“Those who burn street furniture end up being pardoned and people, public servants, whose only crime was to follow orders end up being prosecuted.” This is how the leader of the PP of Catalonia, Alejandro Fernández, defended in November 2023 a mantra that his organization has been defending for almost a year: that the amnesty law would not apply to police officers who were being investigated in cases related to the trial. This same Tuesday 46 national police officers acquitted for the charges against citizens during the referendum of October 1, 2017.
From the beginning, the PP has taken an absolutely militant position against the amnesty law. The rule, which came into force last June, did not contain even the slightest positive loophole. Nothing redeemable.
But from the beginning, the PP's story showed a gap with regard to the police officers who were subject to judicial prosecution for their actions both in the 1-O and at other critical moments of the process, such as the street confrontations following the Supreme Court's ruling against the leaders of the Catalan independence movement.
The PP chose to deny the evidence: that the amnesty law would also apply to police officers. This was requested, for example, in August 2023 by Carles Puigdemont himself, aware that it would be very difficult to obtain his own forgiveness if he did not accept that of the authorities. And this was accepted very early by the negotiators of the law.
But the PP denied for months that what happened this Tuesday would happen. Alejandro Fernández did it, for example. But not only. The PP Minister of the Interior, Ana Blanco, also said that “the amnesty law excludes the FCSE [Fuerzas y Cuerpos de Seguridad del Estado]”.
He wrote it on Twitter, but also said it on television, during a debate on the program 'Everything is a lie', on Cuatro. “The police are not involved in the amnesty. The spokesman for Justice confirms this to me,” said the PP deputy in the same month of June. Blanco relied on his partner María Jesús Moro for his statement.
But the Ourense leader, who Feijóo held responsible for the PP's internal policies after the ousting of Pablo Casado, not only said that the amnesty did not apply to police officers, but also welcomed it: “Be careful, I am happy that “they did not enter because the police went to defend the constitutional order and the rule of law.”
Other authorized voices of the PP also defended this same position in private. “It is surprising that terrorism was amnesty and not the police,” said one of the main leaders of the party in a conversation with journalists in Congress.
Jupol too
But it was not only the PP that said the amnesty would not apply to police officers. The main police union, Jupol, also supported this.
When the rule was finally approved in Congress on May 30, Jupol said it was an “absolute disrespect” to the police officers who were in Catalonia in 2017 and 2019, according to spokesman Ibón Domínguez.
Last January, Jupol General Secretary Aarón Rivero said that “the National Police are the only ones who will pay the consequences of the attempted coup in Catalonia.” Rivero said that the government “hand in hand with its independence partners, prefers to side with the agitators and criminals, while abandoning and despising the National Police and its agents.”
Other organizations such as the SUP, through its spokesman Jacobo Rodríguez, describe the norm as “the greatest outrage against equality before the law of our democracy.”
That same Thursday, Jupol issued a statement in which it congratulated itself on the fact that “the judicial ordeal is ending” for the police officers who requested amnesty, to whom it showed “understanding”, and then boasted that they themselves were the ones who achieved the judicial decision, and through a specific company: “A position that has been promoted for several of the accused officers by Jupol's legal services, exercised through the lawyer Javier Aranda of the law firm Aranda, Melgar & Tasies Advocats”.
At this time, the PP has not yet responded to the amnesty of these 46 national police officers.