“In recent times we have had to deal with various cases related to issues of discrimination, racism or xenophobia, cases that are the product of the spread of hate crimes. They will think that this issue should be addressed in other spaces, that it is a matter of doing more arduous awareness work, and that is true. But we are addressing this issue in the debate on the state of the city because it is true that the increase in hate speech affects coexistence in our neighborhoods and in our city.”
The representative of the València Acull association, Ángela Pedraza, expressed herself in these terms in her speech at the plenary session on the state of the city that is being held this Monday at the Valencia City Hall, during which citizen entities that request it have five minutes to present their ideas or requests.
Pedraza’s intervention, whose NGO is dedicated, among other things, to working for the integration of immigrants, was interrupted by the shouts of the municipal spokesperson of Vox, Juan Manuel Badenas, when he denounced the spread of hoaxes that promote hatred and the discourse towards immigrants of institutions generates problems of coexistence, citing as an example the racist tweets investigated by the Office of the Prosecutor of the Vox councilor, Cecilia Herrero: “These are some more recent examples of messages of hatred and racist attitudes promoted by institutional representatives that harm the coexistence of our city and that promote violence with our foreign neighbors. Racist messages expressed by a councilor of the City of Valencia,” said Pedraza.
At that point, Badenas interrupted his speech by shouting, forcing the mayor of Valencia, María José Catalá, to intervene: “Mr. Badenas, we are going to let the person who is speaking continue his turn,” Catalá said. government partner.
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened a hate crime investigation against the Vox councilor of the Valencia City Council, Cecilia Herrero, for twenty messages published on her Twitter account (X) of a racist nature in 2020. An atmosphere of broth of broth was also generated. culture of hatred when the murder of a Valencian was falsely linked to the fact that he was an immigrant, when the person arrested the next day as the alleged perpetrator of these events was of Spanish origin,” continued Pedraza, referring to Badenas himself. , who attributed the murder, at the end of July, of a man near the Oceanogràfic to an immigrant, while the alleged perpetrator arrested is Spanish.
Pedrazo’s speech was interrupted again by applause from the Compromís and PSPV opposition and complaints from Vox councilors, but once again Catalá intervened and the representative of València Acull was able to finish.
Subsequently, during the intervention of the spokesperson of Intersindical on behalf of the feminist coordinator, Beatriu Cardona, the same situation occurred when, in a review of some decisions of the “ultra-conservative government” of the PP and Vox to the detriment of equality, also cited the racist tweets of Herrero, during which Badenas raised his voice again and was involved in a moment of tension with a PSPV councilor, as denounced by the socialist spokesperson, Borja Sanjuan, and Compromís in their profile x.
