The president of the Valencian Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, published a screenshot of an SMS from Teresa Ribera sent on Tuesday, October 29 at 8:20 p.m., DANA day, to try to convey the idea that the third vice president of the government is I did not contact him until that time. Mazón attempts to respond in this way to an interview in which Ribera explained that she had not been able to contact him until she called him for the fourth time.
In the SMS that Mazón broadcasts, the minister tells him that they are “waiting and worried” and asks him to tell her “everything” with which the government can “help”. “The president of the CHJ is agitated but conducts with the greatest caution. Marlaska and civil protection in it. Aemet is following developments,” she told him. Mazón shared it on Twitter with the message: “Enough manipulation. This SMS [se mandó] at 8:20 p.m. after sending the alert and without coverage at Cecopi. “That’s what happened.”
But in reality, this message from Ribera came after he tried unsuccessfully to call her three times, between 7:35 p.m. and 8:20 p.m. He did this through his secretary, the Moncloa telegraph office and his chief of staff, according to ministry sources. At that time, when there was no response, Ribera sent him this text message. Later, his team manages to locate the president using the cell phone of someone who was next to him and who physically transmits it to him. In his tweet, Mazón makes no reference to the vice president’s calls, but he assures that he was “without cover.”
The controversy began after the deputy secretary for Institutional Affairs of the PP and vice-president of the European Parliament, Esteban González Pons, declared that Ribera was absent from the management of DANA and “was not part of the crisis committee improvised by the Moncloa.” The minister responded a few hours later: through an interview with Hora 25to defend his management and say that he called Mazón after, during the Cecopi meeting, people from the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar warned that they were blocked.
“They called the Secretary of State, he notified me and it took me up to four calls to locate Mr. Mazón (…) It was a short conversation: President, what happened he passed, how can we help you and what do you want us to do? He said to me: “the situation was fine, but it got out of control this afternoon “Forgive me, I will call you in. 10 minutes.” That’s the conversation we had. Logically, he did not call me again, which I understood perfectly,” explained the minister on Cadena SER.
In the afternoon, after Pons’ accusations, the team of the Minister of Ecological Transition insisted on the fact that she was in Brussels on October 29 but “working and reachable at any time”. Later, after the call to Mazón, the third vice-president of the Government continued “while waiting for the evolution of DANA and in contact with the other ministries alerted to the situation”, she participated electronically in the crisis committee established in the very night of the 29th. and advanced his return to Madrid on the first available flight on Wednesday 30.
