👮‍♂️ Everyone Goes to Prison

Plus: JC1 ticks off the Royal Palace, the right marches against Sánchez, and swine flu is back.

Madrid | Issue #128

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Jail time focuses the mind

👶 Look who’s talking! (aka Koldo and Ábalos go to prison — and one starts singing)

Look who’s talking! No, not the charming/cringey 1989 movie about a talking baby that revived the career of John Travolta (look it up, Gen Z!). We’re talking about José Luis Ábalos, former PSOE number two, architect of Pedro Sánchez’s rise, and now jailbird-in-chief of the Caso Koldo — who has discovered a sudden passion for transparency now that he’s staring at up to 24 years in prison.

• Jail really clarifies things. Last Thursday, the Supreme Court judge Leopoldo Puente sent Ábalos and his ex-right-hand Koldo García (of Caso Koldo fame, natch) to pre-trial detention without bail, citing an “extreme” risk of flight.

• The cases these guys face are all over the place — pay-to-play construction deals, commissions on COVID masks, yadda yadda — but the charges sound like a bad bar bill: Criminal organization, Bribery, Misuse of privileged information, Influence trading and — for shits and giggles — Embezzlement

• The context. The investigation phase is closed, and the trial is soon. The anticorruption prosecutor is asking for 24 years for Ábalos and almost 20 for Koldo; the people’s accusation filed by the PP wants 30.

They’re now sharing a cell in the prison in Soto del Real, shivering through Madrid winter, complaining about thin pillows, asking family for thermal clothes and even a notebook — presumably to jot down a prison memoir, “Yo, inocente”.

Jailbird singer. Since finding himself facing a shit-ton of prison, Ábalos has decided to do what in Spain is called “poner el ventilador”. Literal translation: turning on the fan. Practical translation: spraying muck everywhere and hoping someone in power blinks and helps you out.

So much to tell! In the past days, Ábalos & Co. have done exactly that, mostly in the press and on X (though not in court, much to the prosecutors’ chagrin):

• The secret caserío summit. Ábalos says “sources who were there” told him Sánchez, Santos Cerdán (his successor as PSOE number two), and Arnaldo Otegi (the head of the Basque separatist Bildu party) met in a Bilbao farmhouse in 2018 to negotiate the no-confidence motion against former PM Mariano Rajoy (PP). The government and Sánchez himself say it’s absolutely false. In fact, Otegi says he has never spoken to Sánchez.

• Begoña & the Air Europa rescue. Ábalos claims that airline boss Javier Hidalgo begged him — and also called First Lady Begoña Gómez — for help unblocking a €475m rescue of Air Europa, while his subsequent Marbella holiday, worth €9,800, was paid for as compensation for his trouble. (Sánchez denies the Hidalgo-Begoña call. Air Europa also denies it.)

• Delcygate, the sequel. Ábalos’s son Víctor claims it was PM Sánchez personally who ordered his dad to go to Barajas Airport in Jan. 2020 to keep Venezuelan VP Delcy Rodríguez from stepping on EU soil (she was banned by the EU) during an odd visit to the country by a sanctioned politician.

• The blank-check story. Víctor also alleges that Santos Cerdán came with a “blank check” from Sánchez to buy Ábalos’ silence — and that Ábalos only started talking because he realized “the game was rigged and we arrived late to the table.”

Obligatory denial. The PSOE denies everything, and spokeswoman Montse Mínguez calls the son’s claims “falsehoods” and repeats the phrase of the week: “No nos vamos a dejar chantajear por nadie.” (“We will not be blackmailed by anyone.”). The party also keeps reminding everyone that Ábalos left the party almost two years ago.

I barely knew ‘em. Sánchez is responding to all the drama around Ábalos — the guy who basically ran his leadership campaign and, later, the whole party machine — with the classic script: distance and selective amnesia.

• Who? In an interview on RTVE, the PSOE-friendly state TV, Sánchez admitted that he had “political confidence” in Ábalos (which would be hard to deny; there are too many photos). But, he said, “From a personal point of view, he was a great unknown to me.”

• Awkward. Back in July 2023, Sánchez texted Ábalos, “The truth is, I’ve missed working with you many times. I’ve always greatly valued your political judgment. And your friendship. Anyway, I’m sending you a hug.” But hey, 🤷.

