Our revenge will be to survive
- Learning to breathe
- Ten directly responsible
- No Hydrological Plan
- One true God
- No political or social ideas
- The inter-municipal PP
- Tears in the rain
They demanded the resignation of Mazón and Sánchez. They do not represent them. They have failed them. They have failed us all.
Most significantly, the March for Solidarity - ‘Valencia runs for Valencia’ - in which more than 20,000 people, mostly foreigners, have gathered to fill the hotels this weekend and bring a little love and hope to the most vulnerable.
Learning to breathe
An interminable month of November, after the last aftermath, the Valencians, the people of Castilla-La Mancha and Andalusia feel alone because they are still abandoned. 800,000 people affected, 70 cities devastated, hundreds of kilometres of sewers clogged by mud turned into concrete, thousands of cars destroyed, reeds flooding the beaches because the rivers have not been cleaned, hundreds of garages full of mud and faeces on the ground floors, no electricity, no water, no gas... We have to learn to breathe.
The hunger queues continue. Thousands of people cannot return to their homes. The lack of coordination between administrations is the common denominator of a territory that has lost 18% of its GDP, that has left 1,300 companies in uncertainty, 25,000 workers in redundancies and thousands of small self-employed on the verge of despair.
We will need three lustrums and between 60,000 and 100,000 million euros to return to normality without counting the emotional and mental cost that will require special psychiatric and psychological care for life.
The first plenary session in Paiporta, with citizens painfully fed up waiting for solutions, clearly reflects that the state has not responded with the full force of solidarity to the greatest human catastrophe of our time.
It is not a problem of local councils, which have collapsed. It is the duty of the central state to protect its citizens. But this president is never responsible for anything. It is always the others.
When the Tous dam burst (20 October 1982), the army deployed 7,000 soldiers to help the victims. 44 years later, with 19 years of experience of the Military Emergency Unit (UME), on 7 October 2005, only a thousand have been deployed.
‘One day dawned, and another day, and another day dawned and no one was there’. The writer Santiago Posteguillo (Valencia, 1967) recounted his own personal experience in the Senate.
At the fourth dawn, 8,000 military personnel joined the army, which the Minister of Defence reluctantly sent. Many have already returned to their barracks. Why?
The volunteers, with buckets and brooms - beyond their generosity and good faith - looked like Pancho Villa's army.
The firefighters of the Valencian Community were not mobilised. And those from the Basque Country were refused permission to help. At a national demonstration in Madrid, firefighters have demanded a Coordination Law for national emergencies. They have been calling for it for a decade.
Ten directly responsible
Never so few (Sánchez, Marlaska, Ribera -who never went to Valencia because he was defending his vice-presidency in the European Commission-, Margarita, -who loudly insulted the families who had lost everything-, Mazón, the government delegate, the president of the Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar, the director of the AEMET, the Industry and Emergencies councillors of the Generalitat...).
These ten people are the direct culprits.
Mazón's incompetence is unquestionable. Why didn't he pass the responsibility to the Central Government? Did he think he was Gary Cooper with Grace Kelly waiting at the end of the flood?
To hide behind two retired military officers who have demanded that he sign a decree to raise their salaries in order to start the reconstruction confirms that we are in the worst hands at the darkest moment.
The Generalitat has not yet denied, as several ministers assured in the last parliamentary control, that Mazón had already awarded contracts for the reconstruction for 42 million to some Gürtel businessmen. Just what Alberto Núñez Feijóo was missing.
Sánchez, as he did with Fernando Simón during COVID-19, has taken refuge in the vanity of the Valencian president and in the JEME of the UME, who has used the facilities of the Moncloa complex to convince citizens that the Executive has acted correctly.
The UME's neutrality and its traditional prestige have been called into question. What does it take, General Marcos, for the state to declare a national emergency? 1,000 dead? 10,000 houses flooded? Was this governance?
Given the magnitude of the tragedy after the first day of reconnaissance flights with planes and drones, did you not issue a report urging the government to take full command in the three affected regions?
No Hydrological Plan
Never have so few public servants done so much damage to so many. The Government of the Nation failed because Minister Marlaska refused to decree the level 3 alarm and take emergency decisions. The worst Minister of the Interior and the longest-serving of democracy. A liar and irresponsible guy.
Don Pedro Sánchez appeared two days later, with his lady, after his Bolliwoodian tour of India. And he fooled like a Chinaman a Mazón alone in the face of danger after the extensive [business] lunch at El Ventorro with the journalist Maribel Vilaplana.
