The Malaya case was the first major case against the political and economic corruption of Spanish democracy. Since the first arrests were announced in March 2006, their details filled newspaper pages and hours of radio and television news, until more than nine years later, in July 2015, when the Supreme Court handed down the final verdict, lifting the judicial curtain on the great scandal that is it caused. After an investigation that temporarily deprived Marbella of its glory and made it the protagonist of the chronicle of events, to its great regret, nothing was the same again. After her, the police and judiciary changed their way of fighting corruption. And it also showed citizens, and especially white-collar criminals, that impunity is never guaranteed, as cases such as Belt and Púnica later confirmed.
Despite its relevance, the Malaya case is now a vague memory for the vast majority, as 17 years have passed since its outbreak. Many only remember the involvement of famous personalities like the Tonadillera IsMalaya. Once a secret operation. RTVE Play is now attempting to rescue us from this inevitable collective amnesia with the documentary Malaya. “Secret Operation”, a true television crime with four chapters of one hour each, in which twenty of the main protagonists appear in front of the camera, many of whom are unknown to most viewers, who remember how they lived back then and the true scope The research was pioneering work. There will be judges speaking – including the judge who investigated the case, Miguel Ángel Torres -, police officers, prosecutors, activists, journalists, some of the interviewees, a former government president, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero; and a former interior minister, Antonio Camacho. All this, supplemented by images from the newspaper library of the time, recent shots of the scenes and some silent and certainly dispensable recreations.
An image from the documentary series “Malaya. “Secret operation”.
The story is not linear because it cannot be linear, and despite the confusion that jumps in time can sometimes cause the viewer, it looks simple. In large part because the long time that has passed since the events has allowed the authors of the documentary to develop a script from a perspective far removed from the information needs of those days, as anecdotes – like the episode of the alleged Painting – performed by Joan Miró, that the main actor, the businessman Juan Antonio Roca, had it hung in the bathroom and which is denied in one of the chapters – sometimes gained more relevance in the media than it deserved. This journalistic calm that temporal distance gives now allows the documentary to show not only the trees of this gigantic theft of public funds, but also the true extent of the forest that represented the corruption in the Malaya case.
In this way, the documentary recalls essential background information, without which it is difficult to understand why the plot was able to rage in Marbella City Hall for years. It is one of Malaya’s great successes. Secret operation. Nothing can be understood without remembering, as in the series, the controversial Jesús Gil, his time as mayor of this city on the Costa del Sol and his problems with the justice system, an introduction to what ultimately led to the discovery of this case led. But also the harassment that the judge who investigated him was subjected to, and who remembers in the documentary what that meant to him on a personal level.
However, this laudable journalistic exercise is not yet complete. Throughout the four episodes, the viewer sees the same characters parade over and over again – some too often – and misses the testimony of an important part of the Malaya case: those involved. Only two of those who sat on the bench – which, on the other hand, was very secondary – commented on their self-exculpatory version. The rest doesn’t appear. It’s not the fault of the documentary’s authors. As explained at the end of the last chapter, 24 of the key players in this corruption scandal declined to speak for the documentary. Among them is the key figure Roca.
The silence of all of them inevitably leaves gaps in the story, but in no way invalidates the good practice of journalism that Malaya reflects. Secret operation. It is always necessary to save from oblivion the facts that explain Spain’s recent history, even if incomplete. And this true crime comes from one of them, the first macro case of political corruption in Spain.
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