A (chicken) pox on your house. No evidence has been discovered linking Sánchez to Ábalos’s alleged crimes. But it’s pretty bad as it is. As one columnist noted, corruption scandals are like varicella (the chicken pox virus). They go quiet, people forget they have it, then one stressful event and — boom — a painful flare-up. 🔥

• Ábalos in prison is one of those flare-ups. It doesn’t prove that “sanchismo is a mafia”, as PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo likes to say. But it does keep the PSOE’s worst storylines on screen, in a legislature that’s already moving like a zombie shuffle.

And that fan? Now that it’s on, it gonna be very hard to stop.

More news below. 👇👇

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 😡 Tens of thousands rally against Sánchez in Madrid

Madrid got all Christmas-y on Sunday with… oh, wait, no it didn’t. Madrid hosted yet another giant political rally as the PP gathered thousands of supporters at the Temple of Debod to protest what they call the “corruption” of Pedro Sánchez’s government. The party framed the event as a defense of democracy stuff and demanded early elections.

• Welcoming the jailbirds. The rally was announced just hours after Koldo and Ábalos (see above ☝️) were sent to prison, and was organized under the super-subtle slogan “Mafia or democracy?”.

• No one can count because numbers are political. As usual, no one could agree on attendance: the PP claimed 80,000 people; the PSOE-led Delegación del Gobierno said 40,000.

A full PP family photo. National leaders, regional power brokers, congressional reps, rank-and-file members attended — plus former prime ministers José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy, who received some of the loudest applause.

• Madrid’s mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, opened by calling for immediate elections — “[Sánchez] shouldn’t be here; we should be voting” — and delivered one of the day’s more theatrical lines: “Born on a farmstead, destined to die at the ballot box,” a jab at the supposed farmhouse meeting near Bilbao where Sánchez negotiated support from the Basque separatist party Bildu to oust Rajoy in 2018.

God bless the Queen of Troll. Madrid regional presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the PP’s biggest star, drew the day’s most fevered reaction. Her speech mixed her trademark confrontation with warnings about “totalitarian projects,” “mafias,” and “the most critical moment in 47 years of democracy.”

• She went further than anyone else (as usual), linking the PSOE’s alliances with Bildu to ETA’s legacy and comparing Sánchez to Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, complete with “bolivarian” references.

Then came the headliner, PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who — surprise! — also used the rally to call for early elections.

• “Sanchismo is in jail and has to get out of the government,” he declared, to chants of “¡Presidente, presidente!” Feijóo argued that the corruption cases hitting people close to Sánchez are not isolated scandals but “the system” by which the prime minister governs.

• He insisted he does not want to reach power via a no-confidence vote (though the PP recently courted Junts for just that purpose) and called on Spaniards to “decide at the ballot box.”

Big #7! Sunday’s rally was the PP’s seventh major protest against Sánchez since Feijóo became party leader in 2022.

• The scale varies (some drew more than 100,000 attendees, according to PP estimates), but the pattern is clear. Feijóo is turning street mobilization into a core party weapon, positioning the PP as guardian of constitutional order.

With the PSOE corruption scandal only heating up 🔥, Sunday’s rally suggests the political drama won’t cool down any time soon.

2. 👑 The ex-King dropped a video and the Royals are not amused

Spain’s former king, Juan Carlos I (aka JC1), surprised the country this week with something nobody saw coming: a surreal one-minute video aimed at young Spaniards, released first on WhatsApp and then on YouTube, where it spread like wildfire (see above).

• JC1 hasn’t addressed the public since abdicating in 2014, so this message was kind of a big deal.

• He looks straight into the camera to remind younger generations of Spain’s “exemplary” transition to democracy and the “effort, generosity and risks” taken by their elders after Franco croaked.

• Then the kicker. He asks young people to support his son, King Felipe VI, in the “very hard work” of uniting Spaniards.

Publicity stunt? The message dropped 48 hours before the release of Reconciliación, the memoir he commissioned from French writer Laurence Debray — already out in France for a month.

• JC1 calls the book an attempt to tell Spain’s recent history “without self-interested distortions,” a phrase widely read as a jab at how his legacy has been, um, “reframed” since his financial scandals and his self-imposed Abu Dhabi exile (since 2020).

• The video’s aesthetics also sparked chatter. A giant waving Spanish flag, stiff delivery, and a format suspiciously like an official address. Some viewers even wondered if it was AI before the authenticity was confirmed.

