Audio Spain

At the time of writing, dozens of journalists across Spain are still listening to Koldo García 's audio recordings in search of news, relevant information, or a clickbait. As you know, audience ratings are currently measured by the number of readers and also by the accumulation of digital clicks. It may seem like they're the same thing, but they're not. Reading isn't the same as gossiping. But clicks count in the irreversible age of digital information.

In the coming hours and days, there will be a Koldo mosaic in the media. The first tile of that mosaic appeared yesterday. It is an audio recording in which the voice of a fixer named Víctor Aldama can be heard disassociating Begoña Gómez , Pedro Sánchez 's wife, from the efforts to rescue the airline Air Europa in the midst of the COVID epidemic. Aldama was in pretrial detention for alleged fraud against the Public Treasury in the hydrocarbon subsector, committed between 2022 and 2024. The prisoner was released by the National Court after his statement incriminating Koldo García in a corruption scheme that ended up leading Santos Cerdán , former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE, to prison. The same case has José Luis Àbalos , former Minister of Transport and Cerdán's predecessor as Secretary of Organization of the Socialist Party, on the brink. This is the case that threatens to sink the PSOE electorally.

Like Koldo García, Aldama was an informant for the Civil Guard and in 2022 received a decoration from the Benemérita, the Cross of Merit with a White Ribbon, a decoration promoted by the Anti-Terrorist Intelligence Unit of the Armed Institute and awarded by the current Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande Marlaska . Koldo García Izaguirre, a collaborator of Santos Cerdán in the PSOE of Navarra since the end of ETA, when he stopped working as a bodyguard, was also decorated by the Civil Guard in 2018 with the Cross of Merit with a White Ribbon. The decoration was awarded during the final weeks of Mariano Rajoy's government. The reasons behind this decoration are confidential.

The investigating judge in the Koldo case has decided to hand over the audio recordings linked to the latest report from the Civil Guard's Central Operational Unit to Supreme Court Judge Leopoldo Puente , following a request to that effect from Cerdán's defense attorneys. In their letter to the judge, the defense attorney for the former PSOE Organization Secretary expressed suspicions that the audio recordings could have been manipulated. Judge Puente has rejected this possibility in writing, and the release of the audio recordings to the parties appears to be aimed at preventing that suspicion from being fueled. A clickfest is in sight.

The material that the parties are leaking to the media is only a portion of the 10 terabytes that the Civil Guard seized from Koldo García the day they searched his home in Alicante. According to all the information published to date, officers had no difficulty locating the digital devices containing the aforementioned audio recordings. They were in plain sight. Koldo García, a former Civil Guard informant who eventually became a trusted man in the small team supporting Sánchez in the 2017 Socialist primaries, the famous Peugeot campaign, refused to hide this material after having recorded hours and hours of political conversations over the past eleven years, accumulating 10 terabytes of information, which, if transcribed in writing, would take up 65 million pages, according to the investigating judge. This is a Villarejo-2 case.

Former police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo , a key figure in the network of the so-called "state sewers," accumulated 40 tyrabites of secret information in his audio recordings. A colossal amount of information. He recorded it all. There is no definitive evidence that the intelligence services have managed to decrypt all this material. Some of it has ended up on the secondhand market of political junk, and not a month goes by without a new recording of the police commissioner who led a mafia cell at the heart of the state apparatus. Villarejo's audio recordings haven't landed anyone in jail, but they have spread a thick layer of rust and wear over the credibility of certain individuals and institutions. Something similar could now happen with Koldo's audio recordings.

Audio Spain. The politics of this country currently depend on secret recordings made by a former police commissioner with direct access to Mariano Rajoy 's government between 2012 and 2018, and a former Civil Guard informant who managed to join Sánchez's campaign team when he challenged almost all of the PSOE's notables, led by Felipe González , in 2016-2017.

We are in an intense documentary phase. The thorough investigation by Tarragona's Court No. 2 into the case indicting former Finance Minister Cristóbal Montoro for alleged corruption spans 18 volumes. There are no audio recordings here, but there are emails obtained with judicial authorization. It is a seven-year effort carried out under summary secrecy by a discreet outlying judge, assisted in judicial police functions by the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) and the Civil Guard. One wonders whether such an investigation would have made progress in Madrid. Now they will fight tooth and nail to obtain the annulment of the investigation. Its impact on public opinion is enormous. Its annulment would have an even greater impact.

Some argue that the Montoro case "balances" the Koldo-Ábalos-Cerdán case, as if we were in a competition between the PSOE and the PP in the League of Mud and Shame. No such tie exists. Both cases wear down and corrode the political system as a whole. The temporary winner of this erosion is Vox, despite its leader's lack of interest in positioning itself at the forefront of political debate, as some of its counterparts in the rest of Europe have done. Santiago Abascal doesn't operate like the Portuguese André Ventura (Chega), nor like Giorgia Meloni in Italy (Brothers of Italy). Vox makes moves, takes over some issues (immigration), and seems geared toward the strategic capture of the Popular Party. Vox wants to gain enough strength to force the PP to absorb the core of its political program; it wants the PP to carry out its policies. And in some respects, it is succeeding.

This concludes the course. The Saturday video blog will return next September.