The Civic Platform Action Against Hate (ACO), made up of professionals from the fields of jurisprudence, journalism, literature and academia, has denounced Santiago Abascal before the Prosecutor's Office of the Supreme Court for a crime of incitement to hatred for linking immigration and crime with the aim of promoting the mass deportation of the migrant population residing in our country.
The association has exposed before the Criminal Section of this body the recurrent nature of the hate messages through social networks and media in which the leader of Vox associates the group of migrants with social dangerousness and criminality, in what the legal team of ACO denounces as a strategy of Abascal and his party to stir up hostility against the group of migrants.
Some of the actions denounced by ACO as part of this strategy are the dissemination of racist messages by spokespersons of Abascal's party, such as the deputy Rocío de Meer, who has publicly defended "an extraordinarily complex process of re-emigration", which would involve deporting eight million immigrants and their children. "We have the right to survive as a people," she said. In addition, the association provides documentation of proposals such as the one that Vox presented in its economic programme on 25 June, which included "reversing all the regularisations of illegal immigrants carried out by the bipartidismo", which would mean returning to illegality more than a million people who reside and, to a large extent, work in Spain, and carrying out "massive deportations".
You can read the arguments here.
As you are reading these lines, and after signing, there are already more than 40,000 signatures out of a target of 51,200. Given that the initiative was launched yesterday, it is more than likely that in a few hours the target will be met and surpassed.
It is the same old story, these hate groups are not a new phenomenon. Since long before (and also after) one of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda principles, that of creating a single enemy, was put into practice, many have used simplification to construct an "easy", reductionist and false narrative to create a single adversary. Once this has taken hold, they feel legitimised to persecute, repress and in many cases exterminate entire collectives.
Thus, history leaves us with many examples of peoples, ethnic groups or races that were "marked" and then massacred, and in many cases even served as a pretext to start conflicts with disastrous results.
I have many reasons to sign in support of this proposal and invite you to do so as well.
I could go through them one by one here, but as my job consists largely of trying to synthesise I will stick with one: not to let so many obvious acts of incitement and propagation of hatred pass this time and not to have to duck my head tomorrow and lie that I didn't see it coming. And they have been unambiguously proclaiming their intentions since their birth.
