“The truth, in my opinion, is also damaged.” Carlos Mazón is like one of those kamikaze drivers who drives in the wrong direction and believes that those who break the code are the ones who hit him. The president of the Generalitat Valenciana went so far as to affirm this Friday that the decision to send the massive alert on October 29 at 8:11 p.m., when hundreds of citizens were already stuck, was “correct”. And Mazón, in his first appearance before the Valencian courts after the catastrophic DANA, trusted his own lies. The president repeated at the parliamentary headquarters the refrain of lies and omissions that he has been making since the “unprecedented hydrological revolution”, according to the expression repeated ad nauseam, which devastated the regions of Horta Sud and Utiel -Requena, leaving more than 200 dead.
The head of the Consell blamed everyone (even the “prevention system”) except himself in the singular. Mazón attacked at length the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar (despite the 62 notices that the CHJ sent to the Generalitat while the president extended his famous lunch on the day of the debates) and against some of the emergency protocols that he had adopted there barely two years old. he said they were “definitely clear.”
In one of the responses, already in the afternoon, he assured: “I do not hide the errors of the Generalitat, I recognize them and take responsibility for them and I apologize for them.” And full stop. It was the closest thing to taking responsibility, not even their own, but regional ones. Of course, the half-hypothesis was pronounced after several hours of attack against the central government and, particularly, against the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar.
The president carried a huge stack of papers with his speech. Thus, he detailed an interesting timeline, with more than obvious lies, which made a huge triple jump in the five hours since he left the Palau de la Generalitat late in the morning to go eat with a journalist until until it is operational. Again.
Long ellipses allowed him to avoid the detail of a key time slot in the response to the disaster: “I kept my agenda fully aware of the state of the situation and knowing that the Minister of Justice and Interior, with his team, had already visited some of the areas affected by the flooding of the [río] Magro and that he was in contact with the Government Delegation.
“However,” he added, “when I was warned that the situation at the Forata dam was getting worse, I went to the Emergency Coordination Center where Cecopi was established and working. [Centro de Coordinación Operativa Integrado]”.
The president gave only one update on his late trip: “The trip was not easy. Bad weather, as is normal in these situations, generated heavy traffic and lengthened the journey until my arrival. [al Centro de Coordinación de Emergencias de] “The Eliana with Cecopi was working at full capacity and where there was no need for anyone to inform me and I did not delay, not even for a second, the tasks that were in progress.”
The late sending of the mass alert to mobile phones – at 8:11 p.m. – was a “good decision” in “emergency management”, he said without breaking a sweat. Moreover, in the parallel reality in which Mazón operates, such a decision (or negligence, according to the opposition) was an “example that the coordination of administrations worked.” This is a system (Es-Alert) whose delivery corresponds to the autonomous community (and not to “administrations” in general). In fact, the day after the tragedy, two other alerts were sent, without major difficulties.
Like in the 11M or in the Valencia metro
His intervention is reminiscent of the lies that Eduardo Zaplana (his political mentor sentenced to more than a decade in prison for corruption) uttered in response to the 11M attack, when he was spokesperson for the PP in the Congress of Deputies. Or the management of the Valencia metro accident in 2006. The socialist commissioner José Muñoz told him: “We still remember the metro accident, his whole theory is based on the fact that it was of an inevitable tragedy. » For his part, with the fan connected to maximum power, the popular spokesperson, Juan Francisco Pérez Llorca, came to take action against “far-left environmental fundamentalism”.
The head of the Consell did not even allude, in his initial two and a half hour speech, nor in his subsequent responses, to the “riuà” of Valencia in 1957, which in the collective memory of the city refers to a disaster of an unknown number of missing people and a management of the Franco authorities which outraged even the indigenous right. In Valencia there are still shops and bars that have a brand with the legend “this is where the riuà arrived”. On the contrary, Carlos Mazón cited as an example of the “only precedent” for the DANA of 2024 the flood that devastated Terrassa, Rubí and Sabadell in 1962, with “400 deaths”.
