El Ventorro: all the contradictions of a meal that has exposed Mazón

Barcelona"Please, don't drag me into this mess." This is what Maribel Vilaplana asked Carlos Mazón when she arrived home after the controversial lunch on the day of the DANA storm and realized the severity of the floods, which would ultimately claim 229 lives. The fact is that the conflicting accounts given by both the Valencian president and the journalist have transformed the nearly four-hour lunch at El Ventorro into the most compelling evidence of the negligent management by the head of the Valencian government on October 29th of last year. And this has led Vilaplana—who suffered an anxiety attack on Saturday that required her to be hospitalized for a few hours—to testify this Monday morning before the judge investigating the handling of the DANA storm.

The journalist's testimony comes after she broke her silence in September with an open letter. will change the end time of lunchShe said they finished between 6:30 and 6:45 p.m., an hour later than she had claimed ten months earlier. Then, through a source authorized by the journalist, Vilaplana asserted that the meeting with the president in a private room of the restaurant had taken place between 3:00 and 5:45 p.m. The Generalitat (Valencian regional government) also initially stated that Mazón had arrived at the Generalitat at 6:00 p.m. The Valencia Provincial Court considers that the journalist can offer information "of interest to the investigation," which "only she, the president of the Generalitat, and their contacts could know." The lies surrounding that lunch have been a constant from the beginning. The Valencian president and his team avoided saying with whom he had lunch on October 29, but after a few days, Mazón simply stated that it was a "private" lunch. On Thursday, November 7, he changed his story and said it was an unspecified "working lunch." The following day, ten days after the catastrophe, several media outlets revealed thathad eaten with VilaplanaAccording to the Presidency's version of events, the meeting was to offer him the directorship of À Punt. In any case, this "working lunch" was not listed on a blank agenda following the midday meeting with unions and business leaders. In fact, the president of the Valencian employers' association CEV, Salvador Navarro, revealed another contradiction: he explained that he had met with the government at 1:45 p.m., not at 3:00 p.m. as the Generalitat (Valencian government) stated. In the press release announcing the lunch, the Presidency justified the delay in revealing with whom Mazón had lunched, saying that Vilaplana worked "for an audiovisual and communications company" and they did not want to "compromise her employment and professional standing." The journalist works as a spokesperson for Levante CF and does not work for any media outlet.

In that statement, the Presidency asserted that during lunch, "the president received information on the storm's progress from the regional minister, who was already with her Emergency team monitoring and supervising the situation from the command center in Eliana." The list of calls he made that afternoon, provided by Mazón himself, demonstrates that the Valencian president was unaware of what was happening outside the restaurant until 5:37 p.m., when he made his first call of the afternoon, to the regional minister of the Interior, Salomé Pradas. This clearly shows that he was not kept fully informed of events, contrary to what Mazón still maintains. Furthermore, during that call, Pradas warned him that the Forata blockade was in danger, and Mazón still didn't end his lunch conversation.

The call log provided by Pradas to the Catarroja court reveals that Mazón did not answer his calls at key moments in the decision-making process. Of the four calls that went unanswered by Mazón, one was at 4:29 p.m., half an hour before the Cecopio (Emergency Coordination Center) was set to begin, when he was in El Ventorro. Two others were at 7:10 p.m. and 7:36 p.m., when the deployment of the ES-Alert system to the entire province of Valencia was being debated, after the mayor of Paiporta had informed Bernabé that her town was flooding. He did answer his calls later, and it was then—while he was still in El Ventorro—that He informed him of the possibility of sending the ES-AlertUntil now, Mazón has always denied being informed of this possibility during lunch, in order to distance himself from the delayed issuance of the alert. The first call he didn't answer was at 12:52, after the government delegate, Pilar Bernabé, offered the deployment of the Military Emergency Unit (UME) in Utiel in Pradas.

The video that Vilaplana shows him of Utiel

Mazón learned what was happening in Utiel from a video that journalist Maribel Vilaplana allegedly showed him. as the ARA explained a year agoThe journalist received a message from a close acquaintance with a tweet from À Punt in which the mayor of Utiel alerted the public to the critical situation in his municipality, including a video, and urged residents to stay home. She received the message at 5:39 p.m. and, just six minutes later, Mazón called the president of the Valencia Provincial Council, Vicent Mompó, to ask for the mayor of Utiel's phone number. However, Mazón did not end up calling the mayor. Mazón stated that she had spoken with several mayors to address the tragedy, but in the list of afternoon calls provided by Mazón Two weeks ago, there was only one recorded call to a mayor, the mayor of Cullera, at 6:28 p.m., when he was still at El Ventorro. The mayor described the call as farcical, because the president had simply told him to save his phone number, but hadn't informed him of any measures. That Mazón showed no "signs of concern" was also stated by Vilaplana's entourage in their initial communication with the media. Vilaplana, however, is also in the eye of the storm due to the different versions she has given. In the open letter, she implied that Mazón had stayed at the restaurant when she left, but last week it was made public that Mazón had accompanied Vilaplana to the parking lot around 6:45 p.m., when The Spanish government had already recommended sending the mass alertAccording to the head of the 112 emergency services this week, several media outlets also reported last week that, after this lunch, Mazón went home instead of going directly to the Palau de la Generalitat to monitor the emergency situation. However, sources from the President's office deny this and maintain that the Valencian president walked to the Palau after saying goodbye.