Murcia, between corruption and barbarism

For the British traveler Richard Ford, Spain in the 19th century was a country “oscillating between civilization and barbarism” and in his chronicle Manual for travelers through the Kingdoms of Valencia and Murcia (1845) did not hesitate to assign Murcia to the second category: “They even say about themselves and their province that both the land and the climate are good, but that much of what is between them is bad.” The sentence of Pedro Antonio Sánchez, eighth president of Murcia (2015-2017), to three years in prison for prevarication and falsehood, would reaffirm his diagnosis. And a cursory glance at the vicissitudes of the presidency of the community would confirm it without a doubt.

For something, the former superior prosecutor of Murcia, Manuel López Bernal, “claimed” that his prosecutor’s office was one of those that had denounced the most cases of corruption in all of Spain. He did so after being abruptly removed from his post by Rafael Català, Rajoy’s Minister of Justice, in the midst of a maelstrom of corruption cases against leaders and officials of the PP in Murcia. With southern Italian style: the home of anti-corruption prosecutor Juan Pablo Lozano was assaulted when he was investigating the Umbra cases – a series of urban ballots in the capital for more than one billion euros that compromised the PP mayor’s office – and Novo Carthago – a requalification of specially protected areas of Campo de Cartagena–. The thugs They were not looking for jewelry, money or valuables but, on both occasions, official documents and personal computers…

The long mandate of Ramón Luis Valcárcel, 1995-2014, who came from the Alianza Popular de los Magnificent Sevenand the happy coincidence of his tenure with the housing bubble and the hitch culture multiplied the cases of corruption of the Murcian PP, some so close -his daughter, his son-in-law and his brother-in-law of the president were investigated in the Novo Carthago case-, that, after unprecedented electoral successes -four absolute majorities-, in 2014 he resigned to change his appraisal for that of MEP with the added sinecure of the vice presidency of the Eurochamber.

Before Valcárcel there was also an unfortunate history in the PSOE. The first socialist president, Andrés Hernández Ros, was an enterprising and passionate individual, who, based on kilometers and from door to door, quintupled the militancy, reinvented the almost non-existent PSOE of Murcia and obtained an absolute majority in the first regional elections, 1983 He also invented the structure of a community that had never had autonomy and promoted with too many public companies, of little fortune, the modernization of its economy, from a new type of paprika to the breeding of the appreciated Mar Menor shrimp or the production of flat oyster in the same, which came to have a population of 135 million specimens, devastated both by overexploitation and by the brutal degradation of the lagoon (Another day I will tell you the passionate love story between the ostrea edulis and the Mar Menor; you’ll see how interesting).

Hernández Ros was a dreamer with a point of unreal ingenuity. That way of being, which encouraged him to issue an official invitation to Reagan and Chernenko, leaders of the US and the USSR, respectively, to meet in Murcia and iron out their differences, irreconcilably fractured the socialist executive. It was never shown that, on the eve of the party’s regional congress, he endorsed the bribery of the PSRM-PSOE Finance Secretary, Francisco Serrano Lucas, to the newspaper’s political chronicler The truthfrom Editorial Católica but the journalist had exclusive rights to his life, the secretary was expelled and Alfonso Guerra forced Hernández Ros to resign.

The candidate imposed with an iron hand by Guerra was a success: Carlos Collado, general secretary of the Murcian PSOE, a humanist philosophy professor, ruled for 9 years, until 1993, with two absolute majorities and no corruption scandals.

But in the triumphalist Spain of 1992, that of the Seville Expo and the Barcelona Olympic Games, Cartagena was dragging a very harsh industrial crisis that threatened employment in the region –the protests culminated in the burning of the Regional Assembly on February 3– and to alleviate it, Collado bought some land in the region from the runaway Ferrovial de Del Pino for General Electric to establish, which involved an investment of 10,000 million pesetas (60 million, in euros). The United Left of Anguita saw, in the so-called “Casa Grande case”, the opportunity to assault the Murcian socialist sky and the war executive of the PSRM-PSOE, facing Collado, the one to resign.

In 2017, Collado recounted that, summoned by Guerra to a meeting of barons autonomous, spoke out against the plans to remove Felipe González and became an obstacle for whoever had sponsored him. The party was a worse enemy than the complainants and resigned in April 1993, nine months before the Murcia Superior Court of Justice closed the case, not without praising the economic and legal advantages of Collado’s actions, criticizing the inferior judicial actions and accuse the political parties of using the criminal process, “disnaturalizing and instrumentalizing it (…) to satisfy extra-procedural interests.”

But the damage was already done. In a community that, except in the 1933 elections that Lerroux won and the pre-autonomous interregnum, chaired by the Christian Democrat from UCD Antonio Pérez Crespo, was a historic stronghold of the left, the voters did not vote for it again until the endless succession of cases of corruption of the PP in the Valcárcel era (on the payroll of PP bonuses), prolonged by the imputation of Pedro Antonio Sánchez, restored their confidence in the PSRM-PSOE in the 2019 elections. The PP solved it, first, with the support of Vox and, in the motion of no confidence in 2021, with the signing of three Citizens deputies for President Fernando López Miras…

By the way, the PP had its own hill: the fleeting president Alberto Garre, April 2014 to June 2015, elected successor to Valcárcel. He denounced to the prosecutor the contracts of his predecessor with the ACS of Florentino Pérez to build the Escombreras desalination plant and, separated from the presidency of the community, he left the PP with an open letter to M. Rajoy in which he accused him of “inaction against corruption.”

It was portrayed to the minute by Richard Ford, although today he might have written “between corruption and barbarism”…