Councilor Salomé Pradas (Castelló, 1978) has become entangled in her own labyrinth of lies about the calamitous management of the DANA tragedy on October 29 that has left a trail of death and destruction in the regions of l’Horta Sud and from Utiel-Requena. Pradas entered the first Government of Carlos Mazón as Minister of Environment, Water, Infrastructure and Territory. That first position in the Consell was already “great for him,” says a source from that regional department.
Pradas, a lawyer by profession, has been chaining destinations in the PP uninterruptedly since 2014. She started as a senior official in the Government of Alberto Fabra, continued as a councilor in the Castelló City Council, between 2014 and 2019, spent the next two terms in the Senate and landed in its final destination: the Executive formed in 2023 by Mazón with his Vox partners.
After the departure of the ultras and the remodeling of the Consell, Salomé Pradas was placed at the head of the Department of Justice and Interior. At his inauguration, he thanked Mazón “again” for his trust “to be part of his Government of change in the Valencian Community” and for giving him “a gift as a jurist, being named Minister of Justice.”
In matters of Emergencies and Security, powers that fall under his ministry, Pradas promised to work so that there were “sufficient personnel, the appropriate means and the necessary training.” However, it took three months to fill the vacancy in the general directorate of the Interior to finally appoint the morning of DANA, and at the direction of Mazón, an expert in bullfighting celebrations: the former mayor of the PP Vicente Huet.
The councilor’s response capacity in the face of the emergency is “limited,” says a PP source, who recalls that “she has no management experience.” “It has been seen that it is too big for him,” confirms the same source.
Despite this, Carlos Mazón kept his agenda for the morning of Tuesday, October 29, intact. 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) in l’Eliana. Before Mazón’s arrival, which further delayed the making of key decisions, the entire operation was in charge of Salomé Pradas, in a delegation of functions to make one tremble.
The lying competition between Pradas and Mazón
The Department of Justice and Interior, handed over to Vox in Mazón’s first Executive, focused more on the ‘bous al carrer’, a fishing ground for votes in dispute between the right and the extreme right, than on reinforcing the response to the Emergencies , extremely delicate terrain.
The level of incompetence of Minister Pradas has been of such caliber that Mazón himself has bunkered himself with a small ‘politburo’ of trusted senior officials in the Presidency. Of course, Carlos Mazón and his people have not been able to improve the response to the catastrophe, quite the opposite.
The president and his team have 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 the sources directly involved in the emergency response coordination bodies are “chaos” and “disaster.”
A PP source observed this week: “For me, the mistake was not on Tuesday, that was impossible to control. On Wednesday morning in the Presidency it was already known that the dead exceeded 100, and even so they continued to be blocked.” Although at the beginning “information and decision-making failed,” the same source states that “management failures have come especially later.”
The councilor, also known as ‘Salo’, has lied so much since last October 29 that it is difficult for her to unravel her intricate network of falsehoods, built in the heat of the tragedy to try to avoid her responsibility in a catastrophe of enormous dimensions. In a kind of lying competition with the head of the Consell, both have been systematically unmasked. They have left too many clues.
Salomé Pradas stated this past Thursday in À Punt that she did not know of the existence of the mobile alert system until 8:00 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 the same day: although Mazón’s minister denied that the Government delegate, Pilar Bernabé, offered her the help of the UME on the morning of DANA, RTVE recorded her telling her team. . Two epic ‘busts’ that have had no consequences (not even a public apology, as her partner Nuria Montes did after some unpresentable statements that alluded, 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 in the Valencian PP that dates back to the Metro accident on July 3, 2006, which in the middle of the Pope’s visit to Valencia claimed the lives of 43 people and left 47 injured, with many victims of injuries. ‘Horta Sud, but in the current scenario it has expanded to an unprecedented scale. This time, at least, regional television has not manipulated the information as its predecessor did (Channel 9), at a time that resulted in two general directors sentenced: one to six years and nine months in prison for corruption within the framework of the ‘Gürtel case’ and another for six sexual crimes against three house workers.
Far from a minimum assumption of responsibilities, every time a Mazón councilor or the president himself opens his mouth, whether on radio, television or social networks, the indignation among Valencians increases, which had already been seriously worsening since the same night of Tuesday, October 29, car day, when the automatic alert reached cell phones extremely late, at 8:12 p.m. The exact, unforgettable time has become a metaphor for tragedy.
The newspaper archive, as is usual in these cases, also compromises the person responsible for 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 that threshold seriousness to ask for the resignation of a councilor, it is easy to deduce the path that Pradas should take by applying its own yardstick).
The unknown Salomé Pradas has become – suddenly and without interruption – a well-known face in Spain, to the horror of the national leadership of the PP. Like Carlos Mazón, Pradas is already hopelessly synonymous with dangerous incompetence and unlimited lies.
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