"You could see it coming." The phrase is from a member of the legal team of the Mossos d'Esquadra. This Wednesday the decision of the Minister of the Interior, Joan Ignasi Elena, to remove the until now head of the legal advice service of the Catalan police, Mari Pau Martí, was known. The lawyer coordinated the defense strategy of Major Josep Lluís Trapero and Mayor Teresa Laplana. During those intense and hard two years, she formed a solid personal and professional team with the lawyer Olga Tubau and the commissioner Ferran López, who achieved an acquittal sentence.
Martí was considered in the Interior and in the Mossos as a person of Trapero's absolute confidence. There are not a few voices that throughout Wednesday afternoon have contextualized the decision to dispense with the lawyer because it was the last position in the circle of the major that Interior had maintained. "It is the culmination of the purge," various police officers and department officials assured La Vanguardia.
The lawyer had become an "obstacle" in the new guidelines designed by the Interior in everything that refers to the legal defense of the police. A new policy that culminated in a confrontation between the lawyers of the house and those responsible for the Interior after they were forced to withdraw accusations in legal proceedings against protesters accused of assaulting Mossos. Conflicts that only appeared when the defendants sitting on the bench belonged to the independence movement. Until the last day, Mari Pau Martí defended the model that the Interior had always had, that the Mossos go to trial with lawyers from the Ministry. A maxim that Trapero himself made his own in his time as head of the police and that he tried to carry even in his own trial, although in the end, due to the complexity of the case, the department itself paid for the services of Olga Tubau, who worked coordinated by Marti. Despite his involvement in that trial, which from the first moment the Mossos interpreted as a general case against the entire institution, Martí had to overcome countless impediments and obstacles on the part of some Interior officials at the time. The lawyer almost had to pay for the trips and hotels out of her own pocket; and justify that her presence in Madrid with López, Tubau and Trapero was "fundamental" to prepare and coordinate the statements of the hundred policemen who paraded those weeks through that room of the National Court.
Martí's substitute is Àlex Bas, a former member of the Consell de Garanties Estatutàries, from where he had to leave because the term of his stay in that body had expired. It had been eight years since Martí assumed the position of head of legal advice on a provisional basis, although he had been in the house for more than 20 years. Martí had been demanding for a long time that the plaza be convened so that he could present himself. Last night the Department of the Interior assured that Bas's election was based on his curriculum and that 25 people showed up at Martí Square, of which 10 were selected and one was chosen.
In fact, Martí herself applied for a position that will continue to be filled provisionally while waiting for the official position. She introduced herself, who conducted an interview like the rest of her. In different departments of the Generalitat, information related to this vacancy had been circulating for days. In fact, at least one person received a call directly encouraging them to come forward.
Of the lawyer, several sources consulted agreed that the only thing she has done since she entered more than 25 years ago as a criminal lawyer is "work for and for the Mossos" regardless of who was in the department. The police is a particularly complex and complicated institution, another Interior official recalled last night. A complexity that Martí overcame in these eight years, achieving "that all the police knew her and turned to her when they had a problem." Something not easy. Her substitute was already in Interior years ago. In fact, she worked as a doctor in the first promotion of the general directorate of the police but soon left to do a much more political job.
