Carles Puigdemont, former president of the Catalan government, appears at an event organized from Mexico to talk about the Pegasus espionage program without mentioning the legal reasons that the Spanish National Intelligence Center (CNI) had for infecting his cell phone.
Although it is true that the original nature of the software is to prevent acts of terrorism and not to spy on journalists, politicians or members of Non-Governmental Organizations, what was done by the then Catalan president and a group of members of his government in 2017 had as objective the rupture of Spain through the independence of Catalonia.
MEP Diana Riba, journalist Daniel Lizárraga and Alejandro Calvillo, director of The Power of the Consumer, also participated in the event “Pegasus: massive espionage”. All of them were spied on through Pegasus.
Riba and Puigdemont agree on the illegality of Pegasus, but they did not talk about two laws approved by the Catalan Parliament with which they violated the Constitution: the referendum and legal transience.
Lizárraga and Calvillo did clarify the environment in which their cell phones were infected by Pegasus; Riba and Puigdemont did not. There was also no attempt to do so on the part of the moderator, academic Jorge Schiavon, who on several occasions described the event as spectacular.
In recent weeks, Spanish President Pedro Sánchez has faced a new crisis with the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) party, with whom, by the way, Puigdemont’s party has had a pitched battle. Sánchez requested the resignation of the director of the CNI, Paz Esteban, due to the issue of Pegasus. Decision criticized by the opposition and by officials of the CNI itself.
It was the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, who directly responded to the criticism of pro-independence politicians: “What does a State or Government have to do when someone violates the Constitution, when someone declares independence or when someone cuts off the public road?”
Chaos is the current information industry environment. Characters like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage found in social networks the supreme post-truth platforms where rationality has no place.
What happened in the so-called process reached Mexico, mainly, only because of what happened on October 1, 2017, the day of the illegal vote. Scenes of violence in the voting booths went around the world, but little was reported about what happened a few months earlier in the Catalan Parliament about the illegal approval of two laws that gave Puigdemont the green light to organize the referendum.
At a time when it is believed that an influencer is a source of information, the task of informing based on reality is not optional.
@faustopretelin
Consultant, academic, editor
Globali… what?
He was a research professor in the Department of International Studies at ITAM, published the book Referendum Twitter and was an editor and collaborator in various newspapers such as 24 Horas, El Universal, Milenio. He has published in magazines such as Foreign Affairs, Le Monde Diplomatique, Life & Style, Chilango and Revuelta. He is currently an editor and columnist at El Economista.