Propaganda experts have identified a common strategy that consists of “flare disinformation,” referring to the decoys used by military aircraft when they seek to evade an infrared-guided missile.
Politicians who use these methods come to disseminate dozens of different theories to defend themselves, incurring contradictions that are no longer important.
The key, they say, is to confuse audiences, rather than convince them of a single narrative.
Something similar happens with Isabel Díaz Ayuso's attempts since 2020 to defend her management of the Covid-19 crisis in nursing homes, which are a long list of often antagonistic excuses.
Ayuso once again made use of one of the points of that argument when he stated this Thursday in the Madrid Assembly that “the elderly were not saved anywhere.”
His statement has caused strong indignation among the families of the victims and brought the word Ayuso to the top of the
trending topics
in Spain on the X network. However, it was not the first time that the Madrid president resorted to that pretext. .
On June 22, 2020, she said during an interview on
TVE's Los Desayunos
: “In the face of covid, if we do not act in time, it is practically impossible to solve anything.
When, in addition, the people who live in residences, in addition to being elderly people, very elderly people who are especially in the last months or years of their lives, present pathologies, dementia, all kinds of difficulties that in the face of a virus as aggressive as the "What we have seen is almost impossible to do anything."
This defense contradicts other statements by Ayuso in which he has defended that he fought to save all the sick.
Days before that appearance on public television, the president had assured the same thing in the Madrid Assembly: “Of course you cannot say that the elderly have been left to die.
In the Community of Madrid they have defended themselves and fought for every life.”
Another well-known inconsistency is his attempt to blame the Government of Pedro Sánchez, alleging that the powers over these senior centers had been assumed by the then vice president Pablo Iglesias.
This scheme is based on a press conference on March 19, 2020 in which Iglesias announced million-dollar aid for the sector and the support of the military to fumigate centers.
But the central government never assumed responsibility for regulating and monitoring residences, a matter that corresponds to the autonomies, as occurs with most of the management in health, education and other areas.
This defense is very weak, but it is based on the confusion of many citizens about which administration governs each area of our lives.
Any other statement by Ayuso about what happened reveals that it was his Government that was in control from day one.
Ayuso herself destroyed that line of attack when in an interview with Sonsoles Ónega, from Telecinco, in June 2020, she accidentally recognized that she managed the residences.
“President, she said that you managed healthcare and residences.
In other words, you are telling us that you managed the residences, weren't they the responsibility of the sole command then?” the communicator asked her in surprise, leaving the president with a face that has been the stuff of a meme.
Despite this slip, Ayuso has continued to blame Iglesias: for example, when she confronted him in the candidate debate during the 2021 regional campaign or when in the Assembly she had confrontations with the leaders of Unidas Podemos.
Ayuso has used other excuses such as blaming the virus for the disaster (“What has been experienced has been hell, an ensuing war for which we as regional rulers are not to blame”) or that there were “deaths everywhere.”
He has pointed out, for example, that in other communities the percentage of total deaths was higher in residence (85.6% in Aragón compared to 32% in Madrid), but this is playing to confuse with the numbers because in absolute numbers there were many fewer. total victims in those other regions.
The virus caused unparalleled devastation in Madrid in the first wave, both in residences, hospitals and homes.
The truth is that, according to an analysis by EL PAÍS, in Madrid you had a one in five chance of dying if you lived in a residence.
During the first wave (from March to June 2020), 11,389 seniors living in nursing homes died, where there were about 50,000 people at the beginning of the crisis.
Of these, 8,338 (73%) were not transferred to a hospital.
The president has also denied the obvious when she has reiterated time and time again that her Government never sent triage protocols in residences to prevent the collapse of hospitals or that these documents were only drafts that were distributed by mistake.
He has continued to use this lie despite the fact that the media has shown that a senior Health official, Carlos Mur, sent four emails (published by EL PAÍS) to other members of his Government, including the Minister of Health, Enrique Ruiz Escudero, attaching the protocols.
His intention was for them to reach the hospital geriatricians who applied the filter and the nursing homes that were going to support that measure.
They arrived at their destination and their application was mandatory, as those responsible for residences have said in parliamentary and judicial headquarters.
Regarding Operation Bug (the failed attempt to medicalize the residences entrusted to the daughter of a former high official, Encarnación Burgueño), Ayuso's collaborators have said that Burgueño acted without a public contract and on his own, despite the fact that Mur gave him a contract with the seal of the Community and its digital signature in which it was tasked with “the comprehensive management of the covid-19 crisis in the social and health centers of the Community of Madrid.”
Another common excuse made by Ayuso and her team is that the left is twisting the pain of the victims to bring her down.
The time in which this pretext unleashed the biggest scandal was when the Madrid vice president, Enrique Ossorio, used it in 2022, saying in a press conference that “the families have already overcome it.”
This generated pain and anger in the children of the deceased, who still have not overcome their grief four years later.
Then, they remembered that neither Ayuso nor Ossorio have ever met with them.
Write to the author at
fpeinado@elpais.es
or
fernandopeinado@protonmail.com
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