"The worst despair of a society / is the doubt of whether living honestly is useless"
Corrado Álvaro
Koldo-Ábalos-Cerdán. And the Civil Guard entering Ferraz 33 years later. It's happened again—the same old story, it should be said. Returning to the past is always regressive, involutive, depressive. And yet the novelty is that there isn't any. And the only surprise isn't that it's happening again, but that it's happening again, immutably, in the same way, without any change and in the most clumsy, botched version—dirty money and the ministry, recordings and envelopes, prostitutes and construction companies. No added sophistication. The septic tank of the trinket-trinket and downstairs. The same old story. But in the 25th century. That is, it happens when we wanted to believe that we had learned something from the previous decade, the ominous decade of corruption's metastasis—1,611 corruption cases in 2014, 305 of which were macro-summonses—that solid firewalls had never been established, and they had never been established again. And no. You see. Holy, we're back to it. The same thing. On the street. Both the crater of the black hole and the dense frustration, impotence, and democratic devastation.
But if everything is shaken, it doesn't matter, either, because the triple fault of the political earthquake that will shake everything is too much of a systemic failure. Hat-trickThe first, of a party-based party. The second, related to the entire institutional architecture of the State. The third, in the shadow of the tricorneal front. Inside the PSOE, it's hard to believe that for seven years, and with two organizational secretaries handpicked by Pedro Sánchez, no internal mechanism of the enormous apparatus that is the PSOE detected anything, just as it's hard to believe—why?—that until last Monday, Ábalos was still a party member. In the same analogy, it's hard to digest that no institutional body—for prevention, control, oversight, or the fight against corruption—had sniffed out anything in a decade. And finally, it's now completely impossible to believe that the Civil Guard, in ten years and against the backdrop of the monitored Basque conflict, where even the flight of flies was monitored, was not accountable for the endless criminal spree until now. It doesn't fit anywhere. Above all because the trajectory of idiots like Koldo's – they play General Galindo, who grew up in the shadow of the fight against ETA, pardoned by the PP, decorated in 2018 by the Civil Guard, and promoted to Renfe – is historic, unparalleled, and filthy. As a cherry on top, let the words of the former head of the UCO, now paradoxically relocated to Acciona, serve as an extensive metaphor. That Colonel Sánchez Corbí, from the meritorious body that knows everything, convicted of torture and pardoned by Aznar, who, in the wake of October 1st, boasted that they would go after the separatists one by one and door to door.
From this starry present, the rearview mirror of the past is also crumbling.You don't know who I am" and "What about mine?These are two phrases that also float, in form and substance, in the conversations we now know. And yet we've only been told the book's cover and read only fragments of the prologue. What a summer awaits us, when no one knows how long the book will be, what the next chapter of a bottomless pit will be, or how the drama will end. follow the moneyIt's unclear whether we're talking—hardly—just about three alpha-male scoundrels, a parallel black box, or irregular financing. Nobody knows. And this uncertainty is shaking all the party headquarters—except one, Vox, which is rubbing its hands together. The other, not innocuous and paradoxical fact is who's behind the five consecutive complaints besieging the Moncloa Palace: Ayuso's boyfriend, the PP, Manos Limpias, and Hazte Oír, among others. In fact, when it became clear that Díaz Ayuso's brother had been a mask broker in the midst of the pandemic, the Madrid PP filed the original complaint against Ábalos's ministry for the same reason: for profiting from the pandemic. This is the whole story.
Horror memory, antidote memory: those less young will remember that years after the fall of Felipe González, certain media figures acknowledged the dense conspiracy to drive the PSOE from power, mired in corruption and state terrorism, and facilitate Aznar's arrival. In a 1998 interview, Luis María Ansón acknowledged that "the stability of the state had been ruined." However, excuses and original motive aside, the GAL were as real as today's corruption scheme is true. That Santos Cerdán was the pivot and bridge, the architect and engineer, of the so-called "legislative majority" is such an obvious fact that it reinforces the brutal logic that shows that the builder of that majority is its dynamite. Through his own actions, not through others. But there is more memory to avoid failing—or faltering—in the analysis. Between 1987 and 2007, 90% of anonymous private donations to political parties, before they were banned, went to the coffers of CiU, PNV, and PP. CDC (22.85 million) and UDC (19.74 million) topped the list, with 43 million, 40% of the total. PNV received 25 million, like the PP, and the PSOE 5.3 million. Needless to say, the Filesa, Palau, Gürtel, and Tourism cases all saw the PSOE, CDC, PP, and Unió—including the organization secretary—convicted of the same charges. In the Filesa case, as in the Turismo and Pallerols cases, they were ultimately pardoned.We've all passed the plate", "That's what I'm saying," said Enrique Lacalle of the Catalan People's Party (PP) in 1997, laconically, when he had to admit the 20 million euros he had received from the corrupt businessman and corruptor Javier de la Rosa to finance the party. It's a long-standing thing: those who believe that money does everything end up doing everything for money, Voltaire hammered home.
In such a sweltering reality, in a present so far past, the Spanish mirror shouldn't hide the Catalan echoes either. Another organizing secretary, in this case from the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), was convicted of corruption and now holds an official office, with a very high salary, in the Barcelona Provincial Council. The top officials in charge of public works in Catalonia, Joan Lluís Quer and Josep Antoni Rosell, who headed Infraestructures.cat, are still facing eight and nine years in prison for organized crime—for the same reason, their honors, in cahoots with construction companies. And the CDC 3% case is dragging on in the National Court—as always, too—amidst which 30 defendants, party managers, and construction company executives will be brought to trial. Therefore, from everything written these past few days and in a past so far past, I am left with the usual lucidity of Santiago Alba Rico, which left me stunned in one fell swoop with its untamed truth. On Monday, I wrote, with fierce certainty, that it was highly likely that the differences between the usual trickster PSOE and Sánchez's supposedly regenerative PSOE were minimal and that, in the end, there was only one: that the latter, at least, served us well in combating fascism. Alba Rico maintains, with brutal harshness, that the Santos Cerdán case has shattered, like a savage snap, that difference. From the pieces will emerge a gift on a silver platter for the ultra parade that may be about to fall. Although there will always be a red-hot iron to hold on to: either we insist on building common democratic institutions, or the only ones who will be comfortable with the institutions will be the far right. Because they will have assaulted them all and from there, in the name of the fight against the mafia, they will reestablish the oldest of omertàs. and the oldest of the lootings.
