The order to charge the voters of the referendum of October 1, 2017, six years ago today, was given by the then Minister of the Interior, Juan Ignacio Zoido, who communicated it to his deputy operational director (DAO), Florentino Villabona. This is one of the revelations that former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, a plumber for years in the State’s sewers, makes in an interview with the director of El món on RAC1, Jordi Basté, which will be broadcast tomorrow, Monday at 9 a.m. Part of the meeting with the ex-police consists of a face-to-face with the former president of the Generalitat Artur Mas, who was allegedly one of the victims of the police initiatives of Villarejo and his minions.
In the interview with Basté, Villarejo explains that in the days before 1-O he advised bringing “two or three days before three or four police officers” to each school and “when they arrive to open the school [ polling stations and voters], so don’t leave the school open to them, simple as that.” The political leaders of the Interior “understood that the fact of the intervention of the poor colleagues of both the police and the civil guard was much more, let’s say, showy”.
The person in charge of the operation was Florentino Villabona, notes Villarejo. A man “very right-wing”, he describes, and “very given to resuming the demonstrations, and also, being general commissioner, who is like a general, he put on his uniform to be at the demonstrations”. “Fixi’s to what extent he felt like a leader that when a demonstration passed, let’s say, Spanishist, so to speak, on Via Laietana [the police station], he went out on the balcony and saluted like Mussolini, to show somehow he had done it magnificently”.
The head of Villabona was minister Zoido, whom he describes as “a bon vivant”, “they called him l’Estaca, because he was eating all day and didn’t worry about much.” Zoido was frivolous, he says, to appoint a friend of his from Andalusia as traffic director whom “everyone called Goyito Verbena”, because “he organized the folklores, the fairs”.
When Basté asks who gives the order to load, Villarejo assures: “The minister, without a doubt. I imagine he would consult the president”. Even though Rajoy “is a man who always uses Galicianism and when he gives you an order he says ‘it looks like it’s going to rain’ and so on and you have to interpret what he’s telling you so he doesn’t deny it later” .
In his usual line of accusing Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, Mariano Rajoy’s right-hand man and at the time political head of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Villarejo accuses her of having convinced “President Rajoy that the control of the CNI was carried by her, and therefore Cospedal, not even as Minister of Defense, who should have had control of the CNI, did not have it”.
This structure led to the CNI not finding the 1-O ballot boxes: “I think it was a misunderstood controlled explosion. There are probably a number of factors in addition to the ineffectiveness of who was running the CNI at the time [Félix Sanz Roldán], who, let’s say, who was giving… the little information that the CNI communicates, which was Miss Vice President, they understood that it was… good that they did a little paper, but that the subject would not get any further. I understand that it was a… that is, the CNI knew it all along, I’m sure, because I remember that, even though I was already retired, I continued to collaborate with the secret services (…) I I reported a series of data on where they could be and they ignored me.”
In the recording, made on Thursday afternoon in a Barcelona hotel, Villarejo reveals the names and surnames of his sources – hitherto unpublished – in his preparations for Operation Catalunya. One was a former government adviser and the other a senior sports manager.
The first, whom the former police officer mentions several times in the 2,304 pages that occupy his famous diaries, would have guided him in the “who’s who” in the pro-independence orbit.
The second would have provided information about Sandro Rosell, who from 2010 was president of Barça and who was charged in a case for alleged money laundering in an operation to purchase the television rights of the Brazilian national team. Before the trial, Rosell spent two years in pretrial detention. He was acquitted.