The speech that had been prepared for him contained statements like this: “As you know, the first response in an emergency, because it cannot be otherwise, is the rescue of people and the care of possible victims . » The president thus ignored prevention and prior warning to the population of the approach of a catastrophe. Mazón hid behind the fact that the alert was sent when he was informed of the risk of overflowing the Forata dam. The Generalitat Valenciana wanted to avoid an “apocalyptic risk” by sending the alert, according to Mazón. Below this risk threshold, two regions were completely devastated.
Carlos Mazón’s parliamentary package also included striking concepts such as the often-mentioned “renaissance” or “hydrological revolution.” “We learned from what did not work well during the first hours and we corrected it,” declared the president, who specified in passing that the learning affected “politicians and technicians”. The unexpected reference to technicians was a warning to sailors in general.
In the response, he sometimes reproduced the arguments prepared for the PP’s accusations (published by elDiario.es on November 7), especially in his allusions to the Valencian Emergency Unit (UVE). Overall, there was little originality in terms of factual reporting.
Carlos Mazón’s team at the presidency (regional secretaries José Manuel Cuenca, Cayetano García Ramírez and Santiago Lumbreras) followed, apparently satisfied, the intervention of the head of the Consell. It was the president’s “politburo”, without any experience in disaster management, who accompanied Mazón in the most complicated moments. In the groups of smokers in the garden of the autonomous chamber, PP officials and deputies surrounded and hugged the members of the “politburo”.
Salomé Pradas, one of the main protagonists of the disastrous management, gave the image of an archaeological relic. The Minister of Justice and the Interior remained in her seat like a sort of political “zombie” that no one approached to avoid possible contagion. With a distraught face and dark funeral attire, Pradas was hieratic and almost absent-minded throughout the day. In another seat of Consell members, Nuria Montes kept her hands folded during much of Carlos Mazón’s intervention, as if to avoid picking up her cell phone and tweeting another atrocity.
The general tone of the parliamentary bench’s clothing was somber, typical of mass funerals. The people applauded at the end of their leader’s first speech. However, after the intervention of the next spokesperson, José María Llanos, of Vox, his parliamentary group avoided applauding, a sign of the exceptional nature of the plenary session. Nor did Compromís applaud its administrator, Joan Baldoví. And the PSPV-PSOE did the same after the intervention of José Muñoz.
It was not a day for applauding: each time a speaking session ended, the chamber fell into an unusual silence in a parliamentary forum. However, after Mazón’s last intervention, at the end of the afternoon, the popular group reiterated its applause. Some discreet applause, without the usual enthusiasm under normal conditions.
The president, in his lineage, did not answer any questions from the numerous media deployed to the regional Parliament. And there are not a few outstanding questions and in his speech he also assured that he was not hiding from the media, despite the fact that he only gave interviews to the relevant channels and radio stations and that the only press conference with questions was inevitable because it was a meeting with the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, on November 1. The president justified his opacity of information – linked to the metro accident in 2006 – by the supposed need not to waste “not a single minute” denying “hoaxes”. “It would have been immoral to spend time debunking hoaxes, I didn’t spend a single minute on it,” he added.
A deleted tweet
Although those from the day before DANA are for hoaxes. The Vox spokesperson reminded Mazón of his untimely intervention at 1 p.m. on the tragic Tuesday, October 29, when he assured (in a tweet with the video subsequently deleted) that the storm was already over. José María Llanos explained to him that “just like a fire, we don’t say that it is completely extinguished until three or four days.” “This is from the first year of emergency,” he threw her like a knife.
At this point, the president already didn’t care about anything. The new battle is that of narrative. Carlos Mazón is already in the middle of a reconstruction phase, as he said, thanks to the renovation of the Consell. Its public image and credibility have been severely damaged, as have the areas affected by DANA. His reliability has been roundly questioned even by his former partners at Vox. In Valencia, very large sections of the population trust a street gang more than their “honorable” president of the Generalitat.
Carlos Mazón’s entry and exit from the regional chamber was almost clandestine, with a large police presence. His few appearances in public spaces are not really peaceful. Despite this, his speech was of a renewed level and full of references to reconstruction, “mutual support”, “empathy”, “solidarity” and long chatter about the “rebirth of areas destroyed by DANA.”
Compromís spokesperson Joan Baldoví said dryly: “If you couldn’t get to the emergency center at the right time, how are you going to be able to lead the reconstruction?
