The House That Eugenio Built

They sent the bulldozers in during the second week of November 2010. The wrecking and tidying-up crews worked efficiently and effectively. Where a chalet had stood became once more a plot of land in an area of special countryside protection: pastoral equilibrium was re-established. The chalet, over seventy square metres in size, should not have been built. The only licence for building had been for the renovation of a farm shed.

Who is to say that had the chalet not been demolished that it would not now be subject to "regularisation"? Many a property on Mallorca's rural land was granted an amnesty last year under the regional government's Ley de Suelo. The futures of some of these buildings would have been documented and stored in the pending trays of town halls or other authorities, some stamped in red with a threatening "denuncia", awaiting transmission to the courts. Their executions had been stayed at their death rows among bucolic greenery until one day came the pardon. Pay a suitable retribution and all will be forgiven. The bulldozers sighed. There was no work for them.

But the chalet I mention never had a chance. It had to be removed and to be levelled. It had to be restored as a place of natural habitat. There is no X to mark the spot of where it was. You wouldn't know it had ever been there. This was ground-zero chalet. There were strong political as well as legal reasons why all physical memory of it should have been expunged. This had been the chalet that Eugenio had built. 

Eugenio Hidalgo, the one-time and now disgraced and imprisoned mayor of Andratx, was one of the unlucky ones. Unlucky because, though he engaged in widespread planning abuses and got sent to prison as a result, he might well have believed that, abuse or not, the chalet would eventually be given official reprieve or become sufficiently well established in terms of the years it had been built that it would no longer be the target for the bulldozers. After all, wasn't this how such things worked in Mallorca?

Had the chalet been anyone else's, it might well have been reprieved. But it wasn't anyone else's. It was Eugenio's. A further pound of flesh was required in addition to the jail sentence. It became ground-zero chalet in a revenge attack. The demolition was symbolic restitution for the destruction of public confidence through the chain reaction of what Eugenio hadn't bargained for: the actions of anti-corruption prosecutors newly emboldened and supported by the national attorney-general. Matas, Munar, Ordinas, Nadal, Buils, many more have been burned by the firestorm that the prosecutors unleashed. And it was one whose source can be localised to protected land in Andratx. Ground zero.

Llorenç Suau is a mayoral descendant of Eugenio's. The current mayor of Andratx, he won't be re-standing. In October last year, Llorenç and two former mayors, Isabel Alemany and Francesc Femenias, were indicted to declare "in quality" by a Palma court looking into supposed irregularities surrounding the licence for developing car parking in Sant Elm, which just so happens to be the property of the Alemany family. Though not accused, Suau has opted against re-election as he supports the stance of his party, the PP, on not having candidates caught up in legal proceedings. He reckons, though, that whereas the presumption of innocence is a right for all citizens, it doesn't apply to politicians. There is now a presumption of guilt. And, sadly and generally speaking, he is right; sadly because it shouldn't be so and generally speaking because, notwithstanding attempts to clean up local politics, the public wants to believe in political crookedness.

For Llorenç, the problem is that there is someone whose guilt was proven. Eugenio's. Hidalgo is the cross that Andratx mayors have to bear. Llorenç knows this. Innocent or not innocent, the public smell urban planning indiscretions - real or not real - as acutely as they detect the burning of forest land. Their senses have been heightened by the Hidalgo-fallout and Tramuntana firestorms.

Elsewhere, and even with rules laid down by the PP regarding candidates, mayors are not as prepared as Llorenç to sacrifice themselves. Tomeu Cifre in Pollensa is one. Local rather than general party rules appear to apply to him. He has not been charged with any criminal offence, thus he can re-stand and, it should be noted, court documentation in respect of one accusation against him appears not to have been forthcoming from his accuser.

But perhaps mud sticks, regardless. Eugenio didn't build a house of corruption for mayors; it was there before him. What he did build, though, was an enduring edifice of perception, proven in and reinforced by the courts, that will not shift from public sight. Innocence, guilt. Who would be a mayor?

