On 20 October last, the retired police officer under investigation in the Tandem case, José Villarejo The Spanish MPs have given him the pulpit in the Congress of Deputies. He assured in the framework of the commission of investigation of the Kitchen case that Spanish spies secretly injected the King Emeritus with female hormones and testosterone inhibitors, Juan Carlos Iin order to "lower his libido". "It was considered a state problem that this man was so ardent", said the main defendant in the proceedings being conducted by the Audiencia Nacional against the politicians.
His appeal to an episode that seemed to have been taken out of Mortadelo and Filemón provoked a massive reaction on the social networks, to which more than a few academics recurrently turn as a thermometer of opinion, and which in this case exceeded 40 degrees. The memes flooded Twitter and WhatsApp with thousands of messages at such a speed that at dinner parties the following weekend there was no one who had not smiled in solitude at the issue, a phenomenon only comparable to the one that starred the very same Julio Iglesias.
However, in this context, some fundamental questions arise, a couple at least that would have been asked Socrates, Plato o Aristotlebut which very few people are currently considering. Is it true that the CNI injected inhibitors to reduce the former monarch's sexual desire? Is the story Villarejo tells true? And even a third question, perhaps more typical of KantWere the national intelligence officials right in the event that the anecdote was genuine?
The MPs decided to bring Villarejo in because they gave him some credibility. However, the likelihood is that there will never be any evidence to answer the philosophers' questions. There will thus be no certainty that the cecilios They drugged the king to calm his lust for passion, but not the other way round either, for no one will be able to claim that the spies ever mounted an anti-libido operation.
In any case, to the spectators in the Roman coliseum who once shouted "Hispanic" to Gladiator and who today spend their time wasting their time on Twitter and Netflix care little about these little details of truth and morality. Whether or not what Villarejo brought to the media's attention is real is of secondary importance. The only important thing is to splash out on this new series, which is also free.
The reason is that in this post-truth scenario, terms such as credibility, verisimilitude or even committed activism weigh much more heavily than certainty, truth or ethics.. What is of real interest is the faux-reality story about the alleged female hormones of the Emeritus and their hidden implications. As in those open-ended books, the reader's imagination builds the rest.
The facts narrated by the former policeman are bread and circuses for the public opinion.which uses the material that comes out of Villarejo's mouth to recreate in its collective imaginary a reality of its own that - to paraphrase Juan José García Noblejas in its Communication and possible worlds- is as important or more important than the real thing. Something similar to what happened in Middle-earth and Star Wars.
The internal rules of the new world that reigns in the heads of citizens are sometimes even more powerful than those that govern off-line life. I would not be surprised, in this context, if the monarch himself began to understand himself in the framework of this new scenario drawn by the pensioner. The city of Philadelphia allowed a statue to be erected to Rocky Balboa because tourists flocked to the steps of the Art Museum to emulate the triumphant moves of the fictional boxer. The Scots substituted in their streets for the Robert the Bruce by William Wallace following the success of Braveheart.
It still happens today with the Marvel world, Anime or The squid gameIt has had such a strong impact that there are already companies making a fortune with similar survival initiatives. It is enough for the stories - real or fictitious - to have solid legs of verisimilitude to gain a foothold in the heads of citizens, who internalise them to the point of making them more their own than their own concerns. However, this - the appearance of truth - is not the only requirement.
There have been other statements by Villarejo that have not been so well received by the general publicWhy is that? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that some of them touched personalities with enough power to placate them. Perhaps it was because the reality shown by these testimonies dismantled other previous castles that people had erected in their heads and had taken for granted for so long that they even recurrently appealed to them to erect entire constructions of arguments that moved even their own lives.
The main witness to the Zaplana case, Marcos Benaventsaid on 27 October that the documentation allegedly found by the Syrian collaborator who led to the investigation, the businessman Imad Ahmad Al Naddaf Yaloukwas "a set-up". The statement is in line with the one made by Villarejo just a week before, precisely in the aforementioned parliamentary commission where he spoke about the real hormones. The pensioner affirmed that the PSOE gave him the order to "destroy" the former minister of José María Aznar through "a Syrian CNI informant".
Is it true what Villarejo says and what Benavent ratifies? Was the operation against Zaplana a set-up? Who commissioned it, if it really existed, and was it right, should the veracity of this public denunciation be confirmed? Again, the most interesting questions are difficult to answer. In this case, moreover, what the former policeman and the witness (both prosecuted) raise is not very funny, as it has not provoked any memes on social media. The film that draws the new story does not invite us to put tits and long hair on Zaplana, as some visual jokes forwarded ad nauseam via WhatsApp did.
What Benavent and Villarejo do is to offer a new possible world, that of an irreverent series that turns upside down what has been taught up to now while shattering the prejudices already firmly established in popular argumentation as immovable axioms. Despite the fact that the investigation of the Erial case has not been concluded, Spaniards had already ruled that Zaplana is corrupt.. The new avenue being pointed out by the two alleged offenders (accused in Taula y Tandemrespectively) makes prosecutors' knees tremble. This time, they do not make firewood from the fallen tree represented by the King emeritus, but directly attack one of the pillars of the rule of law, the one that sustains the public prosecution.
Roberto Ruiz Ballesteros
Director of Litigation Communications at PROA
This text has been previously published in El Mundo
Image credits: EFE