The article that the newspaper El País published last Sunday on a double page dedicated to Lanzarote was certainly not for a Pulitzer in journalism. For someone who already knows the reality of the island, it did not offer any new information, and ...
The article that the newspaper El País published last Sunday on a double page dedicated to Lanzarote was certainly not for a Pulitzer in journalism. For someone who already knows the reality of the island, it did not offer any new information, and probably the title and some personal assessments were a bit excessive, especially in an unfortunate reference to José Francisco Reyes' young daughter. However, the facts it reflected are unfortunately what there is and what there has been on the island for too many years.
Therefore, it is regrettable to see how many have torn their clothes this week in the face of a report that, ultimately, is nothing more than a sad reflection of the reality of Lanzarote. A reality that some continue to insist on not showing, under the crude pretext of their "love" for Lanzarote. And every time the dirty laundry comes to light, they are scandalized by appealing to the "damage" that is being done to the island with the publication of these articles.
Of course, the island does not fare well in that report. But the problem is not what is written, but what happens. And the fact is that no matter how much some insist on beating around the bush and trying to confuse society, the reality is what it is, and that is what is worrying. Those who have done and continue to do damage to this island are the politicians, businessmen and officials who have contributed to having a flawed and corrupt system, and not those who try to unmask it.
To love this island is not to hide the dirty laundry under the rug so that corruption can continue to run rampant, but to aspire to a future free of crime in the institutions, which allows Lanzarote to move forward and get out of the well in which politicians have put it in recent decades.
Some would like to be able to silence the media, and for citizens to be unaware of the reality, but fortunately the times of dictatorship were left behind years ago in Spain.
Parties like the PIL can decide not to answer calls from a media outlet like La Voz de Lanzarote and Radio Lanzarote, no matter how much they have public positions obliged to respond to citizens through the media, but they cannot stop either the investigations of the Justice or the work of criticism and denunciation of the media.
Marbella, Valencia, Baleares? In Spain, rivers of ink have been written with different corruption scandals, and precisely the strange thing is not that a national media outlet also sets its sights on Lanzarote, but that until now there has not been more talk about the situation on this island. Therefore, because they have not followed in detail the judicial day-to-day of Lanzarote, especially intense in the last two years, compiling everything that has happened in this time would give for much more than a double page in a national newspaper.
Can anyone imagine a citizen, a journalist or even a politician from Marbella, who is not Julián Muñoz, Roca or anyone from the clan of those affected and accused, questioning the reports that El País, El Mundo, ABC or La Razón dedicate to Operation "Malaya"? And why do we assume here that they do it as if it were something normal? As if the normal thing was to silence the reality of Lanzarote. As if the last two years had not existed, and it was still possible to continue with the fallacy that only little papers were missing.
The problem is that while in Marbella the citizens took to the streets to boo those responsible for the looting, in Lanzarote we put up with inadmissible resignation that two councilors who have admitted to having received bribes are applauded (literally), as happened when José Miguel Rodríguez and Ubaldo Becerra left prison and returned to the Arrecife plenary session to vote on a motion of censure. And of course, we see how many politicians continue to insist on making it seem that the corruption they know so well is just an "invention" that should not be talked about too much, lest citizens finally open their eyes one day.
Lanzarote, unfortunately, is like that. And although Dimas Martín should head a list of people declared persona non grata on the island, instead of that, we see how they present his children as the heirs of the Messiah, and they even allow themselves the luxury of coming to explain now how to save the public company that they strived to sink for years.
Curiously, the plan presented by Fabián Martín coincides too much with the one described by the UCO agents in the summary of the Unión case, following the conversations intercepted from the PIL leader. And in this case, for once, the PIL agrees with the UCO: effectively, they intend to sell Inalsa, or at least part of it, to a private company. However, many would have preferred that instead of explaining his plans for Inalsa, Fabián Martín clarified other aspects of the summary, such as the almost 10 million euros that, according to the investigation, his father accumulated in recent years. Will it also be the result of his deep love for Lanzarote?