You don’t need to have read much Machiavelli to understand how information and power end up being linked. More than seventeen years of parliamentary work have given me interesting field work in this regard. If we add to this the relationship between money and … power, the picture takes on new nuances. The debates on the Expo offered more than one opportunity to verify this, especially if the parliamentary task is conceived as a study and analysis and not as a simple rhetorical exercise.
Hence the importance of the prerogatives of the popular representative: being able to ask the Executive for any information deemed necessary to be able to submit this function to parliamentary control. Perhaps regularly, for example, I received from Expo officials a report on existing forecasts on the role of firefighters in the event of possible accidents.
By transforming the sentence into a passive one, we easily understand the lack of enthusiasm produced by those who enjoy power when newspapers circulate too much. The choice between opacity and transparency will be clear. Mr. Pellón was not inclined to provide paper, especially if it could end up in certain media, for purposes other than propaganda. He also did it as if it were a technical requirement; unscrupulous, not considering himself a politician.
My request was, like so many others, ignored. What is curious is the argument for opacity. I was obliged – concerning other papers – to remind him that he had refused them to me under the pretext that he had sent them to the Court of Auditors: “He told me the same thing when I asked him for the firefighters’ report on the unfortunate fire at the Pavillon des Découvertes, which later everyone knows what it was due to: because a man was with a blowtorch in an already closed building, surrounded by inflammable materials without there being any fire extinguisher nearby, as required by legal regulations: you know that This is what happened, and at this point I still don’t have the report from the fire department, because apparently you sent it to the judge “Apparently you only have one report and when you send it to someone you end up without one.”
In the background, there was the question of whether or not a parliamentarian should be recognized as an authority. A court doesn’t mess around and – being an authority – can sanction you. For a parliamentarian, after decades of dictatorship, there are those who do not recognize any authority; As he has nothing to do, he likes to complicate your life by asking you for papers.
What I didn’t expect was that the same thing would happen to my university colleague, then invested with authority. In an oral question asked before the Plenary, I questioned Virgilio Zapatero on “what reasons justify the Minister hiding from this Chamber data on the deficiencies in the security measures of the Discovery Pavilion burned at Expo 92”.
It seemed to me that it is still “curious that a report which existed 20 days earlier, which highlighted gaps which could all explain the fire, did not reach your possession, and that Mr. Pellón himself was not aware of it, as you would like to believe”. “But you hear, through this report – which you say you sent to the judge and not to parliamentarians – that it is the judges who judge the possible incompetence of a minister, and that already goes beyond dark brown. It seems that we have a government so convinced of its guilt that it understands that control of its management does not lie with Parliament, but with the courts. Let’s be serious, Minister, although the truth is that there is a bit of logic in your attitude, because – as they say in Seville – yours is very criminal and, therefore, I understand that you sent this report to the judge. But what I should have done was to send it here, to the House, so that we, the deputies, could appreciate it politically as well as by public opinion; and if a citizen understands that this evaluation comes from a custody court, he will go to the custody court and a judge will ask you for the report; otherwise, we use the judiciary as an alibi to avoid our political responsibilities.
“You act as a complacent chaperone while Mr. Pellón does what he wants, not only with legal rules but also with the most basic requirements of common sense.”
The answer repeated this twice; ignoring that any paper is – at this stage – likely to be copied and considering the authority of the judge as having priority over that of the parliamentarian. It is clear that the diversion of politics was not yet fashionable. This is why I was told: “I do not need to wait until the SS knows or does not know a document so that they can evaluate it and you can decide whether or not to send it to a judge. “It is my first obligation, as a member of the Government, when I understand that a document may be relevant to the objects of an open judicial investigation, to communicate it to the judge.
The worst thing in this matter is that this postponed auctoritas is not sufficiently valued in the Cortes Generales themselves. On at least six occasions, I have been forced, during this legislature, to request the protection of the presidency. My written questions addressed to the Government were not only not completed within the legally established deadline, but the obligatory request for an extension was not even requested. The Presidency probably preferred that it was the MP himself who, with his repeated requests for protection, actualized his interest in the issue. Reviewing my protests could help me highlight the scale of the anomaly while also highlighting the issues that gave rise to them.
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