Spanish media responded instantly and unanimously. Newspapers, radio, and TV treated the clip as a political statement wrapped in book promo.

• Editorials called it “controversial” “weird”, and “surprising,” especially given the timing — the video landed while Felipe VI was delivering an official speech at a ceremony in Madrid. Vanity Fair Spain even said the video “damages” King Felipe by stealing the limelight.

• Reports also noted the recording details. Despite speculation that it was filmed in Abu Dhabi, people close to the emeritus say it was shot in Vitoria on Oct. 30 during a brief medical visit. But who cares? Watch El Gran Wyoming’s parody with JC1 in gulf headgear.

Royally mad. The sharpest reaction came (surprisingly) from the Royal Household. The Zarzuela Palace broke its usual silence and publicly distanced itself from the video — something almost unprecedented.

• Palace sources said they had no prior info about the recording, didn’t understand the point, and found its release “neither necessary nor appropriate.” (PM Sánchez later echoed that phrasing.)

• Translation: the actual royals were blindsided and unimpressed. The statement came just nine days after the royal family celebrated the 50th anniversary of the restoration of the monarchy (an event Juan Carlos did not attend) and less than two weeks after the first full family lunch since 2023.

Meanwhile, sources close to the rascally old codger say JC1 is “very happy” with the video’s impact. Reconciliación hit Spanish bookstores yesterday, and Debray is in Madrid signing copies — there are expectations of bigly holiday sales, and the memoir is reportedly already outselling the most recent books by J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown. We suspect JC1’s take may be, “Hey, reconcile this, pal!”

3. 🐗 Don’t let the jabalíes near the pigs!

It’s like the beginning of a zombie apocalypse flick. One moment grandma is wobbling and mumbling; the next, the entire town is undead. Except here the zombies are jabalíes (wild boars), and the outbreak starts with two of them found dead in the Collserola park outside Barcelona. And unlike your typical zombie movie, the monsters don’t come for you — they go straight for Spain’s €9bn pork economy.

• Welcome back, African swine fever (ASF)! Also known to vets as La Pepa, because a cute nickname really softens the blow of a virus that gives pigs a few days of fever, coughing, internal bleeding and then kills, like, 100% of them. Humans? Totally safe. Your jamón: also safe. But Spain’s pork sector? Totally in meltdown.

Spain hasn’t seen ASF since 1994, and its return is both surreal and depressingly predictable. The virus has marched across Europe for years, hitching from Georgia to Russia to China and into 13 EU countries. All it took here, investigators say, was a jabalí snacking on a contaminated bocadillo tossed from a truck stop on the AP-7 — the “sandwich theory.” Truly the saddest origin story since Patient Zero ate a bat.

• Collserola, normally full of hikers and cyclists, is now a de facto biohazard zone. UME troops, Mossos in Tedax units, disinfectant checkpoints, and park workers are bleaching every trash can in sight. With 900 jabalíes roaming the hills (down from nearly 2,000 a few years ago), authorities are sweeping the forest for corpses. So far they’ve found at least 50, though not all have yet been tested for ASF.

And the economic panic? Immediate and bigly. Spain is Europe’s top pork producer (54m pigs slaughtered last year 🥳) and the third-largest globally. So when ASF reappears, countries slam their borders shut. Japan, Mexico, and the U.K. have frozen imports from Spain. Around 120 export certificates are blocked. Minister Luis Planas admits “a third” of overseas certificates are now stuck.

• What’s saving the sector from full cardiac arrest? God bless the Chinese. Beijing, which buys 42% of Spain’s pork exports, has so far banned only pork from Barcelona province. The rest of Spain remains open for business.

Still, farmers are forkin’ terrified. If ASF jumps from boars to domestic pigs, entire farms must be mass-culled, production plummets, and prices skyrocket — which is exactly what happened in China’s 2018 outbreak, when the country lost 30% of its pigs and prices exploded.

• That was right before COVID. And, well, we all remember how calm and orderly the world stayed after that.

4. 🛂 A wave of immigration is coming — it’s just waiting for Spain’s bureaucracy to get its act together

Deadlines focus the mind. 2.3 million minds, actually. That’s how many wannabe Spaniards rushed to the world’s Spanish consulates to file (or at least book an appointment to file) for nationality before the Oct. 21 cutoff of the Ley de Memoria Democrática. And let’s just say the consulates are not exactly thriving under pressure.

