Open letter to Joe Biden

Open letter to Joe Biden

                                                                               March 24th, 2021

To:

Joseph R. Biden Jr.

President

United States of America

 

Dear Mister President, 

Perhaps is too early in your term as president, but I could presume from your long career in politics you may have been acquainted with the Catalonia growing cry for independence in these recent years.

An ancient country with a long and glorious history, with a vast cultural background and a rich language, Catalonia has been striving to find a place in the concert of the free nations of the world.

The struggle to emerge as a single entity, as a country, has not always been a peaceful one. Lost our ancient rights and laws in fierce battles some 300 years ago, and lost again more recently during the Spanish Civil war that led to a very long 38 years of Franco's dictatorship, had cost us dearly in blood and suffering.

The advent of democracy and the writing of a new constitution for the Spanish State in the 1970s opened a new era of peace and development and growth to Spain and also to Catalonia. Spain is now a modern state of law-abiding citizens integrated into the European Union and cooperating with a wide variety of international endeavours for peace and wellbeing around the world.

This, however, and for the past thirty years, has come about to an unfair cost to the people who live and toils in Catalonia up to a point to make it unbearable.

Not only our economic situation has been set back, worsened further by the worldwide economic crisis of these past few years, but some of our widely accepted initiatives within our community to modernize and put forward a better way of managing it, such as the 2006 Statute of Autonomy originally granted by the Spanish state, have been trampled, despised and utterly rejected by the Spanish central government.

For years, through effort, hard work and entrepreneurship, Catalonia has been the powerhouse for the Spanish state economy. But the unfair taxation system is strangled us and tampered with our efforts so no longer we see our future as prosperous as we should be allowed to dream.

As you well know, the American colonies went into the path for independence initially for a matter of taxes. To us is not just the tea, but rather a sizable chunk of our resources that go to Spain and are not fairly returned as services and investments. Catalonia understands that the contribution in terms of solidarity to other parts of Spain is right, but not to the point to render us poorer than the regions we are helping. And worst, with no end in sight to this lopsided drainage.

All this has brought us to the point of considering that a future not dependent on the decisions and policies, made 400 miles away in Madrid that do not respect our reasoned wishes in terms of administering our lives, is a desirable endeavour.

On September 11th, a date of dire remembrances to both your country and ours, for several years two million of us have taken the streets of Barcelona to peacefully show our will for a change in our relationship with the Spanish State. Those giant rallies have been organized by the civil society, political parties and politicians joining in afterwards. The Spanish state has either ignore us or as they did on the 1rst of October 2017, reacted violently sending riot paramilitary police against peaceful people casting their votes on a referendum considered illegal by the Spanish central government. Following those events, up to 3.000 people have been indicted, charged in courts, or thrown into jail as happened with the members of the Catalan government for their political ideas by lopsided sentences of judicial courts of irregular constitution. Others, as our legitimate president of the “Generalitat”, the Catalan government, forced to go into exile. 

Our collective will is to pursue the constitution of an independent state that suits our needs and dreams for the future. And to do so in a peaceful and reasoned way within the concert of all the nations of the world and the European Union as well.

This is what we want to bring to your attention and, as the head of the most powerful nation in the world, ask for your support to the will of a people that strives for its own laws, its rights and its independent free will in the path of liberty and peace.

With my best wishes for your presidency,

Yours sincerely

Xavier Allué MD, PhD

Citizen of Catalonia