Miguel Urbán: "There are still set-ups like the one I suffered. There are police infiltrating social movements."
Saturday 21 June 2025, by Miguel Urbán Crespo
Miguel Urbán is a veteran activist in the anti-establishment left. A veteran of the Occupy Movement and a long-standing member of Anticapitalistas, his name is once again making headlines, something he had become less accustomed to since his party split with Podemos in 2020, in disagreement over its participation in the government.
[In May] elDiario.es, an on-line newspaper in Spain, revealed details of a secret investigation against him by the Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office in 2016, sponsored by powerful police commissioners. Urbán was falsely implicated in an alleged Venezuelan cocaine operation intended to illegally finance Podemos. Urbán gave this interview to eldiario.es from Sao Paulo, where he travelled to present his book "Trumpisms: Neoliberal and Authoritarian."
Why you? What was the objective in implicating you in the drug ring and financing of Podemos?
I don’t think they had any special interest in me as a person. Just as I don’t think they had any special interest in Iglesias [1] as a person. What they wanted was to destroy a group and destroy ideas. It could have been that I was one of the most recognised figures in Anticapitalistas and one of the best-known public figures in Podemos. Investigating me was an excuse to investigate the Anticapitalistas group and Podemos as a whole. I think it’s absurd to think they were investigating me as an excuse to investigate Pablo because there were already other cases involving Pablo.
Why in the first half of 2016?
This is a key moment for the politics of change. I think the establishment got a shock in the European elections, but the biggest shock comes when we suddenly win in Madrid, we win in Barcelona, in Zaragoza, in Cádiz, we win in Valencia, in Santiago de Compostela, we win in Oviedo and in A Coruña. And they think, ’This could be serious.’ That’s where I think they activate this crazy operation. It coincides with the two general elections, those of December 2015 and June 2016, in which we could have overtaken the Socialist Party. In fact, other plots were also being developed during those months, such as the Grenadines account or the alleged PISA report. [2] These were frantic months of operation by the gutter press, by the state apparatus, but also by the media and economic powers, all trying at any cost to prevent us from becoming the country’s leading electoral force. That was the key element.
How did it feel to find out you were the target of a secret investigation so many years later?
At first, I felt intense anxiety. The first thing I knew was that they were linking me to a drug exchange, and that’s why they’d broken into Pablo Iglesias’s accounts and others. I thought, ’What could they have come up with?’ When you know more details, you see the crude, the comical, even some surreal aspects… That takes some of the tension off. But you’re more anxious about not knowing than about what you do know.
It was also a very difficult time for me personally. My mother was dying. She passed away two weeks after I first learned about this. I’d been feeling bad for several weeks, and things were all mixed up. I also felt fragile. You say, ’These guys could have screwed up my life.’ And then there’s the impunity they enjoy: the perpetrators aren’t just anyone. There are a lot of fascists in the state security apparatus, but these weren’t just nobodies; they were the bosses, with all that that implies.
They want to create fragility, to make you not try anything again, to not move, to want it to be all over. It creates a mixed feeling. On the one hand, you think: ’Well, it happened ten years ago. Let’s let it go. I don’t want to stir up any more trouble.’ Because in the end, it hurts you. But this can’t be ignored. We must speak out and point out that we have a problem with democracy in our country. They weren’t attacking a group that was planning a power grab. Podemos was a party that was running in the elections. So you question how far they’re capable of going, how far they would have been capable of going.
Are you going to take legal action?
This needs to be discussed with my Anticapitalistas comrades. I’ve spoken with Iglesias about contacting Podemos’s lawyers; they’re involved in the case at the National Court and we need to see if we can get involved there. But we have to decide this collectively within Anticapitalistas. Politics is a collective pursuit. I will advocate for our action. We can’t let it go unchallenged.
Could something like this happen again?
Obviously. The Zaragoza Six have been in prison for a year. The kids haven’t done anything. They’re innocent but they are being punished. When you see that the police had someone involved, infiltrated, in Madrid’s social movements for 20 years; when you have infiltrators in environmental organisations, in neighbourhood movements, against logging, in groups like District 14 in Cartagena, neighbourhood groups... It’s not just something that can happen, it’s something that is happening.
The problem of the sewers, the problem of the state apparatus... the flaws in the democratic system remain, and the seams in the 1978 regime and the seams in our liberal democracy, which we are told is perfect, are showing. And it isn’t perfect. Not all ideas are permitted. The right to protest, the right to dissent, is not allowed. We have the six CNT comrades from the Suiza company who will surely go to jail for their union activity. It’s a real shame.
To think this can’t happen is naive, because it’s already happening, and that’s the serious thing, and that’s why I don’t want to let it go. They weren’t against me, they were against some ideas. And it will continue if we do nothing.
