The Argentine journalist  Bruno Bimbi  claims to suffer retaliation by the Generalitat of Catalonia  and ” academic and administrative maneuvers ” after, in 2020, he exposed the imposition of monolingualism in Catalan at the university where he studied in an article published on the  Ctxt website.

In said writing, whose title was ” How do you say xenophobia in Catalan?“, Bimbi explained his own experience as a student of a course at the University of Barcelona (UB), and how Spanish was  also excluded as a vehicular language. . According to the journalist, despite having signed up for one of the few two groups in which her subject was taught in Spanish, the teacher refused to speak it  and taught it in Catalan, rejecting the requests of several students from other parts of the world who They did not understand her and asked her to comply with what was stipulated in the teaching plan. In this way, Bimbi also ended up discovering that all the 11 groups in which the subject was taught were only in Catalan, and none of them in Spanish, despite the fact that the UB announced those two groups.

“They want me to return a scholarship from two years ago”

“I moved to Madrid five months ago, but the Generalitat of Catalonia continues to punish me for that article I published in Ctxt. Now they want me to return a scholarship from two years ago. I am in the last semester of my degree at the UB and my GPA It’s 9.1. It’s crazy,” Bimbi denounced this Friday in a Twitter thread.

In it, the journalist exposes the  “horrible” journey he has undergone as a result of his article, pointing out, for example, that, due to government pressure, his media ended up apologizing: “I have written about much more dangerous things and denounced people.” powerful and had never happened before.

“My grades were lowered”

“Since then, at the UB they lowered my exam grades by averaging them with a grade for ‘attitude’, they removed the credits of two subjects approved with honors from my record, they doubled my NIUB [student identification number at the UB ]  and they rejected my scholarship for that, among a thousand other evils, ” says Bimbi.

The journalist also attributes to the authorities the fact that when, during the pandemic, I was out of work and had a bad time,  the Generalitat blocked my payment of rental assistance for more than a year, saying that a document that I had to pay was missing. To apply four times.  Twice they denied me the scholarship, saying that I was not enrolled at the UB.

“Now that I went to live in Madrid, they invented this.  They want me to return the scholarship they paid me in 2021 after four appeals by presenting the enrollment certificate over and over again to prove that I was enrolled. That started as soon as the article came out, he adds in his extensive Twitter thread.

“Gang of xenophobes and fascists”

Bimbi also regrets the lack of protection that some journalists suffer from their media “when political power harasses them for an article  approved and edited by them.”

“I hope that these types of things also help so many people on the left to reflect (including leaders whom I respect a lot for many other reasons) who continue to defend or justify this band of xenophobes and fascists who are the Catalan version of Trumpism ,” he adds. In this sense, he remembers the pressure from the media and on social networks that he suffered after writing his article: The first thing was 15 days of (hundreds of)  insults  (including homophobic and xenophobic) and moral harassment on the networks, added to the intimidation of the media independentistas, in addition to the “apologies” given by the media in which he worked and “finally the academic and administrative maneuvers“, in his words.