"I am going to reveal a secret that you have to promise me that you will not tell even your wife". With this phrase, Dimas Martín began to share with the then PIL councilor in Arrecife, José Miguel Rodríguez, the great secret he kept in prison, and that allowed him to continue communicating with the outside. "I will send you a message one of these days and I will tell you that I am the invisible one, so you can identify me", he explained in a letter.
At that moment, July 2007, Dimas was serving a sentence in the Tahíche Penitentiary Center, after having his third degree withdrawn, and José Miguel Rodríguez was making his debut as a public official. After the elections, PSOE and PIL governed together in the capital and José Miguel Rodríguez, who occupied the Finance Council, began to communicate with Dimas Martín in prison, through letters in which he asked for instructions for different issues.
"First of all, thank you very much for your letter and for remembering me, not everyone does," Dimas pointed out in his response to Rodríguez's first letter. And then, he began to give him instructions to make that communication more fluid.
"Express" mail
Far from the rules that govern the rest of the inmates, Dimas explained how they could get letters to him on the same day, through an assistant hired in the Cabildo for the PIL group: "She gets them to me every day and you have your answer the same day in the afternoon, except in the month of August, when the mail will be on vacation," he anticipated. "However," Dimas insisted, "agree with her, I think they have another alternative".
In that writing, the threads that could be moved inside the prison are clear, with people who would have helped the PIL leader to circumvent the controls that govern other prisoners, getting letters to him daily. But in addition, it also confirms another extreme that transpired shortly after his arrest, and that the penitentiary center had denied: Dimas had access to a mobile phone in prison.
"Every night from 9:30 you can send me messages that I will answer, and sometimes we could talk", Dimas explained to José Miguel Rodríguez, after revealing his secret. The first step would be taken by Dimas, sending him a first message, under the alias of "the invisible one", so that he would have his number. "Through this method you can consult me about the most urgent and the most complicated you do when we talk or by letter, but I repeat the absolute secret of the subject. Never give names, neither yours nor mine".
Deliveries in "discreet" places
Apart from this letter, there are also other data in the summary that point to the privileges of Dimas Martín in the Tahíche prison. One of the detainees and charged in the case, Francisco Rodríguez Batllori, acknowledged in his statement that Dimas Martín called him from prison and that he had a mobile phone in prison, and added that he considered it "incredible".
In addition, a witness who worked for the PIL in electoral campaigns and congresses and was hired as an orderly of the Cabildo, also gave details on this issue. According to what he declared before the UCO, shortly after Dimas re-entered prison, he received an "order from Matías Curbelo to contact an official from the Tahíche Penitentiary Center". Through him, he had to get to Dimas "correspondence, newspapers and occasionally some food".
According to this witness, he met with this prison official at his home in Los Cocoteros "or in a cafeteria near Tahíche", although this cost him a reproach from the PIL leader. "Dimas Martín called my attention by letter, saying that the deliveries should be made in more discreet places", he told the agents, stating that this "made him begin to suspect the possible illegality of the work they were asking him to do".
Close relationship with the director of the prison
To all this we must add, as had already transpired when the first part of the summary secrecy was lifted, the close relationship that Dimas Martín maintained with the then director of the Tahíche Penitentiary Center, Joaquín Herrera. In several telephone conversations intercepted by the UCO, Herrera spoke with Dimas (who at that time was enjoying the third degree) of the new prison benefits that he was going to request for him, such as the bracelet that would allow him to stop going to sleep in prison as well.
In those conversations, in turn, Dimas Martín spoke to him about the possibility of getting him a job in the Arrecife City Council or in the Cabildo, since Herrera knew that he would soon be dismissed as director of the prison.
During that stage, the Tahíche Treatment Board, of which the director was a part, recommended up to two times granting the third degree to Dimas Martín (the first when he had only served nine months of an eight-year sentence), but both times this measure was later annulled by the Provincial Court. Thus, he forced Dimas to return to prison, understanding that the conditions were not met for him to enjoy this prison benefit, among other things because he had not paid the fine or returned the money embezzled in his management at the head of the Agroindustrial Complex.
After Operation Unión, which revealed the alleged criminal activities that Dimas Martín continued to direct, even from the Tahíche prison, the PIL leader was transferred to another penitentiary center in the Canary Islands, and since then he has only returned to the island to enjoy some permit, or to appear on the occasion of a judicial summons.
