Last weekend he was interviewed in the newspaper La Razón and the journal took the following phrase to the main title: “Violence in Catalonia has been more influential than in the Basque Country.”

This has raised a great deal of controversy among the victims of ETA in Catalonia, who have reported torture. Rosa Lluch, daughter of Ernest Lluch, killed by ETA, for example, replied: “Comparing what is happening in Catalonia with murders like my father’s is not only a banalization, but also an insult to the victims. Please be responsible and do not fatten the worsening of the situation.”

Roberto Manrique, injured in the Hipercor attack, also replied with a tweet: “See minister, when you have a time and stop telling lies, come to the door of Hipercor and tell us what your vision of violence is. Enrique, Nuria, Enric, Francesc, Rosa, Marc, Marta… we look forward to you.”

In the part of the interview that deals with this episode, Marlaska refers to street unrest and it is clear that in the riots in Catalonia there is talk about the violence that protesters exert against the police, but the newspaper takes it to the title in isolation and it seems that in general it refers to violence.

In any case, the statements and attitudes of both the minister and the newspaper clearly show the current effort to criminalize Catalan independence from the apparatus of the Spanish State. The street riots in the Basque Country led to the stamp of kale borroka and under this concept hundreds of young people were condemned by the Spanish judges, many of them with harsh prison sentences. If it has been tougher than the kale borroka in Catalonia, it is not difficult to infer that it deserves penalties such as those of Euskal Herria, or harder. The crimes of kale borroka in the Basque Country were considered crimes of terrorism, especially in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when they were tried under the ETA stamp.

The attitude of La Razón is even tougher, because by offering the slogan of Marlaska out of context, it suggests that the violence in Catalonia has been greater than that which has caused more than a thousand deaths in the Basque Country. The impulse of many media outlets in Spain is very important to extend criminalisation to society, in the case of the CoR it is very clear, as seen in this post by Lander Arbelaitz: the media link the CDS with explosives in their titles, but then do not deny that the National Hearing does not charge them with any such crime.