"There will be no ballot box or referendum." These are the words of the Popular Party spokesman in Congress, Rafael Hernando, on May 25, 2017. There are 129 days left until October 1, the date chosen (it is still secret) for the consultation on the independence of Catalonia.
Those words are repeated on September 4 by the vice president of the government, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, who adds that, if there were any, “the corresponding authorities would already take care of preventing them from being put in place.”
Now there is less than a month to go and we are in maximum tension, with the Parliament about to approve its disconnection laws, with eight judicial resolutions that urge the police forces to cut off those preparations and with the clandestine electoral operation distributing ballot boxes throughout Catalonia.
“There will be no ballot boxes”, insists on September 25 in the European Parliament the spokesman of the PP, Esteban González Pons. Missing 6 days.
“There will be no ballot boxes”, says Rajoy on September 30, during a wedding in Madrid. 8 hours left.
At dawn, 2,229 polling stations receive with Germanic precision some 6,500 ballot boxes.
What has failed? Who has failed? Where did 6,500 ballot boxes come from? The government blinks.
"They made a fool of us," a high-ranking government official at the time admits frankly, in a meeting with La Vanguardia. "It was an organization like that of the resistance in World War II, with entire families involved who did not know what another member of the same family was doing." “It did not occur to anyone – he wants to minimize – that in reality they would not be ballot boxes but plastic boxes with a slot and a lid, the kind for storing socks, no one guessed that for the first time in the history of humanity ballot boxes would be opaque boxes where you can't see what's inside. But it is true: none were found.”
After 1-O, the blame is directed at the National Intelligence Center (CNI). “The ruling that there were ballot boxes on 1-O was made by the CNI. They said they had it under control, and no,” José Antonio Nieto, Secretary of State for Security at the time of the referendum, would say in an interview in June 2019; Nieto declined to offer his version for this report.
Carles Puigdemont had announced the date and the question on June 9, 2017, although it had been agreed between the members of the so-called General Staff of the procés since the end of April.
Four days later, on June 13, the Prosecutor's Office expands the complaint filed a month earlier against the Minister of Governance, Meritxell Borràs, and her second: it now includes the summons of the president. With the matter judicialized, the proceedings correspond theoretically to the police forces: National Police, Civil Guard... and Mossos d'Esquadra.
"The CNI of course was there to stop all that, but I know that 80% of its resources were dedicated to Islamic terrorism, that's why for them the ballot box was not so important, even though it had a lot of political and symbolic importance," he specifies. government command. On August 17, in addition, the attack on the Rambla takes place. The anti-terrorist alert is redoubled.
Two sources close to the CNI agree on this version. The 2017 security directive, the document that marks the actions of the secret services, did not establish the fight against independence as a priority; this figured in a very secondary position and under the generic name of “maintenance of territorial unity”. "Nobody ordered or asked for it, and it was not among the strategic priorities," says one of those sources. "From the moment it is prosecuted, the specific order to stop this operation belongs to the security forces."
The secret service, adds the government source, “was above all concerned then with the CDR [Comitès de Defensa de la República], specifically on 1-O we controlled exactly 424 subjects. The movements and demonstrations that there were were not spontaneous, they were perfectly organized and coordinated.”
On the day of the vote, he assures, “the CNI detected that [the CDRs] were wishing for a dead person so that everything would speed up. Some were very violent."
A Secretary of State for Rajoy maintains that "blaming the CNI is a classic in our country: since it has no voice, it has no defense either." “When one makes a mistake – he adds –, there are those who admit it publicly and there are those who prefer to blame someone else. He is human.” “I don't know the details,” he adds, “but it seems difficult to me that there wasn't a specific order. It was the obligation of the CNI. They were trying to find out about any illegal activity, and the CNI had to obtain as much information as possible about everything”.
The political head of the CNI at that time was the vice president, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría. The Minister of the Interior was Juan Ignacio Zoido, related to María Dolores de Cospedal, in turn Minister of Defense and internal rival of Sáenz de Santamaría. Zoido did not want to attend to La Vanguardia. Cospedal was in Barcelona on the morning of 1-O, meeting with members of the Catalan PP, without the Moncloa having official proof of the trip, as revealed by the journalist Lola García in her book The Wall (Editorial Peninsula), which goes on sale this Wednesday.
