The DANA: ineptitude and fanaticism

The messages that he/she exchanged On the morning of October 29, 2024, the messages exchanged by Salomé Pradas, then Minister of the Interior of the Valencian Regional Government, along with those of the then-President Carlos Mazón and his Chief of Staff, José Manuel Cuenca, could not be more revealing. Nor more disheartening. In her messages, Pradas explained the emergency situation and the measures that had been taken in detail and repeatedly. She also expressed her support for decreeing a lockdown of the population under the emergency law, a measure that Cuenca blocked with a series of condescending refusals, responding to Pradas's messages as if she were a nuisance or exaggerating. "Yeah, right," "No lockdown," "Get that nonsense out of your head," or "Locking down a province is madness." For the most obtuse right wing, lockdown is a direct synonym of economic lossesAnd they usually resist by clinging to any old argument, the kind you'd hear at the dinner table between in-laws. Mazón's response to Pradas's messages and explanations was even more laconic and pathetic, knowing the tragedy that would unfold a few hours later: "Damn it" was his only comment. He must have been nervous because he had a lunch reservation at El Ventorro. For the same price and in the same tone, he could have added: "I couldn't care less." In any case, it's false that Mazón was unaware—as he has repeated on several occasions, for example, in his appearances before the committees of the Valencian Parliament and the Congress—of the impending danger. On the contrary, he was perfectly aware, but it didn't matter to him.

Pradas herself (who appeared on the program a few days ago) Saved The whining on La Sexta's part, trying to shirk responsibility and place it all on Mazón (it's worth remembering that the former councilor is also under investigation in the case of Judge Nuria Ruiz Torralba), significantly contributed to making matters worse a few hours later, due to the fanaticism of the Valencian right. She did so alongside Vicent Mompó, president of the Valencia Provincial Council: both of them asked several changes to the alert text which had to be sent to mobile phones so that it would be "in Valencian" and not "in Catalan". The way they did this was to introduce a dialectalism into the ES-Alert text (the form this by this), a Castilianism (guy instead of Catalan guys) and a serious spelling mistake (Valencia, (Written without an accent). This is the behavior of two fanatics, willing to waste time that cost lives to comply with a criterion that, moreover, is false. Besides being false, it's outdated. And besides being false and outdated, it's ridiculous and xenophobic. But these people's anti-scientific prejudices against the Catalan language also meant that the alarm wasn't raised until 8:11 p.m., when many of the 230 people who were victims of the downpours had already drowned. It's worse than a scandal: it's the confirmation of the terrible, literally lethal, consequences of being governed by inept, indecent, and fanatical individuals.