A group of police officers wait for their transport in front of the Mont-Palau hotel in Pineda de Mar.Alberto Estévez (EFE)
On October 2, 2017, tempers were heated in Catalonia.
The day before, agents of the Police and the Civil Guard had harshly repressed the illegal referendum on independence organized by the Generalitat.
Hundreds of people stationed in the voting centers suffered the charges of the agents, who tried to enter to requisition the ballot boxes in compliance with a court order.
In the weeks and days before 1-O, these police officers had been transferred to Catalonia from other parts of Spain and housed in boats and hotels.
A large contingent of almost 500 riot police went to two establishments in Pineda de Mar (Barcelona).
On the night of the 2nd, hundreds of people gathered in front of one of those two hotels to protest the presence of the agents and demand their expulsion.
Two councilors from the Partit dels Socialistes (PSC) of Pineda, which governed the municipality, and the head of the local police also went to the establishment.
They had one goal: to force the owners to evict such unwelcome guests immediately.
They did it.
More than five years after that episode, the two councilors —the then first deputy mayor, Carme Aragonès, and the one who was head of Urbanism, Jordi Masnou, who today is still councilor of the corporation— have accepted a year in prison and another year of disqualification from holding public office for a crime of coercion.
The Barcelona hate crime prosecutor, Miguel Ángel Aguilar, initially requested a sentence of three years in prison.
This Tuesday, at the beginning of the oral hearing at the Barcelona Court, he announced that he had reached an agreement with the defendants' defense and has reduced the sentence by applying the mitigation of undue delay to both, since the judicial process has been excessively prolonged.
The local police chief, Carles Santacreu —who continues to lead the force— has not joined the pact,
so the trial has been held anyway.
Santacreu is expected to testify on Wednesday, in the second and last session of the oral hearing.
According to the account of the Prosecutor's Office, now assumed by the two councilors, Aragonès, Masnou and Santacreu appeared on the night of October 2 at the Checkin Mont Palau hotel, in Pineda, "with the firm purpose of threatening the leadership of the hotel chain to achieve the expulsion of the police officers”, who theoretically should remain there until the 5th. The three defendants entered the director's office and presented their demands to him.
"They did not say why they wanted to expel them, but the situation was complicated, there was a lot of tension on the street," the director said in his witness statement, who put them on the phone with the manager of the hotel chain.
In the phone call, which has been key to proving the crime of coercion, the then Town Planning councilor yelled at the manager, Juan Martín del Hoyo, that he had to evict the police "yes or yes" because, otherwise, the City Council would close the two hotels for “five years”.
"I will do everything I have to do to close the hotels," threatened the mayor, who currently continues to carry out government tasks in Pineda as a councilor for the reconstruction plan, business, approach and large projects.
Del Hoyo recalled, in his witness statement, how he felt about that call.
“It left me quite stressed.
Being called at midnight and being pressured to throw some clients out of the hotel is not pleasant.
It was a strong conversation, they raised the tone.
He told me that he had to evict them no matter what,
The manager resisted, remembering that he had to accommodate them until the 5th. But the pressures and threats of closure broke him.
Forced by circumstances, he ended up writing a letter that he delivered to the heads of the National Police: "Due to a meeting we have had with officials from the Pineda de Mar City Council, we are forced, under threat of closing our hotels for five years, to evict the police contingent from the two hotels, tomorrow the 3rd, before 4:00 p.m.
One of the police commanders responsible for managing the accommodation of the members of the force explained that he saw the manager "in a state of pure and hard nerves" and that he begged him to evict the agents.
“That night, the policemen no longer had dinner.
The next day, we had to get a cold menu and look for other accommodation, in Peñíscola and Fraga,
Some 800 people —which the prosecutor qualifies as an “exacerbated crowd” in his letter— remained meanwhile, on the night of the 2nd, in the vicinity of the hotel.
The former deputy mayor Aragonès gave an interview to La Sexta at that time to explain the supposed "agreement" he had reached with the hotel: "We have asked that they leave, because the spirits are irritated and there is no reason for be here (...) We have reached an agreement that tomorrow afternoon they will leave.
This could not be sustained, we were putting the municipality and the streets at risk and it was not worth it”.
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