«The mafia is a mountain of shit»
Peppino Impastato
The outbreak of the Montoro case brings together all the immutable ingredients of the traditional nativity scene, stripping away every strand of corruption that is more systemic than systematic, and shaking the political-emotional counter to the provisional benefit of Vox. We look in the rearview mirror, remember where we come from, and wonder what the hell has never changed. Memory corner, regarding the judicial state of affairs, we must remember that three former ministers were convicted and imprisoned under the Aznar regime—Rodrigo Rato, Eduardo Zaplana, Jaume Matas—and that others were also investigated. From the Felipe administration, with a firm judicial signature, the following were convicted, among others: a Minister of the Interior, the party's finance coordinator, several bankers, the brother of Vice President Alfonso Guerra, and mandates to clean up the CESID—and an entire Minister of Defense, Nar, resigned from the Royal Household. From Mariano Rajoy's governments, Montoro is now floating, but Fernández Díaz awaits trial, where he is facing a 15-year prison sentence for patriot While his Minister of Health was already convicted, for profit, in the Gürtel case. In the preliminary indictment phase alone, three people have already left Sánchez's Peugeot—two of whom were party organizational secretaries—and now only one remains at the wheel, named Pedro. That's how things stand. As if we forget every day that the flagship of the series is called Juan Carlos I and still lives like a king in Abu Dhabi.
And the Montoro affair has only just begun, when the moniker "Economic Team" is too polysemous. And all the elements of the one who, posing as a supposed lobbyist, is already accused of the alleged commission of seven serious crimes. There are other major details—high-flying companies like the PP, reworked to promote judicial impunity, or a patriotic police force, also a prosecutor, with a crude and botched dual use: long-standing enemies and internal adversaries within the PP itself; and other nuances that seem minor but are not: a peripheral judge—far from the central judicial district—who for seven years was an anti-corruption expert who warned against it and who they refused to listen to at the time; a journalist like Carlos Alsina, now recalling how the minister spent his money—"who understood power as a way to reward favors, benefit those close to him, and punish those who didn't agree with him, I don't need a judge to tell me that," and "El Chico"—which is how much more expensive and how much more necessary it is to do it—tried to put his nose into the fraud. The rest, from the Montoro archives. It was declared null and void by the Constitutional Court with a highly insulting judicial annulment, because it never had any real effect and revived how he applied that double-edged classist fiscal sadism, with the chainsaw of the worst antisocial cuts and the largest tax increases for the middle and working classes, while bailing out the middle and working classes; up to 85%, without knowing for sure how much they've stolen from us.
Perhaps that's why the unexpected Montoro case will once again stir up all the issues and everything that hasn't been done and is now taking its toll and causing a fracture. The concurrent tragedy is that there's nothing new under a leaden sky. If we go back just a decade, the analysis at the time revealed five intertwined corrupting dynamics that left us with a panorama somewhere between the He doesn't know by Andrea Camilieri, the Crematorium by Rafa Chirbes and the Sicily without deaths Guillermo Frontera's. Five black holes through which almost everything leaks, robbing us of our present and future: the irregular financing of political parties, whose wave of urban speculation we are still suffering the dire consequences of, the private procurement of public works, the vast industry of tax fraud, and the global economy of crime. Between the Gürtel ruling and eight gunshots on Consell de Cent Street last week, let's put it this way, everything has happened and we've seen all kinds of things. As if it were yesterday, too. Because the phrase "under collusive capitalism, corruption is a permanent structural temptation" was uttered in July 2016 in the Catalan Parliament. It was expressed by prosecutor Sánchez Ulled, then the anti-corruption delegate in Barcelona, at the Commission for the Study of Measures to Combat Corruption for Democratic Regeneration. That commission was chaired by former MP Benet Salellas. The prosecutor began his speech by stating: "I understand that inviting me to this committee is the first confirmation of a failure; the failure of institutions to prevent and, at the same time, combat political corruption." As if it were yesterday, then. Eight seasons later.
Whatever the color, one thing never changes. Whether or not corruption gives us a summer respite will depend on the next leaked report from the UCO (University of Cordoba). A paradoxical anecdote: during the most murky years of the Basque conflict—where Koldo Garcia's dark career began—one of Europe's finest criminal lawyers argued during a trial that the highest levels of the Civil Guard always operated as "a state within a state." At the end of the trial, in the impossible squadrons of the palace corridors, a worthy senior officer present in the courtroom approached him and refuted his statement: "You're wrong; we're not a state within a state. We are the state." And that's it. In the nineteenth century, even as if it were yesterday, it would seem as if the political alternation in the Kingdom of Spain was decided more by corruption – González and Rajoy, and Sánchez in the waiting line – than by the vote, in Fèlix Riera's apt reflection on the political rotation in the nineteenth century, still mediated by scandal. In reality, we are on the wheel, in déjà vu and in eternal return, which should confront the dunghill of corruption with its quintessential antonym: political democracy and the ethics of common decency. After all, there's an old aphorism that hammers home the point that capitalism believes it has learned from the mafia everything the mafia believed it had learned from capitalism. This is where we still stand, at this crossroads. As if today were still yesterday.
