Now he has none left, and public memory is often short, but for many years, King Juan Carlos enjoyed every possible complicity. More than complicity, allegiance. More than allegiance, submission. Juan Carlos was a head of state who took advantage of his position (obtained from Franco, as he himself explains in his book, without a trace of shame for this reason) to conduct business for his own benefit. But the most relevant thing is that he did this with the acquiescence or willful blindness of everyone: the successive left-wing and right-wing governments, the judiciary, the Tax Agency (which he systematically defrauded), the business associations, the Church (which never saw anything reprehensible, as much as the monarch's scandalous conduct seemed to please the elite), and, of course, the media, which maintained, willingly or by force, a pact of silence on everything related to the Crown.
Juan Carlos's business dealings were illicit because a head of state should not enrich himself in the exercise of his office beyond his corresponding remuneration, nor divert money to purposes in which he has a vested interest: that is why a president of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, is in prison, for example. However, every time the King of Spain closed trade agreements with theocratic dictatorships ruled by sheikhs and oil magnates—agreements in which he acted as a commission agent—politicians, journalists, and various commentators came out with disturbing unanimity to celebrate that Juan Carlos was "Spain's best ambassador(They said it and repeated it with these words). When in 2010, two years before the elephant scandal, the magazine Forbes He estimated that Juan Carlos possessed a fortune of 1.79 billion euros, even though he had no officially known income beyond his salary as head of state; everyone turned a deaf ear. His lavish gifts were public knowledge (such as the yacht given to him by a group of Mallorcan businessmen, christened precisely with the name of...) FortuneAnd the king's friendship with intermediaries and front men was well known. But nobody said anything. It's not surprising: criticizing or mocking the royal family could bring serious problems to anyone who dared to do so. Even today, the rapper Pablo Hasél is in prison, and Valtónyc recently returned from exile in Brussels, where he had been fleeing another prison sentence for the crime of insulting the Crown. Moreover, the Spanish government still hasn't repealed the gag law.
Too many accomplices, too many people. Obviously, Juan Carlos didn't act alone: the powers of the State, starting with the Crown itself and a Constitution that legally protects his position in several articles, shielded him. And many—not just him—benefited from it. The Crown isn't the only thing Franco bequeathed: corruption, understood as the oil that keeps the machine running smoothly, was also part of the legacy.
