Pablo Hasél promised not to keep quiet, and he kept his word.
The Spanish rapper, whose prison sentence this week caused violent unrest and political strife in the Spanish coalition government led by Spain, barricaded himself at the University of the Catalan city of Lleida on Monday.
In one of his last tweets Before the police entered the campus and assembled him to start a nine-month sentence, Hasél called on supporters to “condemn the culprits to the fucking so many lives”.
His words seem to hit home. In cities across the country, crowds of protesters burned property and police have since sprayed objects every night to vent their anger over the rapper’s ‘kidnapping’.
The case of Hasél, who was jailed on Tuesday for increasing terrorism in his lyrics and tweets, also exposed a deep rift in Spain over free speech and the country’s democratic values.
As mainly young protesters vent their anger over his sentence, the case forces the government to eventually confront some of the country’s laws and its judiciary, which are accused of playing an increasingly reactionary role in society and politics.
The Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, acknowledged on Friday that Spanish democracy has work to do “when it comes to broadening and improving the protection of freedom of expression”. But he added: “In a full democracy there is no place for any kind of violence, and there are no exceptions.”
Despite the protests – in which a young woman allegedly lost sight of a police foam bullet and attacked the newspaper offices of El Periódico de Catalunya – many people in Spain support Hasél’s imprisonment.
They say his lyrics and tweets are an unacceptable humiliation of the victims of terrorism and incite hatred against the police and the former king of the country. When they sentenced him, judges argued that the violence of his words could possibly translate into violence on the ground, and conservatives point to the aftermath of his arrest to prove the case.
But for many others, including people who find Hasél’s lyrics very harsh, his imprisonment is the ultimate example of a worrying sign that the Spanish legal system is punishing people not for what they did, but for what they said, sang, tweeted. . or signed.
Amnesty International and Spanish celebrities such as Javier Bardem and Pedro Almodóvar say Hasél’s sentence – and other prison sentences – have a cold effect on freedom of speech.
One week before Hasel’s imprisonment, Pablo Iglesias, the leader of the left-wing Podemos party and one of Spain’s four deputy prime ministers, suggested that the country not fully turn the page of the far-right dictatorship from 1939 to 1975: “It is obvious that Spain does not have a situation of political and democratic normality,” he said.
A Saturnian figure who looks older than his 32 years, Hasél (real name Pablo Rivadulla Duro), may seem like an unlikely figure to become in graffiti and murals across Spain. As an example of pioneers of aggressive political Spanish rap such as Kase O, he is a lesser known name for his art than for his familiarity with the law since 2011.
He is currently serving his first prison sentence, but he has been tried several times in the past for tweets and lyrics. He also imposed a separate sentence of two and a half years for threatening a man at a bar, and another six months sentence for assaulting a TV journalist during a press conference in 2016.
Some of Hasél’s verbal attacks portray Spain’s former king Juan Carlos I as a ‘mafia boss’ who cost Saudi tyrants. Diatribes against the police claim they “sow racism” and “murder with impunity”. These tweets are seen as wrong with Spain’s criminal law insulting the crown and the police.
For this, Hazel was ordered to pay a hefty fine. But it is the lyrics and tweets that approvingly refer to terrorist figures that carry the much more serious charge of ‘glorifying terrorism’ and that ultimately led to a prison sentence for Hazel.
“I do not care much about the bullet in the back of your neck, pepero,” is an example of such sentiment that was scrutinized in an earlier investigation. Pepper is a nickname for those who support the center-right People’s Party, several of whose members were killed by the Basque terrorist group Eta in the 1990s.
Hasél is not the only rapper who has approved Spanish judges to serve and punish on similar charges: in 2018, the Mallorcan musician, known as Valtònyc, received a prison sentence based on some of his lyrics and ‘ a day before he was due to escape to Belgium. to go to jail.
Other figures in the arts have also found themselves at the sharp end of the penal code in recent years, a situation that is of deep concern to the international art advisory group Freemuse.
Srirak Plipat, the director of the organization in Denmark, said: “I think the freedom of speech in Spain has deteriorated over the last ten years.”
This deterioration claimed by Plipat could be an important factor in understanding why the Hasél case is causing such unrest.