One of the key people in the gear does not understand that the State apparatuses did not detect such a number of ballot boxes or a device with hundreds of people involved, and points to a theory: "I suspect that there was a connivance of the factual powers of the State to determine a course that It was not what the Rajoy government wanted, and the hard line prevailed”.
Between September 13 and 28, the Civil Guard seized 45,000 notices from polling stations, printing plates, 1.3 million brochures and posters, 10 million ballots and 2.5 million envelopes in operations in various locations. In some companies they work at night and with flashlights so as not to alert, explains the book Operació Urnes , by journalists Laia Vicens and Xavi Tedó.
“There was police inefficiency, including the Mossos. The Civil Guard was the one who obtained the most results, and the Mossos failed to comply with a court order. They had the same obligation to look for them. But no one has ever asked the Mossos if they looked for them or if they found any”, says the former Rajoy government official.
"We are not looking for the ballot boxes: there was an attack and absolutely no one would have understood that we were looking for ballot boxes and not terrorists," says a senior politician from the Ministry of the Interior, who remains anonymous "to avoid problems for people who are active ”. “After 17-A, the polls were not a priority for us, among other things because there was a tremendous deployment of the National Police and Civil Guard and it was absurd to be all looking for the same thing. That was the thought in Mossos at that time”.
The government's obsession, says the Secretary of State, “was to guarantee that coexistence in Catalonia would not be at stake. And although it was damaged, there was no major problem of violence. In hindsight it seems easy, but at that time there were many unknowns, an undeniable risk. One of the concerns is that in Catalonia there were 13,000 armed people, who were the Mossos, and you didn't know how they were going to act. Frankly, there was a possibility of a war scenario, which would have been an absolute disaster. It was a low risk, but it existed.”
“We send false signals to the State”, explains Jordi Sànchez, the brain of the clandestine device, to La Vanguardia, “we very ostensibly notify the municipalities to use the ones they have, and the Ministry of the Interior issued a circular demanding the custody of these deposits” .
“We suspected – says Rajoy's former position – that there could be an agreement to use those of the municipalities. We sent letters to stop it.”
The government tracked the companies that manufacture urns in Spain. He also visited them: “The ballots could be printed in countless places, but there were few ballot box manufacturers. We contacted them and warned them that the referendum was illegal. They got scared,” explains that source.
Many ballots, no trace of ballot boxes.
Why then does Rajoy insist, until hours before the vote, that "there will be no ballot boxes"?
One of the government sources considers that “it was risky to ensure that there would be no ballot boxes. The information must have come from the CNI, the National Police or the Civil Guard, I don't know."
The initial idea of the government was that the forces of order would prevent access to the schools, and in that context it was less important if there were ballot boxes or not. “There were about 2,400 schools, but 80% of the census voted in just 20% of them. If we closed 400, the referendum failed. That could be done”, exposes the same source. "It was suggested that the army do it, but it was ruled out."
But the previous Wednesday –the ballot boxes are arriving in each town on those days–, the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia assumes the legal battle and orders the Prosecutor's Office to cease its actions; this had decreed that the Mossos should seal all the premises before Saturday the 30th, but the new court order says that on Sunday "the opening will be prevented." Immediately, Escoles Obertes calls to fill the schools with activities from the same Friday. "For us it was radically different to prevent access than to enter to seize the material." “We had not counted on this scenario. The ballot box does not acquire so much importance until that day”, justifies the former senior official.
“I believe that the State does not find the ballot boxes due to its high degree of ineffectiveness”, says a member of the so-called General Staff. “We did not go to the factories that were the logical ones and that is why they did not detect anything. We had three times as many ballot boxes as we needed.”
“The polls, very well... And? –reiterates one of Rajoy's charges–. They brag about that operation because then it didn't end well. Look at them now.”
