“It's a pyolman.” Thus, the leader of the PP Elías Bendodo to the general director of Civil Protection, Virginia Barcones, the most technical head of the Government on the device to fight the wave of forest fires that have swept around half a million hectares, said Thursday. Barcones has become the new scapegoat of the first opposition party to avoid their own responsibilities in the management of fires that have especially affected four of their communities.
Bendodo called Barcones pyromive after pronouncing the following sentence: “The fires do not go out with ideology and tension, the fires go out with institutional collaboration and loyalty.”
The PP strategy is not new. He already applied it against Fernando Simón during the Coronavirus pandemic or against the Government delegate, Pilar Bernabé, or the top people responsible for Aemet or the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation after the Dana de Valencia. In fact, Barcones was already pointed out after the floods that caused 228 dead in autumn last year because the torrential rains occurred coinciding with a high level meeting in Brazil to which he went on behalf of Spain.
Barcones was since the beginning of the crisis the person who has centralized the help requests launched by the autonomous communities. Law graduate, has been in the background during the current incendiary wave until this week broke out during one of the daily appearances he performs before the media, after the president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alfonso Rueda, hinted that the Government was retaining the state of state resources demanded by the affected regions.
“I will not consent that no one tries to rewrite the history of the management that has been done,” he said to the accusations that “the government” had taken five days to request air support from other communities. Barconones said that their department came simultaneously “three letters in which different communities in the hands of the PP requested” an innumerable list of means they need. ” Bulldozers is not done in ten minutes or that moving aerial media is not done in five. ”
“I trust the good work, in institutional loyalty, in professionalism. It would be very discouraging to think that things are being known to be impossible,” he concluded.
The regional deputy secretary of the PP, Elías Bendodo, replied Thursday morning. “There has been disloyalty once again from the government,” he said. “The government has responded again to a crisis since ideology. He has said that fires are motivated by climate change. It must be told that fires, most of them have been caused,” he added. Caused is not the same as intentional.
“The regional governments have done is asking for more means. What less, since the government did not offer them. The government said again, 'if they need help, to ask for it.' That is unworthy,” said the leader of the PP.
In an interview with TVE this Thursday, Barcones specified that “on Friday (August 15) at night they simultaneously arrived at three requests of a very important number (of media) that take time to mobilize. The next day it was already criticized that those media had not arrived.”
The sequence of Friday night August 15 is revealing. After a visit by Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the president of Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, to a command post against the fires, the three autonomous communities in the hands of the PP most affected by the fire move token in the same direction.
That day, Feijóo claimed before the media deploy the army against fires but that the command continued in the communities. Two days before, on August 13, already with many spotlights in his mountains, Mañueco had assured that Castilla y León had “enough” means to attack the fires.
According to the information registered in the Central Government, at 21.22 of that Friday it is received at the National Center for Monitoring and Emergency Coordination An communication of the Director General of Emergency and Interior of the Xunta de Galicia to claim more state means for fire extinction. An hour later, at 22.23, the Board of Extremadura does exactly the same to demand media of the European Civil Protection mechanism, which was already activated since the 11th, three days before, according to the Executive. At 22.47, a new mail claims heavy machinery and air military media. Only five minutes later the application is received in the same terms of the Junta de Castilla y León.
From the next morning, with Pedro Sánchez already at the head of the emergency committee meetings, the criticism of the PP begins for the lack of means of the central executive. “If you want, you can do a lot,” says the president of the PP in his social networks, where he begins to insistently claim the presence of the armed forces beyond the UME. The next day, Sunday 17, Feijóo himself accuses the government of “always being late for everything.”
Once the statements of Bendodo were heard in which he called him a pyómano, the general director of Civil Protection appeared before the media at a press conference and responded to Bendodo and the regional presidents who have struggled in the last week to point to the device he directs.
“How far are we going to get there? What is it to try to discredit a person? How far does political criticism get,” he said. “It is not true that the help has been late, it has arrived when they have requested it,” he explained. “It is not true that anything late had arrived, it is not true that any resource time had been spared,” he added, in response to the insinuations released by Feijóo and his own.
After the crossing of statements, the campaign in networks was intensified that the Barcones herself has denounced. “Virginia is not an emergency technician, she is an activist,” wrote PP spokeswoman Ester Muñoz, on Twitter. Hundreds of anonymous comments lashed out at the Director of Civil Protection.
Barcones replaces PP to Pilar Bernabé, to the president of the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar, Miguel Polo, and Aemet officials for the Dana de Valencia. As now, the right tried to question the technical agencies of the State to justify the decisions (or the lack of them) of their regional presidents, starting with Carlos Mazón, disappeared during the central hours of the worst catastrophe that his region has lived in the last century.
Polo was a victim of manipulation when the Generalitat spread a modified audio to try to accuse him of hiding information about the flood and preventing the regional authorities could act on time. An operation that the PP repeated with an AEMET official or with the Head of Climatology of Valencia, José Ángel Núñez.
This same March, Fernando Simón reappeared after several years outside the first media line after the huge exposure to which he was subjected during the pandemic. The top technical head of the fight against Coronavirus said he received “much more recognition than criticism, although the latter, being minority, have much more visibility.” And he concluded: “There have been 'haters', people who hate, but I think they cannot direct or mediate our society. I am not going to stop doing my job.”
This Thursday, Virginia Barcones said in his appearance before the media: “Whoever thinks that attacking me personally will silence me, to lose all hope.”
