag". The act ends with the anthem Els segadors.
In addition to this alternative call, another of a very different nature has taken place earlier at the beginning of the Rambla, where a representation of the security forces (Mossos d'Esquadra, Urban Guard, Civil Guard and National Police) have paid tribute to victims of terrorism after the reading of a brief manifesto by a representative of the Catalan Association of Victims of Terrorist Organizations (Acvot). Likewise, leaders of the PP, Ciudadanos, Valents and Vox have participated in the floral offering.
