On October 29 at 6:28 p.m., the President of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, called the Mayor of Cullera, Jordi Mayor, via the WhatsApp application. The head of the Consell had finished the now famous hearty meal with the journalist Maribel Vilaplana, while the mayor stood with two inches of water in the streets of his municipality and looked at the water levels that the Xúquer river carried upstream. What did you think when the president called you? “When he called me, I don’t know what state he was in… not in a state of emergency,” the mayor said on television and confirmed to elDiario.es. The call, which Mazón himself had disclosed this Sunday to justify that he was aware of the impact of DANA on the municipalities, was transformed like a boomerang, based on the explanations given by the mayor of Cullera.
And the mayor of Cullera had been discreet and had not broadcast this conversation with the president of the Generalitat. A conversation that elDiario.es had been aware of for ten days. The call was not informative until the President of the Generalitat publicly disclosed it to highlight his management of DANA Day. “I don’t know where Mazón was, obviously we already know he wasn’t where he should be, and I still don’t know why he called me. “He didn’t tell me anything about the emergency, he did not tell me that the Forata dam was in danger of breaking, and he did not tell me anything either,” the mayor declared on Europa Press television this Sunday.
Mazón defended this morning that on the day of DANA he was not “incommunicado” and that he spoke “even with people who say” that he was, “like the mayor of Cullera”. “At 6:28 p.m. I called him. I have never been incommunicado, I have not refused any food,” Mazón added. It is also striking that Mazón called the mayor through the WhatsApp application, which is generally used when the user does not have telephone coverage, but has Wi-Fi.
WhatsApp call
As the mayor of Cullera explained, the “president” called him on WhatsApp, which was “strange” because he did not have his number and had never contacted him “at all”. “When you don’t have the number registered, you see the photo on WhatsApp, even if you don’t have the contact, and I see the photo of the president and I’m afraid,” he remembers.
“I mean, oysters, what’s going on? “I answer the call and I say, tell me, president, and he says, man, Jordi, nothing, it’s just that your name came up, and I say, well, I’ll call Jordi, and he says, how are you?” .
According to the mayor, during the call he explained to Mazón that it was not raining in Cullera that day, but in the upper reaches of the Júcar, and told him that they were aware of the risk of overflow of the river. He also told him, as he stated, that “in principle” they were “calm” because the flow of the Júcar was beginning to decrease in Algemesí.
At this point, the first mayor recalled the words that Mazón then said to him: “Good, good, good, yes, good. Well, nothing, you save my number, this is my personal number, you save it, and whatever you need, you call me.” “End of conversation. That’s the conversation”, a- he pointed out. A little more than a few minutes, as elDiario.es learned.
In the meantime, he emphasized that at that time he was considering whether or not to hold the municipal plenary session of Cullera at 7 p.m., since he had called a security meeting at 9 p.m. “I had to make decisions about whether or not to extend the suspension of schools and the measures we had adopted previously,” he explained.
“That’s why I go to the plenary session with peace of mind. In fact, during the plenary session, which is recorded and public, I say it: the ‘president’ of the Generalitat called me and told me that in principle all the worst had happened,” he said. he declared These statements can be compared to the video of the plenary session published on the Cullera City Hall website.
Then, when the mobile alert was sent to the population after 8 p.m., the mayor explained that the plenary session had been suspended “automatically” and that it was known that the flow of the Júcar was increasing again: “We started to act by evacuating and taking measures.”
“And until 9:20 p.m., when we received the second beep from the cell phone, we did not receive any communication from the Generalitat indicating that there was a risk of the Júcar river overflowing,” he said. he declared.
Asked why Mazón called, the mayor said he still doesn’t know and doesn’t understand it yet. “That’s why I didn’t make it public before: so as not to add more fuel to the fire, because I understand that a more typical conversation over coffee, drinks and a cigar is not what neither the victims nor the people who suffered this disaster deserve.”
Demands that he not use it as an “alibi”
He thus called “to be in the reconstruction, to help the victims and for everyone to assume their responsibility”. “I can know, minute by minute, day and hour, where I was and what I was doing. “The one who doesn’t seem to be able to explain it is Mr. Mazón,” he said, demanding not to “use him as an alibi.”
Regarding the tone used during the call, the mayor stressed that he does not have “much contact” with Mazón and that he does not know him, but he can “say that it was not about of a state of emergency”.
As for why the “president” referred to this call, he argued that “this is a person who is desperate and cornered by his own lies.” “I don’t know why he uses it, I don’t know what it means, because in the end the call is also made via WhatsApp. Was there no mobile coverage where I was and that’s why he called me on WhatsApp? I still don’t know,” he added.
And he wondered “which other mayors he had called” and whether he had contacted Paiporta, “ground zero of the catastrophe”, or with other first mayors of the Ribera Baja region. “Those I spoke to, he didn’t call anyone else,” he stressed, insisting that he “honestly” does not understand why this call took place.