The president's [electorally calculated] promise after the weight of the first 50 dead floating in the mud was historic: ‘If he needs more resources, let him ask for them’.
The booing during his visit to ‘ground zero’ and his cowardly flight form part of the collective memory of the Valencians of the Poyo ravine.
The King and Queen stayed there talking to their people. And their return a few days later to Chiva, Utiel and Letur (Albacete) showed that the citizens were not shouting at the Royal Family in Paiporta, but at the politicians of the whole world.
Don Felipe and Doña Sofía shared the pain of a vulnerable people while ‘His Sanctity’ sent elite Guardia Civil officers to arrest the ‘ultra-right-wing aggressors’ who hurled insults at him and Mazón, and a broomstick that grazed a photographer. A ‘live hoax’ by the president, which he has never denied.
A month later, after discovering in Baku (Azerbaijan) that ‘climate change kills’ and attending the G20 in Rio de Janeiro to insist on defending the sustainability of the planet, he deigned to submit to the ‘lack of control’ of the government to find a single political responsible for the catastrophe: Carlos Mazón, from whom he demanded the immediate resignation.
The president sentenced: the blame lies with the denialists, the PP (Feijóo) and the extreme right (Abascal), whom he called a traitor to the homeland’.
A guy who has pardoned coup plotters, terrorists, embezzlers; a president who has put 1,233 rapists on the street and who has enacted an unconstitutional amnesty law to break the Nation, a leader who does not dare to go to the Ibero-American Conference because he has generated diplomatic problems with Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Algeria and Israel, calls the president of VOX a traitor.
He, God, the One, the indivisible, the Lord of all guerrillas to neutralise the Transition and return to Zapatero's war-civilianism. He, the ‘other man for eternity’, the Henry VIII of the 16th century, who bribed Thomas More to divorce Catherine of Aragon, five centuries later, giving lessons in democracy when he has half his family, half his government and half his party, with the state attorney general at the head, indicted for multiple corruption.
He is a toxic and predictable president. He accused Feijóo of ‘wanting to control the institutions to place his friends and family’. He always wallows in the same mud. As a good ‘podemite’ recycled to Stalinism who rides between contradictions, the doctor did not find a second to show solidarity with the victims. In this debate, he was only concerned with the PP's boycott of Ribera's candidacy, after whitewashing his responsibilities for inaction in the creation of hydrological infrastructures.
Núñez Feijóo was up to the task, recalling the accusations of Víctor de Aldama, recently released from prison in Soto del Real, he went through his judicial horizon from Begoña to his brother David ‘Azagra’ and asked for a consensus on a Hydrological Plan for the Júcar and Segura before the next DANA.
The president turned a deaf ear, hiding behind science and ecologists, who are the real culprits in the failure to clean up the riverbanks.
Pérez-Castejón avoided talking about the fact that it was ZP who cancelled the PHN two days after shamefully withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq. He omitted that the still vice-president Ribera had spent 50 million on publicity, but, due to lack of funds, improvements in the Júcar that would have prevented many deaths could not be carried out. This is what the technicians indicate.
Therefore, from that debate in Parliament we came away thinking that this Government will not implement a PHN until Valencia is handed over to Catalonia.
Not a word about the motion of censure proposed by the PSOE in Requena during this painful DANA. But he did incite Compromís to try with the PSV and the rest of the far-left forces to try to beat the PP to overthrow the Eurotelevisive Mazón, now that VOX has left the coalition government.
Only one objective moves the tenant of the Moncloa: the electoral mission to remain in power no matter what it costs us taxpayers.
With 50 dead, he used Congress to appoint the 11 political commissioners of RTVE, breaking the rules of the game in the middle of the Legislature. He never respected either the dead or the living. You remember it and remind others of it.
I wanted to start this BAHIA DE ÍTACA with what is important, for the families devastated by the DANA thirty-four days ago, to be faithful to the messages that our own relatives and desperate people are sending us. Only 92 million of the 17 billion that have been earmarked for the victims have arrived. Don't forget us! Don't abandon us at Christmas! Nothing is softer than water and yet its force is so destructive. Dear friends, we are with you.
One true God
The 41st Congress of the PSOE has been an imperial stroll for the Almighty God, Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón. His mandate to the rank and file in the local, provincial and regional administrations and institutions of the State is unique: to win the next regional, municipal and general elections on the 27th. And from that vantage point, to reach the dreamed horizon of the 31st. I Centenary of the II Republic and proclamation of the III, without referendum as when then; this is what the puppies of the PSOE have subscribed to once again in this conclave.
