Let’s see – we’ve had Felipe González (sometimes known in those days as Señor X) and his… at the very least… improper war against the Basque nationalists with the GAL (27 state-murders); José María Aznar who blamed the same Basque group, the ETA, for the Al Qaeda train explosions in Madrid in retaliation for his war with Bush Jr and Blair in Iraq (192 deaths) – plus having some of his ministers ending up investigated for corruption; Zapatero and his peculiar eyebrows; followed by the mysterious M.Rajoy (any Spaniard knows where I’m going with this) and his departure precisely for corruption; and now Pedro Sánchez, who we are told has both a shifty brother and a dodgy wife.
While the far-right, the media-whores, the conservative judiciary, the CIA and the Mossad are doing what they do best – character assassination – the pickings are a trifle thin. The brother and the wife are – as we all know full well – both squeaky clean (as was the attorney general, not that it mattered much) and anyway, there’s the far more traditional fare of the ex-ministers Santos Cerdán and José Luis Ábalos to keep the courts happy.
But Zapatero a crook? He is a benevolent and slightly forgettable ex-president who nevertheless got Spain out of Iraq, ended ETA (through dialogue rather than retaliatory assassinations), legalised mixed-marriages and brought about both women’s rights in the workplace and parity in politics. A piece from The Economist says ‘…the judicial probe centres on Mr Zapatero’s controversial ties to the dictatorship in Venezuela, and in particular the €53m bail-out by Mr Sánchez’s government of Plus Ultra, a Venezuelan-Spanish airline, during the pandemic. The judge claims that payments of around €2m to Mr Zapatero and his daughters for consultancy work were mainly a commission for arranging the rescue…’
This following a timely leak from the CIA, via Homeland Security, of the contents of a phone held by Rodolfo Reyes, a Venezuelan partner of Plus Ultra airways, confiscated at the US border and cloned back in 2021 (the use of any information extracted in such a way would be illegal under Spanish law). Whether Washington wanted to poke the Spanish hornets’ nest and whether Zap’s work in the dreaded Venezuela had anything to do with the sudden release of the damning documents is open to surmise.
The other day, the Guardia Civil were searching his offices (all live on TV of course) while looking for proof of corruption and found some expensive jewellery in his safe. Zapatero it seems took bribes, -oh how are the mighty fallen!- and was paid in gold and rare stones (rather than the more traditional transfer of funds to the Cayman Islands). The baubles have been assayed (by a Madrid jeweller’s shop – belonging by chance to the ex-PP minister Ana Mato), and valued at over a million euros. Well, there’s no arguing with that!
Zapatero told the judge on Wednesday that he did not contact any authority to influence the Plus Ultra bailout and denied receiving bribes. Later on Wednesday, Zapatero gave a written statement insisting on his innocence and granting ‘a voluntary universal authorization to facilitate the tracing of his money and accounts’.
He further stated that he would fully explain the jewels found in his safe at a later time.
The question of whether the contents of a cloned phone can be used in this inquiry will of course be down to the judge, the judiciary and the opinion-piece writers.
Not that this would matter one way or the other – Zapatero’s reputation is now in shreds.
‘…Beyond radio, television, or internet talk shows’, writes Ana Pardo de Vera for Público: ‘journalists are spending a lot of time in newsrooms discussing everything related to the former PSOE prime minister of Spain between 2004 and 2011. Because it's surprising that the only head of government who didn't have a single corruption case in his ranks would so wildly overturn the chessboard—his party, his family, and himself—as some would have you believe, with sentences handed down here and there without even having listened to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’.
It’s a lot easier for columnists when they are at odds with the government – those of us who support Pedro Sánchez must always bring up the fast-growing Spanish economy and the various advances introduced, higher pensions and minimum wage and so on – while for an opposition writer, well, the subject is an easy one: corruption! They may be right, but one must remember the last Partido Popular government fell precisely for this reason, and there are still plenty of the old guard around today.