The rise and fall formula is often used to summarize the historical cycle of an empire: genesis, peak, and collapse. It can also illustrate the dramatic plot of an opera (and even more so if betrayal by your own is involved), or the tradition of building a monumental falla to burn it. All these components make up the double feature dedicated to Rita Barberá with which Salvados began its 18th season this Sunday on La Sexta with the force of an unrepeatable character.
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And why Rita Barberá now and not Ceuta, for example? Gonzo, the person responsible for the show, and Jordi Évole, its creator, have been reproached on social media in the days leading up to it. Well, because, they have come to answer, it is not a daily current affairs program; because they need time; because they do not follow the noisy dictates of social media; because November marks 10 years since her death, alone, in a luxury hotel room, repudiated by the party she helped found; or because the story of the woman acclaimed as the mayor of Spain for winning five times by absolute majority and reigning for 24 years (1991-2015) in the Valencia of wine and roses, of the great media projects that put her “on the map,” represents the most ominous customs and practices of political conduct. Or simply because they want to, not forgetting the audience.
Everything related to Rita Barberá, a woman of indisputable popular appeal, who had a contagious laugh and a natural ease that made her seem like one of her neighbors (without being one), a political animal, continues to attract the attention of the public and politics. Today she is still revered among part of Valencian society and voices claiming her multiply within the PP, the party in which she played a key role since its foundation (already in Alianza Popular) and in its later evolution, not only for her triumphs in Valencia but also for her support of Mariano Rajoy to take the reins of the party, as recalled several times in the program by the former president of the Generalitat, Francisco Camps, who emerged from the municipal ranks of his admired Barberá.
Camps stars in a high point in Salvados. When Gonzo reminds him that in 2009 the controversy over Louis Vuitton handbag gifts from the Gürtel network to the mayor broke out, the former president is ready to deny it and states it was “false.” The journalist, surprised, tells him that Barberá herself had acknowledged it (in a press conference, in which she attacked “hypocrisy” because “in this country” politicians, officials, and journalists “have received gifts”), and Camps responds that he does not remember the moment, that he was busy with his “things.”
However, it was not the most appreciated gift. Barberá really liked fresh truffles. Once she confessed to María Consuelo Reyna that the “most valuable gift” she had received was a “white truffle” that an Italian businessman had sent by his private plane from Italy because there were none in Valencia at the time, according to the former director of the conservative newspaper Las Provincias and friend of the mayor.
“Rajoy supported her behind the scenes, but not openly,” notes the retired journalist about the period when Barberá’s party colleagues withdrew their greetings, especially after her indictment by the Supreme Court when she was a senator for the Taula case piece called pitufeo, the alleged money laundering in the 2015 municipal election campaign that was dismissed in 2021 for lack of evidence.
There are numerous testimonies that parade through the program among friends and party colleagues, political adversaries, journalists, or neighborhood leaders or victims of the 2006 Valencia metro accident that caused 43 deaths and were not received by either Barberá or Camps.
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Of special relevance is that of José María García Margallo. The former Foreign Minister under Rajoy recalls the long evenings and discussions in Xàbia with his “friend Rita” and is very critical of the treatment she received from part of society, the media, and party colleagues, some of whom invited her to leave the party (like leaders Pablo Casado or Andrea Levy) or the Senate (like all parties in the Valencian Courts, including the PP group to which the current mayor of Valencia, María José Catalá, belonged). Barberá moved to the mixed group.
Margallo looks uncomfortable in well-known 2016 images when he approaches Barberá to greet her, after she loudly calls his attention in the Congress courtyard: “Margui!, you didn’t greet me.”
The former socialist councilor and former government delegate, Ana Botella, who denounced irregularities in Barberá’s management, recalls how the then Interior Minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, called her to inquire about the harassment a group of indignados were subjecting the mayor to under her house, which she herself had reported. The surroundings of the entrance to her central home became a stop for demonstrations and protests, especially by the then-called indignados.
Family under investigation
Barberá was succeeded as mayor by Joan Ribó, from Compromís, who explains his refusal to name her honorary mayor, because “if she were alive, she would be prosecuted,” and mentions that her name is associated with a period of corruption, whether or not there was a judicial resolution. With Catalá’s arrival at the mayoralty, the flower bridge was named after her.
A name that has returned to the headlines this very week due to the indictment order issued at the end of the Azud case investigation that has been delivered to the parties. The magistrate places lawyer José María Corbín, Barberá’s brother-in-law, married to her sister Asunción (also deceased), who was also her chief of staff at the mayor’s office, as a procurer of municipal contracts and collector of kickbacks and commissions amounting to 3.6 million euros. He acted with the “protection” of the mayor, she adds. And she indicts him, along with her three daughters, the former deputy mayor with Barberá, Alfonso Grau, and the Urban Planning councilor, Jorge Bellever, both people of the mayor’s utmost trust in the last decade of her mandate. There are a total of 38 investigated.
With Barberá’s death from multi-organ failure caused by liver cirrhosis, as the autopsy ruled (which did not stop some conspiracy theories), a political cycle that began in 1991, when she won the mayoralty, ended in 2015, when the PP began to lose municipalities, autonomous communities, and later, the Government. “Rita is the beginning and the end of an extraordinary and fundamental stage to understand Valencia, the Valencian Community,” concludes Camps as a coda to an intense program that says goodbye with images of a group of citizens singing the Ave María at the door of her house and the burning of a monumental falla.