It's not his first time in the dock, and in fact he already has two convictions, one of them ratified by the Supreme Court. However, the trial that the former mayor of Haría has faced this week, ...
It's not his first time in the dock, and in fact he already has two convictions, one of them ratified by the Supreme Court. However, the trial that the former mayor of Haría, Juan Ramírez, has faced this week reflects a way of understanding politics that has prevailed for years in Lanzarote.
The parallels between Ramírez and other regular politicians in the Courts are increasing, especially when listening to what has been his main defense argument during the oral hearing: that he is a victim of persecution plots against him. It was like listening to Dimas Martín during the last two decades, or José Francisco Reyes during the last years.
And it is that, apart from the type or even the seriousness of the crimes of each one, there are two essential things that unite them. One, their particular way of facing the charges and even the convictions. Another, the way in which they understood public management, doing and undoing as authentic chieftains, as if the island or their municipality were a farm and they could act without being accountable to anyone or submitting to rules or laws applicable to the rest of mortals.
In the case of Reyes, he specialized in granting illegal licenses. Dimas, on the other hand, has had a weakness for the management of public money, already earning a conviction for embezzlement of funds and an indictment for a long list of crimes within the framework of Operation "Unión", including bribery and illicit association. That is, to be part of an organization created to commit crimes, with the alleged collaboration of public officials of the PIL, when he was no longer even in the institutions and even serving a sentence for another cause in the Tahíche prison.
Next to all this, Ramírez would seem a simple amateur, but although on a smaller scale and focused on Haría, his way of acting is not too far from that of Dimas Martín. And his weaknesses ranged from granting licenses, even to himself, to the falsification of contracts signed by the City Council. Even, Ramírez and Dimas also share the fact of having been convicted of another crime not related to their public activity, but with the sale of real estate. In the case of the former mayor of Haría, weighing on him a conviction for fraud.
Reviewing the history of each of them is hair-raising, especially to think how Lanzarote has been able to live for so many years with that way of doing politics, in which it is not that the laws were not respected, but neither the slightest forms of decorum or dissimulation, perhaps thinking that Justice was never going to come for them.
However, for the three of them it has been arriving, with the first convictions and with the serious criminal cases that they still have pending, but that does not mean, much less, that Lanzarote can already rest easy. On the contrary. An entire era of politicians and a way of understanding public management is going through the dock and is being submitted to the courts of Justice, but the scourge of corruption has not ended. And the problem is that, in addition, they may have "learned" from the mistakes. But not to correct the course, but to perfect the methods.
The crude crime of which one believes to be unpunished is no longer useful, and even those who have most calculated their movements have trembled in the last year, thinking if they took any false step that could take its toll. If they left any loose ends or, even, if someone can decide to pull the blanket. Especially knowing that, for example, the "Unión" case still keeps a part under seal and the investigation remains open, with many witnesses and defendants pending to testify before the judge.
However, it is evident that not even one or twenty judicial operations are going to be able to end all the corruption that has roamed freely around the island during the last years. And even less, if some insist on giving it shelter, encouraging it or continuing to live in its shadow.
While that is not put to an end, hope will continue to be in the courts, so that they can remove the masks and put each one in the place that corresponds to them. And until that moment arrives, society should be more alert than ever, because from the era of the gross and undisguised crime we have moved to that of the white glove, in which the objectives are not conquered with chickpeas in search of votes, but with tentacles of power that move in the shadows and that any day will sneak into the living room of our house.
