The embarrassing remarks made by José María Saiz about Irene Montero, belittling her and profanely assuring her that she had achieved her position as Minister for sexual relations with former Vice President Pablo Iglesias, It is not the first controversy surrounding this popular mayor of Villar de Cañas (Cuenca). The PP opened an informational dossier this Thursday, hours after video of their city council’s rallies aired. This Friday, the party’s deputy secretary, Esteban González Pons, assured that Saiz “will be subject to sanctions.”
Most had so far revolved around the same issue: the failed centralized interim storage (ATC) project for nuclear waste to be stored in the small community of 385 people in La Moncloa, planned and approved by the executive branch of Mariano Rajoy’s government his then number two in the party, María Dolores de Cospedal.
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After the political change of color of the regional government, already with the socialist Emiliano García-Page in the presidency, and when it was already becoming clear that the city would not have a nuclear waste site, Saiz Page assured: “This man is not directly in the head” of him and “everyone he assured his advisors that “they each smoke an alpaca of marijuana”. It was 2005, and the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha had just rejected the Villar de Cañas urban planning plan linked to the ATC project. The nuclear dump project began to take its toll. When the government’s decision not to approve the development plan became known, Saiz accused the García Page government of having “bad milk” and wanting to ruin around twenty communities. But personal references were added to the criticism: he said of the Castilian-Manchegoi president that he was “bad like himself, stupid like himself and useless like himself”. Three years later, the regional government’s judiciary concurred and endorsed the decision to rescind the city plan.
The focus of Saiz, who has collected seven mandates at the head of this Conquense town hall, the last with six of the seven councilors he has in the hands of the PP, has almost always been on the President of Castilian-Manchego, alluded to before a few weeks that “He doesn’t even know where Cuenca is.” He went so far as to threaten him with a lawsuit for subsistence when the Supreme Court annulled a decree by the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha that wanted to prevent the construction of the nuclear waste site, although in the end it did not appear.
Not only García-Page was the subject of his unfortunate language. Elena de la Cruz, who was Castile-La Mancha’s development minister in 2015 – died in 2017 – went so far as to make sure “she hasn’t a damn clue what she’s saying”. Some statements also related to the refusal of the Government of Castile-La Mancha to authorize this nuclear storage facility, which despite the doubts of the technical reports has been described as an economic boost for the municipality.
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The environmental movements were – in contrast to the ATC – in the crosshairs of Saiz. 11 years ago, during an action by Enresa, the National Radioactive Waste Company, which intended to build the nuclear storage facility in this city, Saiz snapped at them about the dump: “You put it in your balls.” “Yeah, I told them because they’re fed up with me. They offered garlic and rotten cheese and said that’s what the city would give,” he assured EL PAÍS in a telephone interview at the time. Saiz also admitted he shouldn’t have said it, but added: “They turned me black and sometimes you judge yourself.”
A year later, in 2013, he prevented a group of environmentalists from recording a plenary session taking place in Villar de Cañas to discuss the ATC project. Back in 2015, in an interview on Trece TV, he assured: “I’m more an ecologist than the ecologists, I live in a city … And an ATC is not dangerous, that’s proven.” And he concluded: “The ecologists go like a cow without it Bell jar.”
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