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On October 1st, 2017 the Spanish government deployed the police in Catalonia to prevent people from voting in what the Spanish government considered an “illegal” referendum. The police actions resulted in 893 1 reported unarmed citizens injured in an event described by some international media as a case of police brutality. This paper drags from Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) to analyze discourses of normalization embedded in journalist practices in El País, the most widely read paper in the Spanish language 2. These discursive practices channel extreme positions such as beating and dissolving unarmed citizens who aim to express their opinions by voting into an agenda of acceptable socio-political norm; inevitable actions defined as a constitutional and democratic measure. In the months approaching the “referendum”, El País constructed a case against Catalonia's independence discursively by (1) legitimizing views, ideologies and positions that consider the Catalan's proposal unacceptable, (2) excluding dialogue and (3) propagating anti-pluralist discourses favoring “us” above “them”, which consequently (4) normalized police force as political intervention, justified with the application of the article 155 from the Spanish Constitution. 1 According to the Catalan government and the Catalan Health Department. Retrieve from https: //elpais. com/elpais/2017/10/04/inenglish/1507104937₈74487. html 2 Retrieved from https: //www. statista. com/statistics/436643/mostread-newspapers-in-spain/, http: //www. mondotimes. com/1/world/es/122/3990/9873 and http: //www. prisa. com/en/noticias/noticias-1/elpais-the-worlds-most-widely-read-digital-newspaper-in-spanish-
Antonio Reyes (Tue,) studied this question.