One year after historic floods killed 229 people in Valencia, the Spanish region’s leader Carlos Mazón has faced mounting criticism over his whereabouts during the disaster, snubbing 12 mass protests which have called for him to resign.
The eastern region bordering the Mediterranean had woken up under the highest red alert for torrential rain on October 29 last year.
But for five hours, the conservative Mazón, 51, was absent from the front line of an emergency response widely condemned as inadequate.
Above all, the late sending of a mass telephone alert to residents at 8:11 pm sparked fierce scrutiny of his agenda and a debate about whether that delayed potentially life-saving action.
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“If Mazón had really been where he should have been, the alarm would have arrived on time,” leftist MP Agueda Mico, of the regionalist Compromis party, said on Tuesday.
Regions are primarily responsible for managing emergencies in Spain’s decentralised political system, but Mazón has denied accusations of dereliction of duty during the country’s deadliest natural disaster in decades.
“I did not switch off my mobile, I was not unreachable, I did not lack coverage, I did not lose interest, nor was I lost,” he told local newspaper Las Provincias in a rare interview since the tragedy.
According to the Levante newspaper, a colleague told Mazón there were already “many deaths” when he arrived in the evening at the seat of the regional government after a lengthy lunch.
READ ALSO: ‘Hard to move on’ – Spain’s flood survivors rebuild and remember one year on
Mazón resumed work at 7:45 pm and joined a critical emergency services meeting at around 8:30 pm, shortly after the telephone alert had been sent.
But the warning was too little, too late: muddy floodwater was already gushing through towns south of Valencia city and claiming lives.
Protesters in Valencia hold an effigy of Carlos Mazón reading “criminal” during a demo to protest the regional government’s response to the floods. (Photo by Jose Miguel FERNANDEZ / AFP)
Shifting narrative
Mazón said he spent four of his five hours of absence having lunch with a journalist to offer her a job.
This came after he had initially claimed to have eaten with a representative of Valencian businesses, but the person in question quickly came out to deny that account.
The remaining hour of Mazón’s absence — a critical period during which regional authorities hesitated about sending the alarm — remains shrouded in mystery.
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The journalist, Maribel Vilaplana, broke her silence last month, saying they left the restaurant “between 6:30 and 6:45”.
But sources close to Vilaplana, contradicting Mazón’s narrative, revealed that he then accompanied her to search for her car instead of heading straight to his office.
An unexplained gap persists in his account of events from 6:57 to 7:34, when Mazón made and received no calls, according to a list he submitted to a parliamentary committee.
At 7:36 pm, the list shows he turned down a call from his then-top emergencies official, Salomé Pradas, now under investigation for her role in the handling of the floods.
READ ALSO: What exactly is Spain’s ‘DANA’ weather phenomenon?
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Conservatives ‘undermined’
Although not under formal judicial investigation himself, Mazón has spent a year resisting intense pressure to resign.
Thousands of protesters have descended on Valencia’s streets every month demanding he quit, while 75 percent of the region’s residents want him to go, according to a poll published on Monday by Las Provincias and conservative daily ABC.
Experts view Mazón as a burden for the national leader of his opposition conservative Popular Party (PP), Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who prefers to dodge the topic.
Mazón “undermines Feijóo as a leader” and gives the Socialists “arguments to respond to corruption accusations” against Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, said Antón Losada, a political science professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela.
For Paloma Román Marugán, associate professor of political science at Madrid’s Complutense University, the PP has entered “a rabbit hole” that could have been avoided “with a swift resignation that never happened”.
“But bringing him (Mazón) down is a tricky puzzle” for the PP as the party has no obvious replacement and wants to avoid early elections, she told AFP.
READ ALSO: Why is Spain’s Valencia region so prone to destructive flooding?