The continuism of the Executive and the attacks on Justice corroborate the fear of the courts.
Miss Gómez was found to be a way of greening the victimhood denounced by Emiliano García Page, the only discordant voice. They have officially proclaimed 90% support for the secretary general. But the figure may have been close to 98. An enthronement in the North Korean style.
Diana Morant expressed it effusively: ‘We have... Pedro Sánchez!
One true God. The cult of personality so dear to authoritarianism and populism is back.
Aldama has hovered over the socialist council, conditioning all the resolutions. He is afraid because he knows them and they know that the PSOE machinery - ‘la rosa nostra’- is dangerous. What if the indispensable corrupt escapes?
The most worrying element for ‘agreeing everything’ is Ábalos, angry with his friend Pedro for the mistreatment of his fellow citizens in Valencia. Pedro and José Luis spoke up to seven or eight times a day on the phone.
Too many open fronts in a Sanchista council where the good man is the ‘collaborator’ of Maduro's dictatorship, J.L. Rodríguez Zapatero. Just tell that to Edmundo González. ZP, where are the ballot papers?
They defenestrated Juan Lobato in 24 hours and all the artillery fell silent. ‘Sánchez's purge manual destroys you. It leads you to isolation. And his plumbers are always the same’. Tomás Gómez, former president of the WFTU, an honest man, betrayed by Rubalcaba, who suffered the political ‘bullying’ in his own flesh.
Gómez recalls that Lobato then even applauded with his ears when they changed the lock on his Callao headquarters and left him out in the open in the middle of the night.
The ‘Moncloa case’ will explode in three weeks and will fully reach the aspirant Óscar López, who says he ‘knows nothing’ about what his chief of staff, Pilar Sánchez Acera, did. Did the president order it directly? This complicates Don Alvarone's situation.
No political or social ideas
There was talk of creating an International Tribunal against Corruption (ICT) but Cerdán's ‘lies in a court of law’ do not seem to have caught on with the 6,000 delegates in attendance.
The thunderous applause for Chaves, Griñán and Maleni Álvarez, ‘directly pardoned by Conde Pumpido, in the larceny of the EREs of Andalusia, leads one to think that this government (alone or in the company of others) will legalise as soon as possible, the corruption of politicians as long as they are progressive. They will end up rehabilitating Errejón and Puigdemont.
The ‘financing pact’ is impossible to please the separatists and the socialist barons. The PSOE will create more inequality among Spaniards. It is a fact.
The creation of a Public Company to Build Social Housing is the only idea to forget six years of null management without building a single flat. They will start by renewing Sareb -the bad bank- injecting it with hundreds of millions after placing half a dozen more card-carrying cronies. Loyalty is everything! This public company has no land law or competences.
But it will be a preferential electoral claim for the remainder of the Legislature. In short: Sánchez will remain in power forever promising free housing. To everyone.
The last hurdle is to push through the PGE/25. If a tax reform against banks and energy companies - who is going to invest in our country with so much legal uncertainty? -And if the trade unions have already brought forward the reduction of the working day to 32 hours, ask yourselves what the future holds for us.
UGT and Comisiones have told Pedro what he is most proud of: ‘You are a president who keeps his word; a reliable man’. They have not checked the newspaper archives.
At the 41st Federal Congress of the PSOE, the Andalusian ugetistas, condemned last week to pay 662 million to the Junta de Andalucía for embezzlement of public funds, were invited.
I remind you that to be a PSOE militant you must first get a membership card of the General Union of Workers.
Since we cannot find ideas to regenerate public and social life, will we find, at least, half a dozen just and honest men in this PSOE sanchista?
The fourth Congress that consecutively enthroned Dr Pérez-Castejón will not be the last. Sánchez is also seeking to eternalise himself in Ferraz. But from now on he can lead an unsustainable government.
The inter-municipal PP
The PP continues with its absolute majority in the Senate. The ‘Koldo’ commission is a box of surprises. Neither ministers nor civil servants remember anything. A collective amnesia. Others are invoking their right not to testify.
The former CEO of Globalia arrived with jet lag from Los Angeles and read a communiqué that betrayed his parliamentary ignorance. It is clear that he is a ‘spoilt posjo’. Despite being a ‘travelled man’ he has neither learned nor practised good manners. I pity the workers who suffer from him. Javier Hidalgo provided nothing and lied that he has always been located. The businessman is implicated in the ‘Ábalos-Aldama’ case and we will see what help he gave to Professor Gómez.
