There is another photo that also chases Feijóo. In this, taken inland, it has no sunscreen on the shoulder or is accompanied by a drug trafficker. The 2006 Feijóo – even with the glasses that lost shortly after arriving in Madrid – wears jeans, long -sleeved shirt with folded fists, clock and leather bracelets in sight, and nautical without socks. In the hands he wears a garden hose; With the right thumb presses the mouth so that the pressure increases and several jets come out. It was his contribution, from the opposition, to a fire campaign in Galicia that left four deaths, tens of thousands of burned hectares and in which he tested some of the dirty war tactics that he would use years later to overthrow the bipartite. That included the political use of the victims, something that had the pleasant occasion to repent when the xunta he presided was convicted of the death of two brigades who fought against the flames.
“I was not going to turn off fires. Another thing is that, in that photo, it is evident that I was doing it.” Twelve years later, Feijóo admitted to a Jordi Évole who kept questioning his outfit That the stamp was “a leg of leg, clearly.” The PP leader remembers that they were making “a live” when “there was a regrowth” and “a person” passed the hose. “A naivety,” he insists. Évole, skeptical, did not just believe it: “But you see the hose and say: 'Host, which photon will leave tomorrow on the cover of Galicia's voice '“Its interlocutor is enrolled:” I have already described it, it is a way of putting the leg quite intense. ”
Feijóo had been in front of the Galician PP for more than half a year but it was much less a newcomer to politics. More than an ingenuity, what was reflected there was the birth of a style. The large fire wave of 2006 lasted twelve days, between August 3 and 15, a period in which it razed among the 77,000 hectares admitted by the Xunta and the 92,000 estimated by the CSIC. Any of the two figures are light years from which Feijóo denounced. The then opposition leader came to appeal to NASA to raise the affected surface until 175,000 hectares. Then he would end up admitting that the account had not been done by the American space agency, but a website that analyzed the photos captured by its satellites. After throwing the numbers, Feijóo hid his hand: “I hope this data is not confirmed.” He did not, but the damaged merchandise had begun to circulate.
The sticks on the wheels to that unusual fire campaign, the first that did not manage the PP in almost two decades, began since the same implementation. The PP of A Coruña sent an instruction to its mayors to boycott the implementation of the Municipal Fire Brigades, which were activated by agreement with the Xunta. The signer was the then Secretary of Organization, María Faraldo, promoted to number two of the party in the province by Romay Beccaría, a mentor of both Feijóo and the leader of the popular Coruña: the Ferrol councilor, Juan Juncal, who had just signed for his team to a promising young man with the past in the nationalist activism. His name, Miguel Tellado.
“With us people did not die in the fires …”
In his letter, Faraldo admitted that “it did not seem” that the “differences” between the conditions of the bipartite and those marked by the governments of Manuel Fraga had “enough entity” to “justify” a “decision of the municipalities of the PP not to sign the agreements”, especially because “if there were many fires, the Xunta would try to hold the PP before the PP before the public opinion for this decision.” Therefore, it proposed to hinder the process using a “strategy” based on “in the delay but not in the negative.”
When, in full wave of fire, the chain was revealed the letter of Faraldo, the dome of the party closed ranks with it. Feijóo reduced that instruction to an “unhappy paragraph” that socialists and nationalists used to “criminalize the opposition.” The president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, was then the general secretary of the popular Galicians and gave his “absolute” support to the letter. He came to regret that the government partners were looking for a “smoke curtain” for their management with that internal instruction.
Faraldo would be chosen mayor of Betanzos, a Coruña municipality, the following year, in municipal elections that had a very anticipated departure pistol. Four months before the appointment with the polls, in an act in which Mariano Rajoy – president of the PP – openly requested the vote for the popular, Feijóo threw the pre -campaign with another of those phrases that perhaps today, judicial sentence through, would define again as an ingenuity, or as a leg of paw: “With us did not die people in the fires and, with them, four people.”
24 hours after the start of the great fire of 2006, on Friday, August 4, two women-a mother and daughter-suffered a small accident in their car in Cotobade (Pontevedra, today Cerdedo-Cotobade). What in another situation would be a simple disorder, it was enough for the vehicle to be surrounded by the flames. Both died asphyxiated by smoke, the same thing that happened days later to a 70 -year -old man who fought against a focus on Lameiro Campo. The Funesto Balance was closed with another septuagenarian who died in A Cañiza, also in the province of Pontevedra. He died with 25% of the burned body, apparently, after falling while trying to defend his house from a fire.
It was not the first time that Feijóo had tried to use those deaths politically. A month after the end of the fire wave, thousands of people – between 12,000 and 20,000, according to the sources – demonstrated against the management of the bipartite. Convened the platform Only against the heata double meaning between the international relief signal and the word “alone” in Galician. The PP wanted to convert the fires into the Prestige of that government and needed its own Never again. He did not get it, among other reasons, because the connection between the entity and the party was too evident. His spokesman was the popular mud councilor (Pontevedra). In addition to Feijóo and a Rajoy who arrived late, Ana Pastor, the presidents of the deputations of Ourense and Pontevedra – the current father and the current president of the RFEF, Rafael Louzán -, European deputies and even the former president of the Xunta, Fernández Albor. That day, the final manifesto was read by the daughter and granddaughter of the deceased in Cotobade.
… And if he dies, it is terrorism
But before the fire all imprudence are paid. Also verbal. On August 12, 2010, a year after the PP returned to the Xunta, two 27 and 35 -year -old brigades died in a forest fire in mountains of Montes (Pontevedra). And that time there was responsibility of the autonomous government. It was what the Superior Court of Xustiza de Galicia sentenced in 2017 by considering that the “poor functioning of public services” influenced the fatal outcome.
Shortly after that sentence, after a reasonably calm summer, October lived a terrible wave of fires that led the flames even to the streets of Vigo. In that fateful autumn another four people lost their lives in just 24 hours: two octogenaries trapped in a vehicle in Nigrán (Pontevedra); A neighbor of Carballeda de Avia (Ourense), 78 who tried to save his animals and another 70 -year -old man, in Vigo, who fell through a embankment while using a hose to quell the fire of a neighbor's house.
With the PP there were also people in the fires and Feijóo's response was, again, faithful to his style: decree three days of official mourning in Galicia and pay a campaign in the press in which, on every page, next to a Galician flag with a black crepe was read: “Galicia with the victims. Galicia against incendiary terrorism. Galicia with the extinction teams.” Days later, in the Galician Parliament, Feijóo responded to the criticism of the BNG for the response of the Xunta to the flames: “I can make mistakes, no doubt. But I will never say that the fault is of a political party for being behind the forest fires.” 2006 was further and further.
As things are not seen the same from the government as from the opposition, returning to power had made Feijóo bet on diverting the focus. If Galicia was still burning no longer to look for responsibility in the regional executive: the fire became a public order problem. “Organized terrorist plots” were the ones that were responsible for burning the mountain without, at first, the Zapatero government or the Interior Ministry of Rubalcaba did anything to prevent it. In that 2017, the Friend government Mariano Rajoy had been in power for six years, but in those ads he was only mentioned to thank him for his support for the tragedy.
Also in that today the leader of the PP was shown as an outrageous student of Romay Beccaría. In the 90s, with the future Minister of Health by directing the Department of Agriculture of Fraga, the Xunta had already begun to defend the thesis of the “incendiary mafias”. A possibility to which the bipartite even clinging to the toughest moments but that, still today, is still not demonstrated. Neither the university experts, nor the police investigators in governments of different color nor the reports of the Specialized Prosecutor's Office – directed for years by the current Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz – have never found evidence of their existence.
