Yet another police infiltrator has been uncovered
in social movements in the Spanish State
In June 2022, the media outlet La Directa published an investigative report exposing a case of police infiltration. Ignacio José Enseñat, an officer in the Spanish National Police Force (the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía or CNP), spent two years infiltrating the housing rights movement and the Catalan Independentist Left in Barcelona. This was to be the fist in an ongoing series of discoveries, with more cases found in Barcelona, Valencia, Girona and Madrid: Dani Hermoso, Ramón Muñoz, Maria Canillas, Maria Isern Torres, Sergio Gigirey, Lucía Rodríguez and, this week, Carlos Pérez.
Over the past two years many of us have discovered that we shared our daily lives, affection, sexual relationships, friendships, homes and militancy with undercover officers from the CNP. They entered our lives using deceit and manipulation, and they objectified and instrumentalised us.
The CNP, the Interior Ministry, and the Police Intelligence Service (the Comisaría General de Información) turned us into objects to be studied, illegally extracting information about our lives and our networks: independentist, anarchist, libertarian, ecologist, anti-repression, feminist, anti-racist and anti-fascist networks; youth centres, squatted social centres and all manner of social movements where we fought for life and dignity. The perpetrators of this illegal and inhuman espionage have no moral compass and the state has crossed all the red lines.
The support groups fighting these cases of police infiltration have decided to unite to repair some of the damage done. We are organising to bring an end to police impunity. For two years we have been saying that these operations are a form of torture, and denouncing the tactics used by these officers and their superiors.
Despite our efforts, and despite case after case being uncovered, the Interior Ministry and the Comisaría General de Información have remained. Fernando Grande-Marlaska, interior minister, defended these practices as necessary to maintain national security, refusing to provide more information and hiding behind the law of ‘Official Secrets’ (Ley 9/1968), passed by Franco in 1968. It is evident that these operations are not underpinned by any court process and they do not meet the requirements of lawfulness and proportionality. The aim of these operations is social control, repression and surveillance of the social movements. They are an attack on democracy and on all our freedoms, and they threaten our lives and our mental health.
For two years we have been publicly decrying the state and its officers – the executive arm of these infiltrations. Some of us have brought legal complaints against those responsible, but we have watched with anger and impotence as the judiciary remains impassive and refuses to act. We are still waiting for responses to the cases filed in Barcelona and Girona. We have seen our most fundamental rights violated, with no respect for our privacy, our moral integrity, our freedom of expression, our meetings and protests, or our choices about our sexual and intimate relationships.
These were coordinated acts by the State, the Minister of the Interior, and the Comisaría General de Información, and they have caused irreparable pain and suffering. We will fight to the end to continue to uncover the true identities of the police infiltrators and to condemn those responsible, in the community and in the courts.
We know who the guilty parties are.
How many more operations must be uncovered before someone gives us answers?
Silence is not an option. We need to bring an end to these mechanisms of repression and the violations of our rights.
Infiltration is a form of torture.
Signed by: The support groups for those affected by police infiltration
