The Congressional commission that analyzes the management of the flood that caused 232 deaths on October 29, 2024, especially in the province of Valencia, will hold a new session this Monday in which the then president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, will appear again, and in which the indicted Emilio Argüeso, who was the regional secretary of Emergencies, is also summoned.
Mazón is called to testify at eleven in the morning. He already attended Congress on November 17, but the PSOE and Sumar, who control the committee's table, have decided to interrogate him again to raise, among other issues, questions related to the messages exchanged on the day of the tragedy in the WhatsApp group he shared with the members of his Executive.
According to the messages incorporated into the case by the first vice president of the Valencian Government, Susana Camarero, early in the morning Mazón intervened to encourage his consellers to "flood the media with data," because, in his opinion, that conveyed a "feeling of being alert that you shit."
The chain of messages shows that, at first, the conversation in the group focused on the public communication strategy, but it declined as the situation worsened until it almost disappeared during the most critical hours of the emergency.
The former Valencian president maintains his status as a privileged person by retaining his seat in the Corts Valencianes. On September 1, his defense sent a letter to the judge of Catarroja who is instructing the flood case to clarify whether there is or is not any open line of investigation, or pending to open, regarding a possible criminal responsibility for his actions and, if negative, that this be expressly stated.
The letter from Mazón and the judge's response
In that letter, Mazón argued that there is no evidence in the procedure that he gave instructions about the ES-Alert or ordered the suspension of the alerts, and examined 42 of the deaths to defend that a "individualized causal link" between any of his actions and any of those deaths is not accredited, some of them occurring after 20:11 hours, the moment when the warning to the population was issued.
The magistrate responded that she had directed her "extensive request for dismissal" to an organ, her court, that is not competent to adopt that resolution, given her status as a privileged person. She also reminded that she is not listed as investigated, that she "can withdraw" from the case if she deems it appropriate and that her "exculpatory thesis" ends up being "incriminating" for the former councilor of Justice and Emergencies, Salomé Pradas, charged in the procedure.
"It's not just that no Es-Alert message was sent until 8:11 PM, delayed with absurd legal disquisitions about the confinement, not to mention the linguistic ones, but that previously, incomprehensibly, no other means of warning the population, completely unaware of the risks, especially in areas where it was not raining, were used," the judge states in her ruling.
That same Monday, at three-thirty in the afternoon, the other defendant in the case, who was Pradas's 'number two' in Emergencies, Emilio Argüeso, is summoned before the investigation committee. Congress had already called him last January, but he did not appear, claiming he was on medical leave.
Concentrations of the victims and new appearances
The associations of victims of the disaster —Associació de Víctimes de la Dana 29 d'octubre 2024, Asociación de Víctimas Mortales 29-O and Asociación de víctimas y damnificados de la Dana de Valencia— have called for concentrations next to the Lower House coinciding with the appearances of Mazón and Argüeso.
The committee plans to meet again on September 28 to hear again from two other people who have already appeared: the former councilor Pradas, who did so in December, and the president of the Diputación de Valencia, the PP leader Vicente Mompó, who attended Congress in November.