Spain: One year later, tense tribute to flood victims

"Murderer!" "Coward!"... The ceremony honoring the more than 230 people who disappeared a year ago in floods in Spain was marked by insults directed at the president of the Valencia region, Carlos Mazón, a man whom the victims' families did not want to see and whose resignation they are demanding.

These state funerals, which lasted an hour in Valencia (east), the country's third largest city, were meant to be a solemn moment, but the anger of many residents seems not to have subsided a year later.

Many questions remain about the disastrous handling of the disaster by the right-wing government of the Valencia region, and especially its president Carlos Mazón, whose resignation residents of the affected areas are demanding in vain.

Despite appeals from the victims' families for him not to come, Carlos Mazón insisted on attending the memorial ceremony but did not risk greeting them, unlike King Felipe VI, Queen Letizia and the socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez .

In a brief speech, the sovereign, applauded upon entering the room, deemed it "necessary to continue analyzing the causes and circumstances of the tragedy" in order to "learn the lessons" from it.

The mayors of the 78 municipalities on the southern outskirts of Valencia that were devastated that day by a torrent of water and mud, as well as 800 relatives of the 237 victims, were also present. Almost all of the deaths (229) were recorded in the province of Valencia, with eight people dying in other regions.

Regional President Carlos Mazón tried to remain discreet, but he was subjected to a barrage of insults from some members of the audience. That morning, he had offered vague expressions of regret, without admitting any wrongdoing, saying he had done "everything possible in an unimaginable situation, but in many cases, it wasn't enough, and today we must acknowledge that again." At the end of the ceremony, the insults resumed with renewed vigor, with some shouting: "To jail!" "Resign!"

In Paiporta, the martyred town of 27,000 residents where 56 people died, the mourning period will last three days. A vigil marked by three minutes of silence was planned for 7:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. GMT). On one of the main streets, a pharmacy placed a row of red and white candles on the ground in front of its facade to pay tribute to the victims.

No one in these devastated localities has forgotten those terrifying images of torrents of muddy water sweeping away everything in their path, trapping many residents stuck in their cars, in an underground parking lot or sometimes surprised at home in small houses that could not withstand the floods.

More than 130,000 vehicles had been torn up and carried away, sometimes piled up in gigantic heaps. Thousands of homes had been devastated and rendered uninhabitable.

This tsunami of water and mud swept away everything in its path, generating a total of 800,000 tons of waste. Last week, the body of a man was found 30 km from where he had disappeared, after being carried by the Turia River. Two bodies are still missing.

The victims accuse the regional authorities of not having warned them early enough of the danger, even though the national meteorological services had issued a red alert (maximum risk) for the entire region that morning.

The timing of the SMS alert sent by regional authorities to residents at 8:11 p.m. (more than twelve hours after the red alert from the meteorological agency) remains at the heart of the debates and at the origin of popular hostility towards Carlos Mazón.

As a sign that the anger is still there, more than 50,000 people demonstrated on Saturday in downtown Valencia to demand "justice" and call for the resignation of Carlos Mazón, who was nowhere to be found all afternoon on October 29, 2024. His schedule that day remains at the center of discussions and investigations.