Today 3 years ago from October 1, the day when the nationalist leaders harangued their followers to confront the police. After two years of anniversaries with demonstrations, roadblocks, clashes with the police and politicized schools covered in yellow plastic, today October 1 begins calmly and normally. Only the presence of numerous posters in Din A4 format and in a single color (the cheapest ones) placed in garbage containers intend to turn this day into a day of vindication. The posters repeat "neither forget nor forgive", while people pass by without paying attention to them.

But they shouldn't ignore them. October 1 was the second act of the three that made up the attempted coup, legally the least important of the three, but on an emotional level it was crucial, because the objective of nationalism was, as Oriol Junqueras indicated before the event, show the world "people with ballots in hand and police beating them", because that way "they would have already won".

However, "the world" didn't play along because the referendum was not legal, although if it had been, they could have ascertained without much effort that it wasn't legitimate either. Let's now see the reasons that will clarify these two statements in a simple way.

Why was the October 1 referendum not legal?

This statement is the easiest to prove, for the curious reason that the nationalist government itself certified its illegality.

* It violated the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia and the Spanish Constitution

For this we only have to refer to the Comite de Garanties Estatutaries that the nationalist government created to "ensure that the referendum complied with the constitutional and statutory legal framework". Despite the fact that this body was created by nationalism to certify the legality of the process (and many independentistas were part of it), their own lawyers ruled against it without a hint of doubt. That call was flagrantly challenging both legal frameworks. The independentistas themselves thus certified the illegality of their act.

* It violated European legislation

For this we refer to the opinion of the Venice Commission, an organization of the European Council, to whose judgment the nationalist government submitted its referendum. The ruling was blunt: the referendum was neither legal nor democratic because it didn't meet a series of minimum conditions, such as abiding by a regulation published one year in advance (remember that the voting rules were made public throughout the same morning October 1, when some people had already "voted"). Nor could it be legal without submitting to the legal framework of the member country (which it obviously didn't do) and no referendum could be legal without being agreed, and this was unilateral. Once again, the nationalist government put its referendum on trial and obtained another certificate of illegality.

Obviously, the call violated many other laws, but after what has been said, is it necessary to add more? Since that day, the nationalist government has not stopped turning to Europe for every measure that the government of Spain took to stop that illegal act, the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) began to receive complaints that eventually answered and their responses were devastating, all in favor of the action of the government of Spain and none in favor of nationalism. The clearest and most resounding was the Strasbourg ruling against the complaint for the "violation of the rights of parliamentarians" by suspending the session of October 9, 2017 in which independence was presumably going to be declared. The ECHR not only dismissed the complaint but also emphasized that the action of the Spanish government was "necessary in a democratic state", "legitimate" and "a pressing social need". And the resolution was final and unappealable.

Why was the referendum on October 1 not legitimate?

The answer to this question is also simple, what happens is that this question is not usually answered because when a European state or organization comes to the conclusion that a referendum is illegal and, therefore, has no validity, it no longer enter to judge the degree of legitimacy of the same. But let's do an exercise of imagination and supervise that electoral call as if it had not been a victimizing staging but a tool of democracy, and let's see, therefore, all the events that violated the most elementary democratic rules.

* The referendum wasn't in the program voted by the independentistas

It's a fact. Neither JuntsPelSi nor the CUP proposed a referendum in their programs, but rather took the elections that were presented as a plebiscite. If they won this plebiscite, they wanted to carry out a DUI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence). But when they achieved the majority of seats without having a majority of votes, it became evident that they had not won (In the words of the leader of the CUP, Antonio Baños, "we have not won the plebiscite, therefore there is no DUI"), and then, after the internal struggles that dismounted Artur Mas and raised the then unknown Puigdemont to the presidency, this new unilateral referendum was raised, which Oriol Junqueras rejected outright as "a past screen", although later he changed his mind and decided to carry it out although the Catalans never have voted for it.

* The referendum was not supported by the majority of Catalans

We have already mentioned that the coalition of JuntsPelSi and the CUP lost the plebiscite in votes because it was a false plebiscite, since in a real one the votes are actually counted and in this one, since they knew that they would not reach 50%, they counted the seats, that thanks to an old Spanish electoral law that is only used in Catalonia, they give an enormous advantage to the most depopulated provinces such as Lérida (with a pro-independence majority), over the most populated such as Barcelona (with a constitutional majority), to the point that a vote in Lleida can be worth the same as three in Barcelona. In this way, the nationalist coalition achieved an absolute majority in the Parliament without obtaining more than 47% of the votes. They had the power, but not the people. At least not the majority of them.

