The minister, the blanket and the frustration

There was a minimal intrigue about whether José Luis Ábalos would turn on the sprinklers in his judicial declaration, but the accused opted for quite the opposite and challenged the Civil Guard to find the loot from all the corruption he is accused of. According to him, and as highlighted by "El Periódico" on its front page, the reason he didn't yield any cash between 2018 and 2023 is because a minister "doesn't just pay for things around here." In any case, it's interesting to see what the press that would like to put Sánchez in the dungeon will do with this meager testimony from Ábalos.

L’Abc, for example, headlines "Relief at Moncloa and Ferraz because Ábalos is not spilling the beans." It is a phrase that assumes there is a pit of waste to be discovered and that, simply, the former minister did not want to bring it to light. No matter how much stench the newspaper suspects, it is still a formulation that undermines the presumption of innocence. El Mundo, for its part, does what is so typical of newspapers tangled in their fictions, which is to release a headline incomprehensible to the average reader: "The Prosecutor General limits the reward for cooperating against corruption." Basically, it says the same as the previous one, but attributes it to a dark maneuver by the Prosecutor's Office, although later in subtitles and in the article this is specified regularly. I suppose what matters is to let the delicate rotten perfume of judicial tampering float in the air. As is known, judges cannot be criticized, but prosecutors can, especially if they allegedly favor the government. Finally, La Razón says that Ábalos "forgot" Pedro Sánchez. One more day, we witness the feast of seeing how interpretation devours information. You can say mass in court, but there will always be someone to attribute to you motivations, spurious strategies, or amnesia.