The order to attack 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 transmitted it to his deputy operational director (DAO), Florentino Villabona. This is one of the revelations that former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, a plumber for the State sewers for years, makes in an interview with the director of El món a RAC1, Jordi Basté, which will be broadcast tomorrow, Monday at 9 a.m. Part of the meeting with the former police officer consists of a face to face with the former president of the Generalitat Artur Mas, who was allegedly one of the victims of Villarejo’s police initiatives and his henchmen.
In the interview with Basté, Villarejo explains that in the days prior to 1-O he advised taking “two or three days before three or four police officers” to each polling station “and when they arrive to open the polling station [the polling stations and voters ] well, don’t leave the school open for them, it’s that simple.” The political leaders of the Interior “understood that the intervention of the poor colleagues of both the police and the civil guard was much more, let’s say, striking.”
The person responsible for the operation was “Florentino Villabona,” says Villarejo. A man “very right-wing,” he describes, and “very given to rebuking demonstrations; And also, being a general commissioner, who is like a general, he put on the uniform to be at the demonstrations.” “Look at how much he felt like a leader that when a, let’s say, Spanishist demonstration passed by, so to speak, on Via Laietana [the police station], he went out to the balcony and saluted like Mussolini, to somehow demonstrate that he had done it magnificently.” .
The head of Villabona was Minister Zoido, whom he describes as “a bon vivant”, “they called him Zampa, because he was eating all day and did not worry about too many things.” Zoido was frivolous, he says, for appointing a friend of his from Andalusia as traffic director whom “everyone called Goyito Verbena,” because he “organized the folklore, 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.” Although Rajoy “is a man who always uses Galicianism and when he gives you an order he tells you that ‘it looks like it’s going to rain’ and so on, and you have to interpret what he’s telling you so that he doesn’t tell you later.” deny.”
In his usual line of attacking Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, Mariano Rajoy’s right-hand woman and at the time political head of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Villarejo accuses her of having convinced “President Rajoy that she would control the CNI.” , and therefore Cospedal, not even as Minister of Defense, who should have had control of the CNI, did not have it.”
This structure meant that the CNI did not find the 1-O ballot boxes: “I believe it was a poorly understood controlled explosion. There are probably a series of factors in addition to the ineffectiveness of the person who directed the CNI at that time [Félix Sanz Roldán], who, let’s say, to whom he gave… the little information that the CNI transmits, which was the young lady vice president, they understood that it was… well, that they made a joke, but that the topic was not going to go any further. I understand that it was a… that is, the CNI knew at all times, I am sure, because I remember that although I was already retired, I continued to collaborate with the secret services (…) I reported a series of data about where they could be and “They ignored me.”
In the recording, made last Thursday afternoon in a Barcelona hotel, Villarejo reveals with names and surnames who were two of his sources – until now unpublished – in his preparations for the Catalunya operation. One was a former Government councilor 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 is who” in the independence orbit.
The second would have provided information about Sandro Rosell, who as of 2010 was president of Barça and who was accused in a case for alleged money laundering in an operation to purchase the television rights of the Brazilian team. Before trial, Rosell spent two years in preventive detention. He was acquitted.
