The crisis that devoured the slightest hint of Carlos Mazón’s political and ethical credibility was born in a private room in Ventorro, where the first in a chain of lies that ended up revealing the true stature of the former president was conceived. This lunch, unimportant in itself, became a devastating symbol because Mazón decided to hide it, manipulate it and support it with a complacency that today borders on the obscene, if we compare it to the tragedy that simultaneously struck the south of Valencia. Ventorro’s lie opened up all the others: he revealed a way of governing where the image weighs more than the truth and where institutional responsibility evaporates at the slightest discomfort.
The fall of Mazón can be explained by this inaugural deception. He first denied food, then he caught up with it and finally he wanted to justify it with a carousel of contradictions. What could have been resolved with a straightforward explanation has become a scandal because he and Maribel Vilaplana chose to support a false story. And even if the journalist has no political responsibility for what happened, her subsequent attitude is very reprehensible. It is therefore not strange that many citizens – not out of morbidity, but out of pure logic – deduce that perhaps there was something more between the two than just lunch. Not because his privacy matters, but because his explanations were so erratic that they invited precisely that: thinking that something was hiding that, if it really wasn’t relevant, wouldn’t require so much communicative pirouettes. But the political damage is not personal, but resides in the unconscious of those who were forced to react.
As DANA devastated southern Valencia, the president voluntarily disconnected. This is confirmed by WhatsApp messages delivered last Friday by former advisor Salomé Pradas to the judge, which dismantle any subsequent alibi. Pradas informed him of the extreme risk in the Poyo ravine, serious flooding and an extreme situation in several municipalities. The response to one of these notices – according to the notarial deed – was an indescribable “cojonudo”. A word that is enough to measure the frivolity with which Mazón faced a fatal emergency. These messages also seriously affect his chief of staff, José Manuel Cuenca, determined to minimize the crisis and stop urgent decisions that could have saved lives to protect the presidential image.
The conclusion is as simple as it is devastating: Ventorro’s lie was not a mistake, it was a method. A method which reveals a leader incapable of assuming his role when reality demands presence, courage and transparency. Mazón chose the opposite: absence, calculation and lies.
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