The president of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, announced this Tuesday as general secretary of the PSOE in the archipelago that his party will appear as a popular accusation in the so-called Mediador case.
Torres made this announcement in the last debate on the state of nationality of the current legislature, in which he explained that as there is no damage to public coffers, the executive he heads cannot appear in the case, which investigates alleged extortions of businessmen in which former PSOE deputy Juan Bernardo Fuentes and his nephew Taishet Fuentes, former general director of Agriculture in the Canarian executive, a position previously held by his uncle, have been arrested.
And he has done so, among other reasons, to avoid "turning into executioners" those who are really "victims" in the so-called Mediador case, because what is being investigated are "individual responsibilities, until proven otherwise".
The Canarian president has argued that the fact that "one person, two, or however many are part of a group, an organization, an institution, state security forces and bodies, become corrupt cannot mean that the institution to which they belonged is corrupt, until proven otherwise".
"You cannot condemn those who are the victims, the institutions and the honest people, for how shameful and illicit the actions of those who were part of them may be," he proclaimed.
And he added: "you cannot turn into executioners those who are actually the victims, and the victims are, we are, the honest people."
"It cannot be that we have to defend our honorability against false and unproven statements from those who have been shown to have lied in court and are going to be convicted, as they have been on several occasions, for violating the law," he said in reference to Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte, the mediator who gives the case its name.
"Giving them encouragement is participating, and that is precisely what has made me question many things" these days in which the Mediador case has dominated newspaper headlines and television spaces, but he believes that "it is worth it" to publicly defend "the honesty of the vast majority of public servants, officials, and also politicians".
Ángel Víctor Torres has insisted that the details that are gradually becoming known about the case "repulse us, embarrass us", and has again asked "that everything be known, that whatever needs to be investigated is investigated, that whoever has to fall, falls."
"Whoever breaks the law, let them fall, but let no institution of our land be dragged down gratuitously, falsely and vainly," Torres concluded, who recalled that "similar events, even more serious, have occurred in democracy and before, in our community and outside of the Canary Islands".
"And unfortunately no one can say that this will not happen again, here or anywhere, in the future," he closed.