But it must be also remembered that many political representatives of that 47%, nationalist parliamentarians, didn't want that referendum either. Many ot them fell into the famous Puigdemont purge, which replaced all the elected positions that showed doubts by loyal militants such as Clara Ponsatí (the person in charge of Education who wasn't able to express herself in Spanish) and others. That 47% of legitimacy was gradually reduced as many of its representatives were purged in favor of people with a more radical profile, including the head of the Mossos, who had affirmed that in case of illegality he was willing to arrest Puigdemont, and that it was "resigned" in favor of Trapero, for whom the old position of "major" was reinstated. In fact, such a purge could actually be seen as a self-strike within the main coup. At the last minute the skeptics that still remained got off the locomotive, the last being Santi Vila, since then branded as Judas by nationalism. Finally, only the most convinced, those resulting from the purge, were those who signed the "disconnection laws", the authentic first act of the coup attempt carried out on September 6 and 7, 2017 in the so-called "sessions of shame" in which the rights of the parliamentary minorities, which, in this case, represented the social majority, were violated. Let's remember that all the other groups left the chamber, including the comuns, who, in the program that had brought them to Parliament, had been totally opposed to any unilateral action.

* His execution was against democracy

Already involved in the referendum itself, respect for democracy was conspicuous by its absence. Obviously there was no electoral confrontation, no debates, no opposition. The nationalists were the organizers, the ones who ran the only campaign, the ones who hired and paid for the posting of posters (there was a laughable attempt to show that there was a counter-campaign with a small print run, all identical, claiming to represent the political parties constitutionalists and even Franco! asking for the NO, but nobody believed it). The nationalists were those who voted, those who counted, those who paid the "observers" (in addition to presenting the ANC itself as an "impartial observer") and those who gave the results. People could "vote" where they wanted and as many times as they wanted.

Obviously the official results, published weeks later and still publicly accessible today, show dire incongruities. In more than 80 Catalan municipalities there were not only more Yes than No ... but there were more Yes than inhabitants. We are talking about Yes percentages of 300% or even 500%. To understand each other, it's as if each person on the census had voted five times or as if infants and the inhabitants of the town cemetery could vote. And that's not counting grotesque events like the ballot boxes that fell to the ground before the vote at the Barcelona Escola de Treball and that were already full of ballots or the fact that a conversation between two nationalist politicians was recorded before the call in the one that commented on the result they would give after the vote, saying that they would say that around two million people had participated because of the "police repression" but that there were actually three million who had wanted to vote ... which was more or less what they communicated when the time came, stating that, with these unrealistic data, they had obtained around two million supporters, something that on the other hand they obtain in democratic elections, but with a census of more than five million and many more votes in against that in favor.

In short, the nationalists were lucky that the referendum was so illegal, because if it didn't become so and the European media had to come to analyze the cleanliness of the process, the embarrassment for them would have been appalling. October 1 was undoubtedly the most regrettable act of the three that made up the coup. Of the third, the day of the statement itself, few remember the exact date, the event vampirized by that of this October 1 of rage, pain and fake news. The first, on that October 6, in which the break with Catalan, Spanish and European laws was signed, is the one that we can't forget. It was the day that the "disconnection laws" were raised where it was stated that the decisions made in the parliament "will not be subject to the Spanish institutions or, above all, to the decisions of the Constitutional Court", chilling words that were only used earlier during the signing of the enabling laws that granted Adolf Hitler plenipotentiary powers.

Illegal. Illegitimate. Antidemocratic. That's why no country in the world has recognized the "Catalan nation". For this reason, none of the around two hundred human rights NGOs consider the prisoners of the "procés" political prisoners, but as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have done, they have categorically denied it. That's why Amnesty International has denied the nationalist claims regarding the trial of the "procés" and has declared that "it can't be said that it was not a fair trial".

Something I agree with the poster: Neither forget nor forgive, although Pedro Sánchez insists on doing both.

What happened should not be forgotten. And who doesn't see it clearly, to pull the newspaper library. Everything is there.