The crater of the crisis that has opened up in the Spanish interior ministry is beginning to have colossal dimensions and with each passing hour it gets deeper. Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska has not managed, not even by opening the coffers to impose salary parity on all state police and security forces, to quell the rebellion at the apex of the Civil Guard unleashed after the sacking of colonel Diego Perez de los Cobos as head of the Madrid command, euphemistically justified for reasons of loss of ministerial confidence. At the heart of the conflict is the report sent by the Civil Guard commanded by De los Cobos to the judge investigating whether there was a possible crime committed in authorizing the Women's Day rally in Madrid on March 8th and pointing the finger at the central government's delegate in the Madrid region.
Since then, Marlaska has had to appear and explain a sacking or resignation every day: on Tuesday it was the number two of the corps, lieutenant general Laurentino Ceña, the visible face of the Civil Guard during the coronavirus pandemic when he was present regularly at daily press government conferences. Ceña immediately showed solidarity with De los Cobos, a uniformed man with huge prestige in certain sectors after his expedition to Catalonia to prevent the independence referendum on October 1st, 2017, which resulted in more than a thousand people being wounded through disproportionate police violence. This Wednesday, Ceña has been joined in his departure from the paramilitary body's hierarchy by lieutenant general Fernando Santafé, head of the operational command of the Civil Guard and considered the number three officer of the corps.
In the midst of the coronavirus crisis, which has so far left more than 27,000 dead in Spain, and the economic crisis, which has already become the main concern of the public, a third crisis has set in, the product of the confrontation between the minister Marlaska and the Civil Guard. It is an unusual situation for a Socialist government in Spain, as there has never been a similar eruption in a corps of a military nature in which 90,000 officers serve.
And it is also a news development that is more than worrying, as the idea of solidarity with the dismissed colonel through the Civil Guard hierarchy's action of taking a step forward could be read as a challenge to the political powers. There is nothing new here, in terms of this government's inability to carry out any initiative that does not respond to the dominant political ecosystem in Madrid, where other powers have been taking control of the situation, starting with the judiciary, which has been setting the agenda of Spanish public life in recent times with disproportionate power.
Above all these crises, emerging as an issue of its own is the fragility of a government overcome by events and without the capacity to lead this new and difficult stage in a minimally cohesive way. With Pablo Iglesias fresh from watching, on HBO, the three seasons of the essential French television series Baron Noir - a recommendation, as he himself told us, from Pedro Sánchez - it is very possible that he is still infused with the aggrandizement of the parties and the double standards of public servants. Certainly, the series is realistic but not a good example. The protagonists move the plot forward via revenge. Nothing that sounds that strange to us.