José Manuel Villarejo is a disturbing character who lives by throwing the stone and hiding his hand. He accumulates legal cases, his morality is underground, but every time he stands in front of a microphone, the former commissioner becomes an influencer and creator of trends. The morbidity generated by his accusations, recreations or fables is a guaranteed trending topic and a headache for his unexpected protagonists. It scandalizes, blushes, embarrasses…
That Artur Mas agreed to a face to face with Villarejo on RAC1 with Jordi Basté as The Observer was an experiment with guaranteed success that had more of a personal and political reaffirmation of the former president than a search for certainties. Operation Catalunya existed and Villarejo accumulated legal cases, years in preventive detention and a first sentence of 19 years in prison for his private businesses.
The retired police officer’s resume does not make him less attractive as a storyteller. He has explained in court, in Congress and in different interviews his operations against the independence movement. But there is always something left in the gutter. The novelty is to reaffirm it without intermediaries before one of his victims: “We wanted to destroy you because you were enemies of the unity of Spain.”
The headlines that jump from RAC1 to “the CNI proposed sending tanks to Catalonia in 2012” and the voice of Santiago Abascal resonates: “The Spanish people have the right to defend themselves”; Felip Puig was an “informant” for the CNI, and he launches a new story about the former minister.
There is no shortage of pink sauce: “We were looking for an illegitimate daughter for Artur Mas.” And the former president says that he had an unexpected domestic conflict: His daughter, the real one, demanded a higher pay because, according to the dossier, Mas was more generous with his non-existent daughter… Villarejo adds spice to the sauce: “He had You have to go to a university to pick up a girl’s glass and examine her DNA. When I made the first arrangements I saw that this was nonsense.”
Villarejo feeds our morbid voyeur. Who watches who in reality shows and trash TV shows: the viewers or the participants? asked psychologist José Ramon Ubieto a few days ago in La Vanguardia. The ability of the former commissioner is unquestionable. He was about to snatch the throne of the season audience of El món a RAC1 from Gerard Piqué’s interview, with his Casio and his Twingo in the middle of war with Shakira.
