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The Council of Ministers will make dismissals next Tuesday Antonio Hernandez Espinal (Seville, 1973) as director of Political Coordination of the Office of the Presidency of the Government, as reported this evening by TVE.
Antonio Hernández was one of the trusted men of Paco Salazar, the former Moncloa advisor accused of sexual harassment against several collaborators, both at the PSOE and at the presidency of the government.
Hernández Espinal was identified as the person who covered up Paco Salazar’s harassment allegations.
Until now, he was also responsible for data, analysis and foresight within the Andalusian executive of the PSOE, under the orders of Vice President María Jesús Montero, also affected by the controversy.
With this dismissal, the government is trying to avoid the escalation of a scandal which has caused deep unease in different federations and in the feminist sectors of the PSOE.
After the institutional event of Constitution Day, President Pedro Sánchez assured journalists on Saturday that assumes “in the first person” the “error” committed by the PSOEby not handling the complaints filed through internal party channels by two women against Paco Salazar in five months.
In an interview with EL ESPAÑOL in February 2022, when he was already working alongside President Pedro Sánchez at La Moncloa, Antonio Hernández revealed one of his most little-known facets, that of Worshipful Master of Freemasonry.
As he explained, In 2005, he joined the Hiram Workers Lodgefrom Seville, because “I felt like I was missing something”.
“I had learned about Freemasonry on the Internet. There were two lodges in Seville, and one did not admit women at that time, so I chose the other, the Hiram Workers’ Lodge,” he explained in the interview. “I wrote them an email without much faith, but they answered me. I liked the people I met. I entered out of curiosity and because of the vital moment in which I found myselfabout thirty years.”
Then, when Pedro Sánchez arrived in government in June 2018, he called him to join his team at Moncloa. “It was a dream, it was to be in the West Wing of the White House,” Hernández Espinal told EL ESPAÑOL.
Even though the relationship between the two goes back a long way. Already in 2011, Hernández collaborated with Pedro Sánchez in the preparation of the framework presentation on municipalism for the leadership of the PSOE.
Antonio Hernández joined the Seville City Council in 2007, as advisor and director of Communications to the socialist mayor Alfredo Sánchez Monteseirín, led by his sister Nieves Hernández, who was advisor for Finance and Security of the said city hall.
Antonio Hernández was reported this Sunday, in information from The newspaperas “accomplice and accessory” of the alleged sexual harassment committed by Paco Salazar against several women, both at the PSOE and at Moncloa.
One of the women involved said she experienced “humiliating, demeaning and misogynistic” behavior from Paco Salazar.
And he clarified that “no totally carefree behavior” of Pedro Sánchez’s advisor “would have been possible without the particular collaboration of his faithful Antonio Hernández Espinal (…)”.
Concerning the senior Moncloa official who will be fired on Tuesday, he declared that he was “a man who spent his life teaching so that we would not see Paco and his behavior as they were.”
“Antonio constantly enlightened us, making us doubt our perceptions and our own reality. She constantly told us that we did not value where we were, that anyone would kill to be us,” adds this testimony collected by The newspaper.
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