Municipal councilor Salomé Pradas (Castelló, 1978) got caught in her own labyrinth of lies about the calamitous management of the DANA tragedy of October 29 which left a trail of death and destruction in the Horta Sud regions and Utiel-Requena. . Pradas entered the first government of Carlos Mazón as Minister of Environment, Water, Infrastructure and Territory. This first position at the Consell was already “great for him”, says a source from this regional department.
Pradas, a lawyer by profession, has been traveling to the PP without interruption since 2014. She started as a senior official in the government of Alberto Fabra, continued as a councilor at the Castelló City Hall, between 2014 and 2019, spending the two years following mandates in the Senate and lands at its final destination: the Executive formed in 2023 by Mazón with its Vox partners.
After the departure of the ultras and the overhaul of the Consell, Salomé Pradas was placed at the head of the Ministry of Justice and the Interior. During his inauguration, he thanked Mazón “once again” for his trust “to be part of his government of change in the Valencian Community” and for offering him “a gift as a jurist, by being appointed Minister of Justice” .
In matters of Emergencies and Security, competences which fall under his ministry, Pradas promised to work so that there are “sufficient personnel, the appropriate means and the necessary training”. However, it took three months to fill the vacant position at the General Directorate of the Interior to finally appoint the morning of DANA, and under the leadership of Mazón, an expert in bullfighting celebrations: the former mayor of the PP Vicente Huet.
The councilor’s capacity to respond to the emergency is “limited”, says a PP source, who recalls that “she has no management experience”. “We saw that it was too big for him,” confirms the same source.
Despite this, Carlos Mazón kept his agenda intact for the morning of Tuesday, October 29. Then he attended a dinner to conspire to take control of À Punt, the Valencian regional television station. And only around 7:30 p.m., the president decided to go to the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi) of Eliana. Before the arrival of Mazón, who further delayed the making of key decisions, the entire operation was entrusted to Salomé Pradas, in a delegation of functions that would make one tremble.
The false competition between Pradas and Mazón
The Ministry of Justice and the Interior, entrusted to Vox during Mazón’s first executive, focused more on the “bous al carrer”, a fishing ground for disputed votes between the right and the far right, as well as strengthening the emergency response. extremely delicate terrain.
The level of incompetence of Minister Pradas was of such magnitude that Mazón himself retreated into a small “political office” composed of trusted senior officials within the presidency. Of course, Carlos Mazón and his men did not succeed in improving the response to the disaster, quite the contrary.
The president and his team kept Cecopi paralyzed for eight hours in the midst of a humanitarian crisis in the metropolitan area of Spain’s third capital. The most repeated words among sources directly involved in emergency response coordination bodies are “chaos” and “catastrophe.”
A PP source observed this week: “For me, the mistake did not happen on Tuesday, it was impossible to control. On Wednesday morning, at the presidency, we already knew that the number of deaths exceeded 100, and despite everything, they continued to be blocked. Even if at the beginning “information and decision-making failed”, the same source affirms that “management failures occurred especially later”.
The councilor, also known as “Salo”, has lied so much since October 29 that it is difficult for him to untangle his complex network of lies, built in the heat of the tragedy to try to escape his responsibility in a disaster of enormous consequences. dimensions. In a sort of lying competition with the head of the Consell, both were systematically unmasked. They left too many clues.
Salomé Pradas told À Punt last Thursday that she only became aware of the existence of the mobile alert system at 8 p.m. on the Tuesday afternoon of the floods; Then an audio published by Cadena Ser denied this version.
To add insult to injury, Pradas was denied again on the same day: although Minister de Mazón denied that the government delegate, Pilar Bernabé, had offered him help from the UME in the morning of DANA, RTVE recorded her telling her team. Two epic “busts” which had no consequences (not even a public apology, as his companion Nuria Montes did after unpresentable statements alluding, without any kind of humanity, to the relatives of those who died in the tragedy ).
Pradas, synonymous with incompetence
This is a sort of custom of the Valencian PP that dates back to the metro accident of July 3, 2006, which, in the middle of the Pope’s visit to Valencia, cost the lives of 43 people and left 47 injured, including many injured. ‘Horta Sud, but in the current scenario, it has expanded on an unprecedented scale. This time, at least, regional television did not manipulate the information as its predecessor (Channel 9) had done, when two general directors were sentenced: one to six years and nine months in prison for corruption in the context of the ‘Gürtel Affair’ and another for six sexual crimes against three domestic workers.
Far from taking minimal responsibility, every time an advisor to Mazón or the president himself opens his mouth, whether on radio, television or social networks, the indignation of Valencians increases, which has already seriously worsened since the same night of Tuesday October. On the 29th, car day, when the automatic alert arrived extremely late on cell phones, at 8:12 p.m. The precise and unforgettable moment became a metaphor for tragedy.
The newspaper archives, as usual in these cases, also compromise the head of Justice and Emergencies: three years ago she requested the resignation of the head of Agriculture of the Government of the Pacte del Botànic due to the death of a dozen donkeys (with this threshold of seriousness for requesting the resignation of an advisor, it is easy to deduce the path that Pradas should take by applying its own criterion).
The unknown Salomé Pradas became – suddenly and without interruption – a well-known face in Spain, much to the dismay of the PP national leadership. Like Carlos Mazón, Pradas is already hopelessly synonymous with dangerous incompetence and limitless lies.
