Mossos d’Esquadra, Catalonia’s regional police, on August 8 activated a “cage” operation lasting more than three hours to capture the region’s former president Carles Puigdemont after his long-awaited return to Spain.
Checkpoints along motorways within and outside Barcelona have been installed, causing traffic jams and other incidents on several roads in the area as Puigdemont arrived from France. Organised by his separatist Junts per Catalunya party, he appeared at a rally in Barcelona city centre in front of the Arc de Triomf.
According to Junts, the rally was an “institutional welcoming” of the previously exiled leader.
The Spanish authorities have not yet been able to locate him.
National opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo from the centre-right Partido Popular (PP) accused Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of forcing Puigdemont’s “disappearance”. He called it “another unbearable humiliation”.
There has been no word from the Spanish authorities as to how Puigdemont crossed the French-Spanish border without being detained.
He was met with chants of “independence” from some 3,500 supporters upon his arrival to the rally.
Puigdemont argued before his “[Catalan] compatriots that Catalans should be able to decide their own future freely.
“Seven years ago, they began a hard repression that has pushed us to prison and exile and has impacted the life of thousands and thousands of people just for being separatists.”
He added: “We have come here today to remind them that we are still here.
“We have no right to quit. Because the right to self-determination belongs to the people.”
Puigdemont said his potential arrest by the Spanish authorities would lead many believe that the separatist movement would “be dissuaded”.
“But they are wrong,” he said. “And in that mistake, they would trample upon the credibility of Spanish democracy… but we know they care little about that.”
It was Puigdemont’s intention to attend a debate taking place in the regional parliament.
The leader of the Socialist Party of Catalonia, and Pedro Sánchez’s former Health Minister, Salvador Illa, was expected to be confirmed as the new president of Catalonia.
Illa had already secured support from the leftist separatist party Esquerra Republicana, which has governed Catalonia until losing the snap election last May.
Puigdemont had threatened that if the parliament did not vote for him as president of Catalonia, his party would cut ties with Sánchez in the national parliament, putting in jeopardy the PM’s prospects of continuing in office.
Puigdemont has a detention order against him issued by Spanish authorities and had been wanted for seven years when he fled to exile.
The former Catalan leader, who has been accused of embezzlement, did not benefit from controversial Amnesty Law that pardoned the Catalan secessionists involved in the October 2017 events.
