He has been known as the quiet man, the man of disposition, and also as Bambi and Sosomán. But as José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero remembers in his new book, born from conversations with Màrius Carol, before becoming famous he was, for a long time, the grandson of Captain Lozano. That Republican captain who the night before his execution on August 18, 1936 in Puente Castro wrote a short letter: “I die innocent and I forgive, I ask my family to also forgive. “I was never a traitor to the country and my only creed was the love of republican good, an infinite desire for peace and the improvement of the humble.” Rarely has it been possible to affirm of anyone with more certainty that we are our biography.
The letter and the memory of the executed grandfather open Crónica de la España que dialogue (Navona), a book that was presented yesterday at the Ateneo de Madrid with poker from ministers (María Jesús Montero, Félix Bolaños, Pilar Alegría, Ana Redondo), but also with Miguel Sebastián, Cándido Méndez, Magdalena Valerio, Pepiño Blanco and even the president of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado. And Jaume Roures, owner of Navona and who had the idea for the book. A volume of conversations whose title, Carol ironically, is today “an oxymoron, because dialogue is not fashionable in Spain. Today the politics of this country are more on the attack.” A dialogue that she said, for Zapatero was not so much the means as an end in itself.
Ana Pastor served as master of ceremonies alongside Zapatero and the former director of La Vanguardia, whom she congratulated for collecting in the book “a lot of things that we had not been able to get out to the president on many issues.” Like the end of ETA. Zapatero recalled a thriller scene in the Moncloa bedroom, with a call from Rubalcaba in the early morning, with his wife Sonsoles asking what was happening and the Minister of the Interior explaining to him that Thierry, leader of ETA, claimed to have planted 7 or 8 bombs in the country and was not going to reveal where they were unless he spoke on the phone with Zapatero. “It was not an easy decision,” he recalled, “but I trusted Alfredo a lot, who prescribed calm. Even so, there was a space of uncertainty, and if bombs had started exploding it would have been very hard.”
He also recalled how at that moment when the end of ETA seemed possible, the king emeritus acted as mediator between Rajoy and him for the negotiations. And he gathered them together: “It was neither good nor bad. With Rajoy there, it’s not strange either,” said Zapatero, ironically, who contrasted Rajoy’s attitude at his investiture in 2004 – “there was not even a single line of delegitimization towards my victory” – with what Sánchez suffers. In fact, he explained that the day he heard Feijóo “that Sánchez treated the executioners better than the victims, I asked my secretary to clear my agenda: we were going to dedicate ourselves to the elections.” And he stressed that “against ETA we had a clean victory that has finally allowed us, after two centuries, to have more than ten years in our country without political violence.”
Zapatero did not want to leave without condemning another violence, that of Israel, and the double standard that the West is using – “those deaths of innocent people in Gaza are going to leave their mark on everyone, it could be a before and after, like the illegal intervention in “Iraq that turned the Middle East into a disaster.” In domestic politics, he repeated that “the amnesty is very good for the country” and claimed a plural Spain: “For a long time there was a strictly Castilian interpretation of Spain that has not been good for us. And I am concerned that now this interpretation of Spain’s monopoly is made from Madrid. “We need a Spanish interpretation of Spain, of its diversity”