Society Is Sick: Corruption in Spain

There was a time when I paid comparatively little attention to politics in Mallorca or indeed to politics in Spain. What made me take far greater notice was what happened on 27 November 2006. The mayor of Andratx, Eugenio Hidalgo, was arrested, as was the director-general of land planning at the regional government. The trail from the corruption case which exposed Hidalgo was to lead to Jaume Matas, then the president of the Balearics. More or less all the corruption investigations since had their origins in Andratx. Investigators and judges began to make links; Urdangarin, Munar, Matas, you can trace them all back to that day eight years ago.

It is conceivable that fewer cases might have cropped up had it not been for the former attorney-general, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, seeking and appointing regional prosecutors to root out corruption and later creating the anti-corruption and organised crime prosecution service. In 2004 the Balearics got the first regional prosecutor, Juan Carrau, who instigated the case against Hidalgo, by which time he had been joined by the second prosecutor, the more celebrated Pedro Horrach. There are now four prosecutors in all.

As we are all too well aware, new corruption cases still arise with regrettable frequency. The prosecutors have greater powers, but they can't prevent corruption, only investigate it. Nevertheless, maybe these greater powers have had some deterrent effect or at least helped to improve the perception of corruption in Spain. The latest survey of corruption in 175 countries by Transparency International (TI) shows that Spain has improved three places since last year; it is ranked 37.

A director at TI, Alejandro Salas, has suggested that when economic times were good, corruption was hidden. Economic difficulties have brought about greater awareness and willingness to pursue the corrupt and a more open public and political debate about corruption. Hence why, one might suggest, Mariano Rajoy has been talking about the subject, but then Rajoy's pronouncements have tended to be reactive, as was the case with the now infamous "Spain is not corrupted".

Rajoy didn't actually say that "Spain is not corrupt". It was "is not corrupted". The semantic distinction is important, as it implies a corruption of recent times. But this is a view with which Alejandro Salas disagrees. "Corruption is not new in Spain. It is an historical phenomenon." "What strikes me is that corruption in Spain is very structural, very systematic. It is not just one party, not one government, not one province. It is impregnated into different sectors of society." Rajoy might be advised to take note of what Salas says, just as he might like to consider words that were spoken in 1993. "It is not politicians who are corrupt, but it is society that is sick." Who spoke them? Jaume Matas, who, in addition to having twice been Balearics president, was a colleague of Rajoy's in Aznar's national government. Matas was quoting a Spanish philosopher, José Luis Aranguren.

Gabriel Garcias is a professor of law at the university in Palma. He has said that "so long as there is no ethical or moral transformation in society, the law will solve nothing". I used this same quote in an article from 2010. The prosecutors have been prosecuting since then, but have they really had a deterrent effect? Maybe, but at the time I was quoting Garcias I was also quoting the Balearics spokesperson for the UPyD party, Juan Luis Calbarro: "The Balearics have the highest number of people who are corrupt or allegedly corrupt per square metre in Spain." Calbarro explained the link between politics and society thus: "businesspeople who are friends of certain politicians, businesspeople who assemble companies in order to receive adjudications decided by their political friends, as well as the wives, husbands, cousins and nephews of politicians".

Since the emergence of the Hidalgo affair in 2006, I have written some 70 articles with corruption as a central theme. The society-politics nexus has been a not uncommon aspect of these articles. Some might aver that politics are divorced from society at large. In terms of general society's distance from the political machinery and from decision-making, this is probably so, but society and politics are most definitely not separated in other ways. They are one and the same when it comes to corruption. Garcias and Calbarro said so in 2010. Salas now says so, and even Matas implied this twenty-one years ago.

The historical phenomenon of corruption to which Alejandro Salas refers can be found over the centuries. For example, the Inquisition was inherently corrupt on account of the need to fund and perpetuate itself, while the sham democracy from the later nineteenth century run by the local political bosses, the "caciques", was so corrupt that no one even sought to hide the fact. "Spain is not corrupted." It's a semantic error.