A massive demonstration toured the streets of the center of Valencia yesterday with one man in the target: Carlos Mazón, president of the Valencian Community, of the PP. The protesters, 130,000 according to the Government delegation, demanded the resignation that on Tuesday, October 29, flooded several Valencian towns, destroyed thousands of homes and businesses and took the lives of at least 214 people. Among the slogans this banner read: “We stained with mud, you stained with blood.” The phrase referred to the delay of the Generalitat Valenciana in sending the massive alert to mobile phones that warned of the impressive flood that flooded the entire area, a warning that came when many of those affected already had water above their waists.
Some of those gathered brought together all these criticisms in two sentences: “The one who warns is not Mazón” and “Mazón, coward, at eight it was already late.”
In the march, called by more than 40 associations and civic groups in Valencia – and which had other replicas in towns such as Alicante and Elche, and also in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol – there were also references to the incompetence of politicians in general. , criticism of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and mentions of Alfafar cleaning the streets and houses of mud. Many of these volunteers, coming from all over Spain, attended the march carrying the brooms they use to bail out mud and which have become a symbol of the population’s fight against the destructive effects of dana. There were cries of “murderers,” “murderers” directed at the politicians.
But the objective of the demonstration was, mainly, one: for Mazón to resign. In the Plaza del Ayuntamiento one heard chanting this: “The people dying, Mazón eating.” The phrase alluded to the fact that the president of the Community, on Tuesday the 29th, while several weather alerts had already been triggered, went to have lunch at a well-known restaurant in Valencia and was there until six in the afternoon with a journalist. After that meal he joined the Cecopi (Emergency Coordination Center), which had been meeting since 5:00 p.m. Hence, many of those gathered accused Mazón of negligence and demanded not only his resignation but also his imprisonment. Some of the banners simply said, “Mazón, to prison.”
Román Ribelles, 53 years old, who works as a teacher at a high school near the flooded area and who has colleagues and students who have been affected by the cold drop, maintains that there is “a political tradition like that of minors, because with the “The issue of the alert is very difficult not to think that we are in the hands of useless people.” And he added: “Beyond ideologies, it has been obvious that it has been one negligence after another. The turning point was the visit of the King. Spain, and Madrid above all, then became aware of the abandonment.” Ribelles was alluding to the visit of the monarch and the queen, who together with Pedro Sánchez and Carlos Mazón tried to tour Paiporta on November 3, one of the most punished towns, and were rebuked by numerous neighbors who felt abandoned by the authorities. Since then Mazón has not set foot in the flooded cities again. This was also echoed by the shouts of the protesters: “Mazón, resign, come out of hiding.”
In the march there were families from Valencia, young people stained with mud who had just cleaned the streets of Sedaví, Aldaia or Benetússer, but also affected people who have left their houses empty of furniture and belongings after being taken over by the water, and They went to Valencia to protest. This is the case of Nerea Reis, from Alfafar: “My mother, my sister and I have been left homeless. The water reached 1.90 meters high and when they warned us we were already up to our knees. We had to get on the roof and with sheets, like ropes, jump to the neighbor’s house. They didn’t warn us, they left us alone, abandoned, and the firefighters didn’t come until the fifth day. The neighbors were the only ones who brought us food.”
Pressure on Mazón
The march, one of the most massive in Valencia in decades, increases pressure on the Valencian president. This, for now, has not been taken for granted. The same afternoon that the protest was taking place, he posted a comment on his X account about the improvement of the treatment plants affected by the flood. He also defended himself against criticism for his long lunch on Tuesday, while the flood was becoming evident, stating that the real change occurred at “seven in the afternoon,” a time that coincides with the moment he joined Cecopi. and when his Government received information from the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation warning about the rise in waters.
In reality, at three in the afternoon the situation in the Valencian community was approaching collapse, with the Aemet rain alert at red level, multiple emergency calls, floods in some municipalities and even a missing person. And none of this subsided throughout the afternoon. The Júcar Hydrographic Confederation itself had sent a notice hours before the seven in the afternoon warning that the Forata reservoir had begun to flow and that flows greater than 1,000 cubic meters per second were expected in the Magro River, although The last climb in the Poyo ravine, the most lethal, was not reported until 6:43 p.m.
With all that pressure cooker, . On Friday, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, met by videoconference with all the popular regional presidents and the event marked the party’s first collective support for the Valencian president. In the PP, however, some already assume that their future is doomed, although not in the short term. Also in the pillory is the Minister of the Interior, Salomé Pradas, who said in an interview on Thursday that she did not know that a massive alarm system existed to notify the population through cell phones. The one that was sent from Cecopi that day, a few minutes after 8:00 p.m., reached the residents of the affected areas when many were already escaping the waterspout or struggling to get out of their cars in the middle of the flood. In any case, Pradas serves as a fuse for Mazón. “If the counselor falls, he is next,” say party sources. “If it is admitted that there have been errors, he would also be responsible,” they add.
In the manifesto, the organizers criticized that Mazón sent the alert after eight in the afternoon “so as not to compromise the interests of businessmen and the profit of capital, putting the lives of thousands of workers at risk.” There were also reproaches against the central government: “There was a lack of agility and coordination between the regional and state administrations,” said the convening organizations.
In the generally peaceful march, there were some isolated incidents and at the end, a police charge. At City Hall some protesters threw flares and the police responded with shoves and blows. Cries were heard of “you have lit the fuse in the land of gunpowder” or “Where were you on the first day?” When the march reached the Generalitat palace, some of the participants approached the main door and filled it with blobs of mud, garbage, cardboard, dirty brooms, and white overalls used by volunteers when cleaning flooded cities. and posters with Mazón’s face upside down. They also stamped their hands with red paint on the walls and, on one side, they wrote “Mazón murderer” and left a sign that read: “Incompetence has its consequences.”