20 May 2025
Translated by David Fagan for International Viewpoint from eldiario.es.https://www.eldiario.es/politica/miguel-urban-sigue-habiendo-montajes-sufri-policias-infiltrados-movimientos-sociales_1_12315657.html
Attached documentsmiguel-urban-there-are-still-set-ups-like-the-one-i_a9063.pdf (PDF - 911.8 KiB)
Extraction PDF [->article9063]
Footnotes
[1] Pablo Iglesias co-founder of Podemos and member from 2014 until 2021.
[2] Pablo Iglesias Sociedad Anónima or Pablo Iglesias Pty Ltd report published by right-wing media spreading false information on Podemos.
Miguel Urbán Crespo
Miguel Urbán is a leading member of Anticapitalistas in the Spanish state and a former European MP on the Podemos list 2015-2024.
International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
Turning Political Repression into Movement
Building
My first years of progressive activism and organizing took place during the presidency of Richard Nixon, who, without a doubt, led one of the most repressive presidential administrations we have experienced in the United States in the modern era, prior to this Trump regime. It was under Nixon that the Republican Party, with its “southern strategy,” began to move toward becoming the kind of regressive entity that allowed pathological liar, racist, and convicted sexual abuser Donald Trump to be elected president in November 2016 and again in 2024.
During Nixon’s first term, from 1969 to 1973, he oversaw the use of government agencies to attempt to destroy groups like the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement and the Young Lords, including armed attacks by police that resulted in deaths. Newly enacted conspiracy laws were used to indict leaders of the peace movement and other movements. An entirely illegal and clandestine apparatus was created to sabotage the campaigns of his political opponents in the Democratic Party, leading to the midnight break-in at the Watergate Hotel that eventually led to the exposure of this apparatus and Nixon’s forced resignation from office in 1974.
I learned several things during those Nixon years about how to deal with government repression. Unfortunately, given Trump/MAGA’s attempts to replace US democracy with a fascist regime, those are very relevant lessons for today.
One critical lesson is that there is a disparity in the government treatment of people of color—Black, Latino/a, Indigenous and Asian—compared with the treatment of people of European descent—white people. The historical realities of settler military aggression, broken treaties, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, assumed white dominance, and institutionalized racism continue to have their negative, discriminatory impacts.
We are seeing this play out right now with the Trumpist arrests of Brown and Black immigrants, over 90% of whom, according to AI, have no criminal record. There can be little doubt that the intention is to use this racist campaign to establish a wholly new “justice” system which will increasingly come after not just immigrants but anyone who is consistently resisting their efforts to overturn democracy and install an authoritarian, repressive regime.
Those of us of European descent must be conscious of these realities and act accordingly, prioritizing right now the defense of immigrant rights. Very big numbers of us are stepping up, demonstrating and engaging in nonviolent action, risking and getting arrested, in opposition to what is happening with ICE in particular.
Government repression can’t be allowed to paralyze or divide organizations or movements. This is one of the objectives of an unjust government trying to repress those who challenge its policies and practices. That is one of the reasons why we need to be about the development of a movement culture that is respectful and healthy. Such a supportive cultural environment can help us weather this storm we are in and emerge from it stronger and better both as individual activists and organizers and as a mass progressive movement.
This is one of the necessary elements for successful resistance to government repression.
When I say “successful” I don’t mean that there won’t be casualties on our side, people behind bars, some for months or years, or people physically attacked and injured or worse, or deportation, job losses or greater economic hardship. It is clear that under a Trump/MAGA regime this is already happening and will continue and likely get worse, particularly for immigrants, people of color and low-income people generally.
Other things which can defend our rights and our movements are these:
-effective legal representation in court. It is good to see the way that many lawyers and progressive legal organizations are stepping up to defend immigrants and challenge the Trump executive orders issued so far;
-broad community support when repression happens. There are instances when ICE has attempted to arrest people and, on the spot, neighbors and others have prevented those arrests or, by their actions, have brought media attention to what is being attempted and, over time, have gotten people released from jail. It is a fact that there is a strong and extensive network of organizations nationally which is having an impact.
All of this can immediately or over time serve to undercut support for the Trumpists, strengthen our justice movement and hasten the time when the power of the organized people overcomes them on the way to the worldwide social, economic, environmental and cultural changes needed for humanity and all life forms to avoid ecosystem and societal breakdown.
Ultimately, what I have learned is that government repression can have a disruptive impact on our work, but we can turn a negative into a positive. The extent to which we can creatively, intelligently, and fearlessly demonstrate the truth of what we are about when responding to what they are doing to us is the extent to which we can have confidence that yes, we will win. Si, se puede!
No comments:
Post a Comment