The Popular Party is waiting for the climate to become more tense before summoning Pedro Sánchez.
Beyond Núñez-Feijóo's trade union voluntarism, Pepe Álvarez's compliments to Sánchez in Seville testify that when the day and time comes, UGT and Comisiones Obreras will continue to threaten to mobilise the streets to make the PP pay monthly for social peace. Pedro and Yolanda have it a little easier.
After the failure of the Spanish PP in Brussels - it was right to torpedo Ribera's candidacy - the PP held a municipal rally in Valladolid.
The secretary general outdid herself by describing the PSOE's meeting in Seville as a ‘ceremony of corruption’.
It was not a bad counter-programming. The best gift was the resignation of Juan Lobato and his appearance at the Audiencia Nacional. The Moncloa/Prosecutor General's Office plot was exposed. The government used state institutions to persecute and destroy a political rival. This is extremely serious. We could move from legal insecurity to political instability by attacking the sacred rights of a citizen used to ‘politically assassinate’ a political rival.
The other gift is more succulent. Óscar López will be the rival in the next regional elections in Madrid. He will be a minister, but he is not in the Assembly. And as a candidate for the Junta de Castilla y León he was a package deal for Vicente Herrera.
Otherwise, the popular leader seemed looser and more confident in his ‘face to face’ with César Sánchez. After two days of kisses and hugs with the militancy, he closed the popular Intermunicipal with a clear idea, looking at the polls. ‘Hang in there, Pedro, because we Spaniards are going to throw you out [vote by vote] with principles and dignity, which neither the government nor the president have’.
He made a mistake last week when he said he was open to leading a motion of censure... and urged Sánchez's partners to let him fall.
Don Alberto, would you really be willing to accept the votes of PNV, Junts, Bildu or ERC to reach the Moncloa? Let the judicial agenda mark the gradual degeneration of the PSOE and dedicate yourself to making proposals in the street: Housing, PHN, Financing, Electoral Law Reform, digital job creation, AI, vindicate nuclear energy and slow down the green and energy pact that will sink us in 2035. Reform education, University, VET and give scholarships to students who make an effort to create an Equal Opportunities Principle.
Fight against drugs - nothing has been heard from you about the police officer Óscar Sánchez, head of money laundering, who has been arrested with 20 million euros in his chalet, with another million in his official office and another 17 million in cryptocurrencies.
Have you ever thought that drug trafficking is the real engine that moves the world? Any measures against fentanyl? What about compulsive shopping on mobile phones, pornography, sexual harassment, cybercrime, obesity, mental health or school failure? What about AI?
I have certainly mixed the ‘churras’ with the ‘meninas’, but the problems are on the ground. Look at the countryside, the sea, the reconstruction of the DANA. Don't resign yourself, Sanchez is also mortal. To begin with, harmonise the PP's discourse and create a Factory of Ideas so that the message gets across clearly in all directions. Start with the simple: update your PP.es website.
Tears in the rain
Emperor Sánchez has crossed the border between heaven and earth and his horizon goes beyond Orion. ‘I have seen things you would not believe. Attacking burning ships..., C-rays glowing in the darkness near the Tannhaüser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain’.
I would not add that ‘it is time to die’ (in fiction) because she has to manage too many scandals. His calm is apparent because the procession is inside.
Sánchez is still very much alive; he has shielded Montero, who has accused the PP of staging a ‘coup d'état’ for calling for the president's resignation, and Cerdán for denouncing that the PSOE is suffering ‘human carnage’.
These are tempting phrases for a factory with no ideas either in Moncloa or in Ferraz.
The secretary general continues to believe that he is governing with an absolute majority.
He is backed by Sumar's government partners and his fellow travellers against Spain: Junts, ERC, Bildu, PNV, Podemos, BNG and Compromís. The reason is obvious: they are as corrupt as the PSOE. Sufficient social majority.
Spain is leading from the left, they say from the Andalusian capital. Sánchez leaves Seville, unstoppable, reckless and dangerous.
Víctor de Aldama does not want to go back to prison. Corruption has reached the gates of the Palace.
We are still in the extreme centre. Our revenge against the eternity of the supreme leader will be to survive under the protection of the Constitution of 78, which this week celebrates its 46th anniversary.
Long live the Magna Carta! Our revenge against the eternity of the supreme leader will be to survive.
Antonio REGALADO RODRIGUEZ is a journalist. He is the editor of BAHÍA DE ÍTACA at:
aregaladorodriguez.blogspot.com vengeance will be to survive