A decade ago, Spain was still deeply affected by the global financial collapse. By 2011, youth unemployment is approaching 50%. Anti-austerity measures, and a general contempt for Spanish political culture, caused the movement “May 15” (15M), which launched Podemos and the career of Iglesias. His young fans occupied town square across Spain.
In 2012, Catalonia took over Basque separatism as the new fault line in Spain’s shaky unity. The Catalan movement to secede from Spain culminated in Catalonia’s illegal independence referendum in 2017, during which people were beaten by police as they tried to vote.
In the same period, a flood of royal scandals damaged the popularity of the monarchy. The revelation that King Juan Carlos I hunted elephants with his lover in Botswana while Spain was plagued by misery of the sovereignty period caused great disgrace. The once revered royal had to resign in 2014 in favor of his son.
Around this time, Iglesias coined the term ‘the cupboards’ to describe the political parties, major business interests and the judges. The term was adopted by supporters of 15M, and the ‘castes’, who clung to the old certainties of the monarchy and a united Spain, began to feel the heat.
Last year, the pressure increased after the bombing accused Juan Carlos withdrew a total of $ 100 million (70 million pounds) in Saudi Arabia.
According to Plipat and other advocates for freedom of speech, these crises have prompted conservative politicians and judges to use legitimate speech laws to curb the flow of tweeted anger.
Plipat notes that judges have started using the glorification of terrorism charges with greater frequency since 2015.
David Canales, a researcher at the Amnesty International office in Madrid, also says that in the same year, conservative lawmakers tightened sentences related to the lifting of terrorism: ‘Those 2015 reforms were clearly enacted in response to all the social mobilization and all that activism. ‘
The rise of Hasél, a far-left, anti-monarchist Catalan as a nationwide symbol, is not so much because of what he says or expresses, but because he represents the logical conclusion of this law and orderly action.
With their crude references to terrorist victims, Hasél and Valtònyc can be considered outliers. But since 2015, people with a much milder expression have ended up in court. The judicial environment has created what Canales calls a dangerous “deterrent effect”.
Guille Martínez-Vela, the editor of the Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves, is all too familiar with the threat of being punished by the penal code. In 2017, when thousands of extra police officers were sent to Catalonia after the illegal referendum, his publication joked that the riot police had snorted the entire supply of cocaine in the region.
While the alleged preference of the police for drugs is a comic herd in Spain, Martínez-Vela was denounced by the national police and summoned to a trial.
Police argued that the joke fueled anti-police hatred. Martínez-Vela said the hate speech laws were designed to protect minorities, not a powerful, state-supported collective. The charges were eventually dismissed.
But Martínez-Vela was shocked by the experience: ‘If I now draw or write a joke for the magazine, I always think’ how would I defend it before a judge? ‘… this is the cold effect: the idea that if they joke about the police, they can take you to court. ”
There are numerous other examples, including in 2017, when a student, Cassandra Vera, was given a suspended prison sentence for tweeting a joke about the assassination in 1973 by Eta on the last prime minister to serve under Franco, and in 2016 a group of puppet players. face criminal charges for allegedly increasing Eta in a street production in Madrid. Vera’s sentence was later overturned by the Spanish Supreme Court, while the puppets were eventually acquitted.
But there are signs that there may be a change of government, which last week announced plans to amend the law so that ‘verbal offenses committed in the context of artistic, cultural or intellectual acts’ did not result in imprisonment not.
A government spokesman said he wanted to “provide a much safer framework for freedom of expression”. Podemos seeks to move forward with changes that could alter or suppress the glorification of terrorism provisions.
Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. A senior serving Spanish judge, speaking to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, said: ‘The mentality of some judges is very conservative, they have ideas that are not progressive about fundamental rights … and this leads to this interpretations.
‘I think it’s generally other people [in the judiciary] agree that these laws need to change. The restriction on freedom of expression should only be for me if there is a direct message to hurt someone. “
There was no justification that a rap lyric would ever require jail time, the judge said. ‘I think it’s absolutely out of proportion. We put it on the same level as stabbing someone. ”
For the judge, the Hasél case raises deep questions about Spanish society and its relationship to the monarchy.
‘Maybe we have very fragile institutions and there is a tendency to protect them. After all, adult societies can handle such criticism without going to court. ”