From the Canary Islands to Christian Lawyers

The president of the Canary Islands government, Fernando Clavijo, of Coalición Canaria, complains that the Minister of Health, Mónica García, has "ridiculed" him and "taken him to the meme" for his theory about swimming rats that could escape from the ship MV Hondius and spread throughout the Canary Islands, biting the suffering citizens at will, an idea he maintained in a screenshot taken from an AI. Perhaps Clavijo doesn't realize it, but he himself has made a fool of himself and offered himself as the protagonist of memes, by providing the synopsis of a B-movie to an extremely delicate health operation with a strong international impact. Clavijo's laughable —but not funny— overacting could not prevent Pedro Sánchez from once again receiving applause from the international community: the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen; the UN's António Guterres, and also the President of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom, have praised the management of the situation by the Spanish executive. The national spokesperson for Vox, José Antonio Fúster, commented: “How scary, when the WHO praises you, it must be a bad thing.” Because, as we know, the WHO is one of the favorite targets of the lies and conspiracy theories of the global far-right. Perhaps for all these reasons, Clavijo has announced the possibility of taking the Spanish government to court for its handling of the hantavirus (in fact, the arrival of the ship has already been the subject of judicial rulings: on Friday, the National Court rejected an urgent request to halt the disembarkation, and the next day, the Court of First Instance of Madrid confirmed the imposition of a quarantine on the cruise passengers). When the fear mechanism fails them (the theory of the invasion of amphibious rats, however much fun it may have generated, was nothing more than an attempt to sow fear among the population), they always have the option of taking matters, whatever they may be, to court. They don't always win (often they do), but at least they have managed to bog down the discussion.Experts at spreading falsehoods and judicializing, the ultra entity Abogados Cristianos has raised a outcry because they want to prevent Pope Leo XIV, during his visit to Barcelona in a month, from visiting the Lluís Companys stadium because, they allege, under Companys' mandate "more than eight thousand people were murdered". They refer to the persecutions of religious by the FAI during the Civil War, but they omit precisely this: that there was a Civil War caused by a military and fascist uprising, which had the support of the Church. They propose that, instead of the Lluís Companys stadium, the pontiff go to the Valley of the Fallen, as they still call it. It seems that under Franco's mandate no one died, starting with the 33,833 people (12,000 of whom were unidentified) that the dictator had buried in his tomb in Cuelgamuros: the largest mass grave in a fascist Spain to which some want to return at all costs.