Three days after Elena Solís' dismissal as Minister of Environment of the Cabildo, the tension with her former Podemos colleagues continues to grow. In addition, the resignation of the Secretary of Communication of Podemos Lanzarote, Yurena Corujo, as advisor in the Island Corporation has been added to the cross accusations.
"She has not resigned because of me, but because of the mismanagement of my dismissal", Elena Solís pointed out on Radio Lanzarote - Onda Cero, who claims that Yurena Corujo believes that councilors Myriam Barros and Jorge Peñas "have done things wrong" and "have rushed".
"As she said in a meeting, the socialists are dividing us, they are making us dust and now they wash their hands", says the former councilor. And she insists that her dismissal was ordered by the PSOE.
"We cannot let you be dismissed, because if not we have to break the pact", she assures that the councilors told her, after announcing that the president of the Cabildo had threatened to dismiss her on Friday if she did not resign. According to Solís, both Yurena Corujo and the former head of the Podemos list to the Cabildo, Nona Perera, witnessed that conversation, and opposed her dismissal. However, when she refused to resign, she believes that Myriam Barros and Jorge Peñas carried it out to remain in their government positions.
"Things got complicated because there was a lot of pressure in the Environment area. No matter how much I pushed, there was no way for Podemos to support me in the face of the Presidency, to get these areas out and ease the constant pressure and interference I had in the Environment and Biosphere Reserve", she says.
"It suits her very well to blame the PSOE, but she is lying"
For her part, Myriam Barros has responded harshly to Elena Solís: "The reality is that it suits her very well to blame the PSOE, when the reality is that this lady is rude, does not know how to treat staff and of course I am not going to work with people like that, who also lie and cheat".
In her opinion, "the mistake has been to try to cover up all these things so that they would not transcend", but she assures that they had been dragging on for months.
"I understand that this is the speech that Elena wants to sell, because it is not convenient for her to sell the other one, but the reality is that she has been dismissed for a lack of confidence, for mistreating and speaking ill of the Cabildo's civil servants and for being totally out of tune with the Podemos group. We are people, we treat people as people and we are not going to tolerate or allow anyone to mistreat the workers, and much less our colleagues, it is something that cannot be allowed", defends Barros.
"It has been covered up for a long time so as not to cause a scandal, but there has come a time when the situation of that woman who is so rude, as has been seen in all the interviews, that the only thing that matters to her is personal interest, because she has made a round of radios talking about how bad the PSOE is, my partner Jorge and how bad I am, but she has not presented a single project that improves the environment of this island", she says.
She has even questioned now that Solís "has three jobs, one in London, one in La Rioja and another in the Cabildo". "And then she says that with five areas she can't do more, it's normal that she can't do more with three jobs. Now I understand why she hasn't taken out any project in the area of Environment, because if you have three jobs, the most normal thing is that you don't perform in any of them", she said about her former colleague.
"She complained about the lack of staff, another lie, because the staff area has been the most reinforced. Recently they have brought her an island director, a geologist, an advisor who she treated terribly and she had to be put in another office because what she was doing to her was terrible harassment", she added.
In addition, she has criticized Elena Solís' speech about the role she has played in the Cabildo. "The island did not survive without her. Until Elena Solís arrived six months ago, here we did not take care of the island and nobody cared about the island. The savior was her and the others are worthless", she has ironized.
Regarding the resignation of Yurena Corujo, she has downplayed it: "These are things that happen and then there are usually two or three people who leave with the dismissed person or the one who resigns".
In any case, she has pointed out that she "regrets" her resignation. "She is an endearing colleague, but she does not agree with how things have been done, and she has made the decision to continue working in the party, but she does not want to be in the Cabildo".
"Excuses to stop a person who was uncomfortable"
Faced with Myriam Barros' speech, Elena Solís maintains that everything is "excuses and justifications to stop a person who was uncomfortable for everyone". Regarding the statement made public by the two councilors this week, accusing her of disloyalty, she has pointed out that she does not understand what they are referring to. "Disloyalty is that I found out through a newspaper at three in the afternoon that I had been dismissed, having had two meetings last Monday", she questions.
As for the lack of communication, she believes that there was no organized system to meet periodically. "They can't say that I wasn't trying, that I was going on my own, because that's not the case".
In addition, she has defended her management both in her areas, and even in those of her colleagues. "It was my idea" or "it was with my money" -in reference to the public funds she managed from her Ministry- have been some of her expressions to refer to initiatives announced from the areas of Barros and Peñas.
"I am very worried about what is going to happen now, after I have left. Society will judge if it is a matter of me being conflictive or of me having done my job and practically nobody has liked it, including Podemos", she says.
"Until now we have been in an institution of blah blah blah in relation to sustainability and environmental protection, but when that starts to be applied as it has to be applied, it starts to raise blisters everywhere and that is not my fault, it is that we have to protect what we have, we cannot turn a blind eye", she defends, in reference to the controversies in which she has been involved, such as the cancellation of the Rally Isla de Los Volcanes or her intervention in a report of La Sexta on the extraction of aggregates in the area of Muñique.
On this last point, she assures that it was the Cabildo who asked her to intervene and affirms that she made some "innocuous" statements, because she was in conversations with the transporters, "trying to get a conservation project in the jable". "This program was not done intentionally or nobody knew the content and what happened happened".
In any case, she insists that her job was "to defend the environment, biodiversity and the inhabitants of these islands above economic interests and the whims of the factual powers".
"What is clear is that now there is a before and after. Obviously the government group has turned its back on the island, on biodiversity and on the environment. It is a very serious thing that the interests of the government have been given priority over the island", she affirms after her dismissal.
Now, after having entered politics as an independent, coming from environmental associations, she affirms that she will continue "working and trying to find ways to do things outside the institutions, because from them it is not possible to work".
