This text belongs to Político, the newsletter that Lola García sends every Thursday to the readers of La Vanguardia. If you want to receive it in your email, sign up here.
When Jorge Fernández Díaz was appointed Minister of the Interior, I discussed his appointment with a senior official in the PP Government, who justified it to me like this: “Jorge is a fuse.” That department is usually a source of problems, he insisted, and Fernández Díaz is Mariano Rajoy's most faithful servant, so in a moment of crisis he could assume the role of scapegoat without resistance or scandals. No one could imagine at that time that the problems of the Ministry of the Interior were nothing less than a plot by corrupt police commissioners who prepared to invent and spread false information to discredit rivals of their political bosses.
It was not Fernández Díaz who initiated such misdeeds, but he did demonstrate enthusiasm for the possibilities of eroding the independence movement that he glimpsed in the activities of senior police officials. It was Commissioner Eugenio Pino who baptized this group as “patriotic police,” of which José Manuel Villarejo stands out for his “Torrente”-style self-confidence and his excessive penchant for recording everything, starting with himself. Deciding whether Rajoy favored the investigation of pro-independence supporters or simply received reports about them without knowing how they came about is almost impossible to prove. But that does not mean that it is very striking that these excesses have not ended up in the dock.
The Minister of the Interior was always a loyal and close collaborator of Rajoy. He knew him very well, since he was under his command during the eight years of José María Aznar's government. Rajoy knew that Fernández Díaz would do whatever was necessary for him and would keep him informed at all times. The minister was always very inclined to do credit to his boss and the independence issue always worried him greatly. Curiously, he went from being a “cryptoconvergence” in the words of Aleix Vidal-Quadras when he presided over the Catalan PP, a friend of Jordi Pujol, to the alleged cover-up for a group of police officers who persecuted Convergència leaders with bad tricks. The shift towards independence of that party disturbed the minister, imbued with the supposed responsibility of defending the State from the risk that the growth of supporters of secession could imply.
But Fernández Díaz was not the only one competing to earn the consideration and favor of the then President of the Government. With the struggle for the inheritance of power as a backdrop, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and María Dolores de Cospedal also competed for the role of Rajoy's informants. Cospedal was the one who used the wrongly called “patriotic police” the most and, especially, Villarejo. The minister always wanted to gain control over the secret services, but Rajoy kept the CNI in the hands of his vice president. So the Interior Commissioners became the information arm of the PP leader. Cospedal managed that ministry when Fernández Díaz was in charge and later, when she placed Juan Ignacio Zoido in charge of that portfolio. In fact, she demanded in vain that Rajoy make her superminister of the Interior and Defense. Both reported their discoveries to the president and it is evident that in those years many of them had to do with the independence process.
The police did not act alone. In the PP they provided them with names and suspicions to pull the thread. This is demonstrated by the lunch between Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, then president of the Catalan PP, aligned with Cospedal, and Victoria Álvarez, the ex-partner of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, the first-born of the former president of the Generalitat, in the summer of 2010. At that time, The independence movement was beginning to emerge and some in the PP believed that the corruption scandals could sink Convergència and favor the popular ones. Everything was increasing in intensity and in November 2012, three months after Artur Mas stepped on the independence accelerator after the fiasco of his interview with Rajoy, falsehoods from the Interior began to be published, in this case the non-existent accounts of Pujol and Mas in Switzerland, which were presented as the alleged collection of commissions. A month later, Camacho met with Villarejo to explain which people she should investigate. As soon as she showed up, she commented to the commissioner: “Cospedal is like my sister.” The illegalities of the police continued. 2014 was especially intense in malicious investigations by the Interior against the independence movement.
But starting in 2010, it was not only the process that worried the Government. In fact, Cospedal used Villarejo to prevent the Gurtel case from affecting Rajoy. The then general secretary of the PP concentrated all her efforts on that front, which she had begun her judicial career and was emerging strongly in the media. To such an extent that she felt unfairly treated because the vice president was taking a profile in this matter and leaving her alone with the difficult task of defending the party against accusations of corruption. Although she had to testify before the judge, Cospedal has not sat on the bench for any of these matters. Fernández Díaz is pending trial for a Gurtel derivative, the Kitchen case, of alleged espionage on former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas to snatch papers that could involve PP leaders.
Neither Cospedal has accused his superiors nor has Fernández Díaz, who has remained in his role as a “fuse”, without the judges having ended up clarifying the political responsibilities of the Catalunya operation. The Prosecutor's Office has now opened an investigation into one of the aspects of that scandal, just when the Government of Pedro Sánchez has agreed with Junts to open an investigative commission in Congress into these activities. It is a shame that such a regrettable episode for the functioning of a democratic State is resolved, whether in Parliament or in the judicial sphere, only when there is an obvious political interest behind it.
