The strategy of concealments and lies with which the Government of the Valencian Community has faced DANA and its catastrophic consequences It has its antecedents in Galicia. 22 years ago, the Popular Party of José María Aznar and Manuel Fraga He also tried to camouflage his mistakes in the management of a tragedy, that of the Prestigewith a similar labyrinth of fictions, entanglements and hoaxes.
So, the lies they ended up causing a resounding social uprising which ended up costing the PP, less than three years later, the power in the Xunta that it had held for 16 years. This decline in Galicia began to erode the Aznar Government, which would fall in 2004 after repeating again and again similar communication strategies with the Iraq warthe accident of Yakovlev 64 and the 11M attacks.
On November 13, 2002, the captain of the Prestigea Greek tanker flying the Liberian flag of convenience loaded with more than 77,000 tons of crude oil, noticed a crack in the ship’s hull when it was sailing off the Galician coast and sent a distress signal. Far from offering him refuge in a port or on a sheltered beach, where he could have been surrounded by a few hundred meters of floating barriers to contain the spill and limit its effectsAs the technicians recommended, the Government ordered the captain to continue sailing towards the high seas in the middle of a strong storm.
Six days later, and after traveling up and down the Atlantic coast of the community in an erratic and incomprehensible journey improvised by the authoritieswith the waves cracking the first breach in the ship’s structure until it was completely broken, the Prestige It broke in two and sank 250 kilometers from the coast. By then his burden had already contaminated thousands of kilometers of sandbanks, estuaries and ports. For months, the ship continued to pour fuel from the place where it still rests almost 4,000 meters deep.
Black tide, brown tide
If the DANA has dyed brown entire regions in the Valencian Countryhe Prestige He also painted the entire coast of Galicia black. Except for that difference in color, the photos and chronicles left by both catastrophes are very similar: thousands of people armed with household goods ttrying to make up for the inaction of the administrations with their handswaves of volunteers improvising physical help and moral support for those affected… And also lies, many lies on the political management of the catastrophe, and disguises of supposed work with which to camouflage them.
Since he knew that the floods They had taken hundreds of lives In his community, Mazón has not taken off the red vest with which he seems to want to identify himself, from his work in an office, with those who actively participate in the rescue tasks at the foot of the ravine. In Galicia, some of those responsible for the decision not to have given shelter to the Prestige and having walked recklessly along the coast, they also appeared before the media with katiuskas and a sailor’s suit on the carpet of the Government Delegation in A Coruña, simulating the disguise of those who were really on the beaches. cleaning chapapote.
The same day that the cold drop devastated their community, Mazón remained inexplicably missing for five hours, perhaps the most crucial in making decisions that could have saved dozens, who knows if hundreds of lives. In an attitude that reminds you, Manuel Fragathen president of the Xunta, decided go away for the weekend to Aranjuez to participate in a hunting trip on Friday, November 15, 2002, when the oil spill was already reaching the coast. Aznar’s then Transport Minister also went hunting that same weekend, in his case to the Lérida Pyrenees, Francisco Álvarez Helmets. It took more than a month to visit the affected areas.
When the Prestige shipwrecked there were no social networks, nor streamers neither pseudomedia on the Internet financed by economic and political power to expand hoaxes, lies and lies. But the fake They already existed and were disseminated through conventional media. The day the chapapote arrived at Coído beach, in Muxiaground zero of the catastrophe in Galicia as it may be today Paiporta either Benatuser in Valencia, the then Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Miguel Arias Cañetesaid on public television that thanks to the action of the authorities, an oil spill had been avoided. The Environment, Jaume Mataswas that day in Alicante inaugurating a desalination plant.
black tide
The Government delegate in Galicia, Arsenio Fernandez de Mesawho would eventually become director of the Civil Guard, came to ensure that the fuel would never reach the coast when it had already done so, destroying estuaries, fishing grounds, shellfish beds and polygons for mussel rafts and salmon farms. In Muxía, the residents were astonished to see how a military force from the civil protection corps sent by the Belgian Government arrived at the town asking where and how they wanted to be helped, long before the Spanish Army did. He directed this one Federico TrilloAznar’s Defense Minister, who only mobilized him weeks later. Until then, the only use he could think of for the armed forces was for bomb the Prestige with Harrier aircraft.
When he realized the true magnitude of the environmental disaster he faced, Aznar sent his first vice president to Galicia, Mariano RajoyGalician from Pontevedra and who years later would succeed him as Prime Minister. Together with his former Minister of Health José Manuel Romay BeccaríaRajoy led the PPdeG faction known as “the mortarboards”, attached to the centralist Aznarism of Madrid and opposed to that of “the berets”, of a Galician nature and headed by the Minister of Public Works and Delfín de Fraga, Xosé Cuíña.
Cuíña’s “berets” had begun to question the inability of the Executive to manage the catastrophe and they threatened the PP with a split, but Rajoy stopped that incipient division in its tracks: he launched a political campaign aimed at vary the editorial line criticism from the community’s major newspapers, criminalized the movement Never Again that had brought together the social protest, shifted all the blame to the captain of the tanker and, above all, delved into the lies.
The paradigmatic example of that strategy was the pathetic assessment he made during a press conference about the thousands of tons of fuel that the remains of the Prestige They were still shipping to the coast from the bottom of the ocean. They were only, he assured, “small threads, four in particular, streams that looked like vertical stretching plasticine.” But Rajoy’s campaign was much deeper and effective. He ended up forcing Cuíña’s resignation, after accusations were leaked from the party itself that the councilor’s family companies They had sold cleaning material to the Xunta. Cuíña defended himself by assuring that they had provided it at cost price and with the sole interest of helping, but neither his political career nor the “las berets” faction ever recovered from the blow.
Mazón, Feijóo and Cuíña
The political loneliness that Cuíña, who died in 2007, suffered in those days is also very similar to what he experiences today. Carlos Mazón, from whom everyone turns away today in his partyincluding its leader, given the evidence that their absence, passivity and inaction during the decisive moments of the cold drop contributed to intensifying his dimension, and that his red vest is nothing but the disguise of lies with which he intends to camouflage them.
What is at least paradoxical is that both catastrophes, the DANA and the Prestigethe brown mud tide of Valencia and the black tide of chapapote in Galicia, Muxia and Paiportaseparated by more than 1,000 kilometers of distance and more than two decades of time, are united by lies and by the same protagonist: Alberto Núñez Feijóowho succeeded Cuíña in the Xunta to begin the political career that has led him to sit as president of the PP 22 years later.
#Mazón #DANA #strategy #lies #unmasked #Prestige #Galicia