• How bad is it? Of those 2.3 million hopefuls, 1 million have filed their applications so far, and another 1.3 million are still waiting for their appointment because the system collapsed under so much humanity.

• Just 414,000 people have actually been approved — about 17% — and only 237,000 have made it all the way to signing up as actual Spaniards, croquetas and all. At this rate, some will get their passport around the same time we get the next season of Paquita Salas (oh, just read about that here).

So what is this Ley de Memoria Democrática (and did Orwell name it)? No — though “Democratic Memory” does sound like something Big Brother would put on a poster.

• The 2022 law was originally written as a way to offer nationality to descendants of Spaniards who lost theirs due to exile or discrimination. But under a later legal interpretation that’s driving the tsunami, any child and grandchild of Spanish citizens can reclaim nationality with proof of their lineage.

• The law also fixes past gender discrimination by including children of Spanish mothers who lost nationality upon marrying foreigners pre-1978.

• Even 171 descendants of international brigadistas have already been recognized.

And where is the system breaking? Basically everywhere. Consular offices are bursting, roofs are literally falling in (hi, São Paulo), and some government sources admit the process could last decades.

• Actual numbers. Buenos Aires is drowning in 645,000 requests, followed by Córdoba (125,000), Havana (350,000), Mexico City (165,000), São Paulo (150,000), Miami (120,000), and Caracas (40,000 provisional).

• Argentina alone accounts for nearly 40% of the total. Because, you know, the economy there has basically collapsed in recent years. That’s also true of Venezuela, but Venezuela — the whole country — has already moved to Spain.

All of this will probably reshape Spain. Once processed, the number of Spaniards abroad is expected to jump from three million to five.

• But the bigger shift may be political. As we noted in a recent piece, Spanish attitudes toward immigration are hardening as more people arrive, just as housing becomes increasingly unaffordable.

• Studies from the CIS polling agency show worries about immigration rising fivefold in two years, Vox keeps yelling about “invasions” (because the right wing is gonna right wing), and even the PP is rolling out plans for a Canada-style immigration points system.

Basically, Spain is about to welcome a new wave of citizens just as the country is becoming much less chill about immigration. This could get awkward.

5.😔 Jaén in shock after the deaths of 2 teenage girls

Jaén is in mourning after the deaths of two teenage girls, aged 15 and 16, whose bodies were found in the Parque de la Concordia in the early hours of Saturday in what looked like a possible suicide.

• The girls’ desperate families used phone geolocation to find them in the park when they failed to return home on time, and were the first to arrive at the scene, where they tried to revive them before emergency services arrived.

• The initial forensic inspection found no signs of external violence or evidence of third-party involvement, and the case remains under judicial secrecy.

The girls, Rosmed (15) and Sharit (16), were daughters of Colombian parents with deep roots in Jaén. They had studied together in secondary school and, more recently, were linked to a vocational hairdressing course, although only one of them was still enrolled.

Friends describe them as inseparable. Rosmed was known online as “Chara”, a highly creative teenager who filled her social networks with digital drawings inspired by anime and videogames, and who openly talked about social anxiety.

• Education authorities say Rosmed had been under a self-harm prevention protocol in one of her former schools, with follow-up by guidance staff, a school nurse and her family. Her mother has also spoken of a past bullying episode at that center.

Sharit’s parents paint a very different picture of their daughter’s state of mind. They insist she was in “her best moment” — happy, studying to follow the family trade in aesthetics, with a boyfriend she adored and a stable routine.

• They reject the idea that Sharit wanted to die and say they don’t believe this was a simple suicide pact. Her father has publicly questioned the official narrative and demanded that the police get to the bottom of what happened that night, including how and where the ropes used were obtained and why the park was so poorly lit.

The schools where the girls studied are now trying to process what happened, and have stressed that no evidence of bullying has been detected in either girl’s current school, despite what some classmates have suggested to the media.

Investigators are now combing through the girls’ phones, social media accounts and recent WhatsApp messages to reconstruct their final hours and to understand the dynamic between them.

• Dark theory. One key question is whether one of the girls, already identified as having previous suicidal ideation, might have influenced or “suggested” the joint act to the other, or whether there was external pressure or third party involved in planning that night.

For now, the National Police’s main working hypothesis is a double suicide, but all lines of investigation remain open.

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