The Spanish government is under fire after allegations that police officers infiltrated far‑left and green groups and engaged in sexual relationships with activists to win their trust and obtain information. The scandal broke in January when Catalan media outlet La Directa reported that a police officer using the name Daniel Hernández had had sexual relations with various members of a Barcelona squat and far‑left movements since 2020. In one case the intimate relationship lasted nearly a year, according to the alternative publication. Six women have filed a complaint against the officer, accusing him of sexual abuse and arguing that their consent was obtained through deception. One of the women’s lawyers, Mireia Salazar, told AFP that the purpose of the complaint is “to know how far these practices go, which in our opinion have no legal justification.”
The controversy deepened after the Madrid branch of climate activist group Extinction Rebellion said it had been infiltrated by a female police officer who “had sexual relations with at least one of its members.” The affair recalls the British case of Kate Wilson, an environmental activist who was tricked into a sexual relationship with an undercover officer for nearly two years; a 2021 tribunal ruled that the police had violated her human rights.
In Spain, the Hernández case has sparked outrage, especially in Catalonia, the region that triggered the country’s worst political crisis in decades during the failed 2017 independence push. The scandal follows Spain’s central government’s admission last year that it had spied on the mobile phones of 18 Catalan separatist leaders using Israeli spyware Pegasus. “Where is your moral limit, where is your ethical limit?” Catalan separatist party ERC lawmaker Gabriel Rufian asked Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez last month during a debate in the assembly. “It is not just a threat to political freedoms, ideological freedoms, but also — it seems — sexual freedoms,” he added, referring to the undercover Barcelona police officer. Sánchez’s minority leftist coalition relies on the ERC to pass legislation, and criticism has also come from the far‑left party Podemos, a junior coalition partner of Sánchez’s Socialists. “It is violence against women,” Podemos secretary of state for equality Ángela Rodríguez told Catalan radio station RAC1. “The sooner we know what happened and justice can be done, the better it will be for the reputation of security agencies,” she said.
The scandal arrives as Sánchez’s government faces waning support ahead of regional elections in May and a year‑end general election. Both the interior ministry and the police declined to comment on the allegations when contacted by AFP. However, during a recent parliamentary debate, Interior Minister Fernando Grande‑Marlaska dismissed the ERC’s accusations of “illegal activities” by police as “a lie.” Undercover officers have also reportedly infiltrated a far‑left group in the Mediterranean port of Valencia and a Barcelona housing‑rights organization called Resistim al Gòtic, though no sexual‑misconduct allegations have emerged in those cases. La Directa identified a police officer using the alias Marc Hernández, who pretended to be a Resistim al Gòtic activist for nearly two years before being exposed in June. “When the information was revealed, it was a shock,” Marti Cuso, a member of the group, told AFP. “We did not suspect anything; we had no clues that his person could be a police officer.”
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