Mà rius DÃaz Bielsa, the first mayor of the city of Badalona after the recovery of democracy, died this Saturday in Barbastro on the verge of turning 90 years old. Retired from active politics for years, DÃaz had returned to his “place in the worldâ€: the Aragonese Pyrenees that he loved so much, his house in the Pineta valley, which he himself had built for years. He lived in the lush valley, an ancient glacier dominated by Mount Perdido, until his iron health began to fail. He died in the city where he was born in August 1933, accompanied by his four children, Mà rius, Roger, Helena and Hèctor.
He was a mountain man who was interested in the sea. After finishing high school, he moved to Barcelona to study sailing. To contribute to the payment of his studies, he worked in the afternoons in the workshop of a relative in Badalona and there he learned about mechanics. Concluded the naval school, he preferred industry to the merchant marine. He opened his own workshop. Sixties. Jet development. At that time Badalona was the city with the greatest industrial variety in Spain. Dozens of large factories and a workshop on each corner. In the MÃ rius DÃaz foundry, however, there was a machine dedicated to other tasks. Behind a partition was one of the duplicators of the propaganda apparatus of the clandestine PSUC. In that workshop, metal was melted and leaflets against the Franco regime were printed. Married to the educator Teresa Lleal, daughter of a merchant marine captain, DÃaz was more than just a small businessman, dynamic, likeable, enthusiastic, with a great capacity for social relations. Teresa and MÃ rius shared a great passion for music, they were part of the new cultural circles of the city and the typographer Abilio Campos, a lifelong friend, brought them closer to the PSUC.
Mechanics and books. At the beginning of the seventies, MÃ rius DÃaz was one of the promoters of the Al Vent bookstore, which would soon become a center of cultural reference. He also participated in the foundation of the neighborhood association of the Center neighborhood. In 1979, the PSUC proposed that he lead the Badalona municipal list in the first democratic municipal elections. At that time he was the director of a shipbuilding factory in Baix Llobregat. A factory director at the head of a communist list broke some schemes and that was the key to his success. He headed a very representative list of the different sectors of Badalona and managed to win in a city that, in the general elections, seemed much more inclined to the PSC.
The company director went on to direct the municipal administration of a Badalona in which everything was lacking. He was a very dynamic, executive mayor, focused on two fronts: bringing order to an antiquated and disoriented administration due to the negligence of the last years of the dictatorship and facing at least five basic problems: the lack of public schools and institutes, serious pollution from the beach, the absence of urban planning, the uncertain future of the Montigalá-Batllòria industrial estate, an asset of the Banca Catalana group in which it was intended to build a gigantic residential neighborhood for 60,000 people (the equivalent of the population of Girona at the time) and the uncertainty about the Can Ruti hospital (today Hospital Germans Trias), which the UCD Government did not decide to start up. There was also a pile of unpaid taxes at the municipal treasury offices. 26 new school buildings were opened in four years, the beach sanitation program was launched, air pollution was reduced, the Germans Trias hospital was opened, urban planning plans were drawn up for all neighborhoods and a reorientation was negotiated from the Montigalà -Batllòria industrial estate, with less housing, more parks and more services. It was a tough negotiation with Banca Catalana and later with the Deposit Guarantee Fund. Mà rius DÃaz never appeared in the list of metropolitan mayors for whom Jordi Pujol, president of the Generalitat, felt a special sympathy.
It was worked hard. It was a municipal coalition government (PSUC-PSC) aimed at putting the city in order, applying a democratic regeneration program previously agreed upon by all the opposition parties of the old regime. DÃaz was a popular mayor, without populist excesses. The following example, very from another time, describes the character. The introduction of information technology in the municipal administration made it possible to know how many fees and taxes were pending collection. It was technically possible to send a communication to the defaulters with all the pending receipts, offering to pay the debt in installments. There were thousands of people and there was only one year left for the second municipal elections. MÃ rius DÃaz gave the order to collect all pending receipts, without any delay. At the end of the mandate, the Badalona City Council had no deficit.
That rigorous policy did not take into account Kabul. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought to the fore the existing dissensions in the PSUC between two tendencies difficult to reconcile: Eurocommunists and pro-Soviet. For some, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia was a broad democratic front, with many nuances; for others, a communist party that had to get rid of reformist ambiguities. The discussion ended in a split. Possibly the discussion was somewhat more complex, but that was the substance. Some wanted to return to social democracy with leftist accents. Others did not want to get away from the USSR. We are talking about the final stretch of the so-called cold war. The current war in Ukraine allows a better reinterpretation of that episode. General discussions and local realities. The municipal elections of 1983 offered an interesting paradox: the two parties that had governed Badalona obtained more support than ever. Communists and Socialists added up to 80% of the votes after their first experience of joint government in one of the most complex cities in Catalonia. The PSC was ahead this time. The pro-Soviet split (three thousand votes) took the mayoralty from DÃaz, who had never traveled to Russia. Joan Blanch, another man of strong character, became the new mayor of Badalona.
Mà rius DÃaz continued to be faithful to his own, combining municipal representation with the management of a computer company. They were difficult years in which he had to face illness and the death of his wife. He was more interested in action than rhetoric. He never loved conspiracies or theoretical baroques. There was not an ounce of intellectual melancholy in him. He was above all a vital, active, generous man who never stopped feeling the claim of the Aragonese Pyrenees. He had very good friends in Aragón, among them, the singer-songwriter José Antonio Labordeta. He never broke ties with Aragon and when he retired he settled permanently in the Pineta Valley, his place in the world.
Those first four years of municipal democracy have left an indelible memory in Badalona, ​​as if the freshness of unrepeatable changes had been preserved in amber. The city keeps fond memories of its first mayor, who two years ago received the title of adoptive son. An entire generation of men and women gave their best to help rebuild and legitimize democracy in this country. Mà rius DÃaz, a land sailor, was one of them. That was his ship until the Pyrenees asked him to return.
