“I'm going to ruin your life”, “your boss will end up in jail” and other threats from MAR

Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, chief of staff of the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, after a plenary session of the Madrid Assembly in July 2023. Europa Press News (Europa Press via Getty Images)

“Nothing surprises me.

"He has done this every time he has had a problem," says a former leader of the PP, referring to the threats and coercion of journalists from Miguel Ángel Rodríguez (Valladolid, 60 years old), known as MAR, with a public salary of 94,324.20 euros. as chief of staff of the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso.

And he adds: “He has sent much worse messages to party members: 'You're a piece of shit', 'I'm going to ruin your life', things like that... he loses his temper quickly.

In his case, he is a boss: he threatens and diverts the focus by selling damaged merchandise to outlets willing to buy it.

He makes a scandal to cover up another.

He did it with Casado and the spying on Ayuso to cover up what happened to his brother, and he is doing it now.

There is more talk about him than about the tax fraudster and that was one of the objectives.

He doesn't mind putting himself first because what he likes is playing that character.

He would pay to do what he does because the only thing Miguel Ángel Rodríguez is afraid of is going home to his house and ceasing to be relevant.”

Chiefs of staff and press and politicians in general try to condition journalists so that their information benefits or does not harm their interests.

Overcoming these pressures are part of the job.

But, as all the sources interviewed to prepare this text - leaders and former leaders of different parties and journalists from different media - point out, Rodríguez, Ayuso's right-hand man, has gone much further: to threats, insults and the dissemination of hoaxes about the professionals who do not submit to their manipulations and who investigate the president's boyfriend, Alberto González Amador, accused of tax fraud and document falsification.

The latest example has been to point out, with a photograph, name and surname, two EL PAÍS journalists, accusing them of something totally false—harassing minors in the vicinity of the Madrid president's residence—and Eldiario reporters

of

assaulting, “hooded.” , the House.

The penultimate was to ensure that the Prosecutor's Office had offered an agreement to Ayuso's boyfriend a few hours after learning of the filing of the complaint against him, and that it had later withdrawn it due to "orders from above."

The truth is that it was González Amador, through his lawyer, who had offered the pact and already admitted the crimes committed against the Treasury—which, despite everything, the Madrid president publicly denied.

Rodríguez's modus

operandi

violates article 20 of the Constitution, which includes the right to communicate and receive truthful information.

It is a strategy greased over decades, at least since, in 1996, José María Aznar appointed him Secretary of State for Communication and spokesperson for his first Government.

And it is a strategy that has so far gone unpunished that has required necessary collaborators, the media “willing to buy damaged merchandise,” as stated by a member of the same party as the president that Rodríguez works for: the PP.

“If what he has done now,” adds a member of Vox, “was done by the chief of staff of [Carles] Puigdemont or [Alberto Núñez] Feijóo, it would have ended the careers of both of them, but it doesn't happen here.” nothing because Miguel Ángel has been in this for 30 years, he knows a lot of people in the media and when they don't obey him, he goes after them, he doesn't care about the right or the left.

"He dedicates himself to inventing things and threatening, especially at certain hours."

Sources from this party, with which the PP governs in five autonomous communities, recount an episode of threats to Iván Espinosa de los Monteros and Rocío Monasterio —“Even your children are going to regret it”— motivated by Vox's support for the commission parliamentary investigation into the guarantee of 400,000 euros to a company owned by Ayuso's father.

“At that time they were very nervous.

The threat was verbal, through a PP deputy in the Assembly who is now a national deputy.

We cannot know if it was sent by Rodríguez, who controls everything, but her pattern of behavior has always been that: threatening and manipulating the media, just like Ayuso's, which is to say that she has a mania every time she is investigated for something. .

It has worked for them the first two times, with his father and with his brother.

We will see what happens in the third.”

“He went crazy if you didn't pay attention to him,” denounces a purged person from Telemadrid

That Rodríguez threatened an

Eldiario

journalist in writing—“We are going to crush you, you are going to have to close”—shows, in the opinion of this Vox member, that “he believes himself to be untouchable.”

Ayuso's right-hand man deleted numerous tweets from his account before he was officially named chief of staff of the Madrid president, such as the one that defined Inés Arrimadas, from Ciudadanos, as “physically attractive as a young female.

Politically inconsistent” or the one who responded to Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, from Vox: “Fuck you, idiot: Avalmadrid.

So they push you.

Idiots".

Other tweets that remain visible to the public suggest how far Rodríguez could climb in the private sphere, such as this one from September 8, 2019: “The general director and the Director of News of Telemadrid are part of a plot of irregular contracts that started when he presided over the turncoat [Ángel] Garrido.

Things get difficult for them.

"At three."

The general director and the News Director of Telemadrid are part of a plot of irregular contracts that started when the turncoat Garrido was president.

Things get difficult for them.

At three

— MÁR (@marodriguezb) September 8, 2019

The Telemadrid purge

In February 2020, in an interview with

El Mundo

, Ayuso declared: “I could say that I am the only regional and Government president of Spain who has a television that is critical of her.

And I have no objection to that.”

But it had to have some because after two years of legislative drought, the first law of the popular leader after her electoral victory in May 2021 was on Telemadrid, to control it.

It changed the rule that regulated the medium – celebrated by Ayuso herself in 2015 – to dismiss its general director, José Pablo López, and put, in his place, José Antonio Sánchez, president of RTVE at the time of the famous Black Fridays. —when employees dressed in mourning to denounce information manipulation—, whose name appears in

Bárcenas' papers

and who in 2017, in a parliamentary commission, had boasted of voting for the popular party.

“It is appreciated that the PP is looking for a little position for me,” she said.

At the head of Onda Madrid, the regional public radio, they placed Alfonso Nasarre, a close collaborator of Rodríguez in the Secretary of State for Communication during the Aznar Government.

The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of several of the public television workers who denounced the Madrid Government for unfair dismissal after the purge, such as Jon Ariztimuño, news director of Telemadrid.

“I said a few goodbye words to the team and when I returned to the office, the computer passwords no longer worked,” he recalls.

“And they didn't even pay me for the last week of work.”

The list of those purged is long.

“There was,” one of them recalls, “a pressure, let's say, normal, that any government exerts on each public television, and then there were the

miguelangeladas,

when he went crazy because you didn't pay attention to him”: “He didn't tolerate that we had autonomy.

And I cannot prove that the poisoning campaign against us in some media outlets was their thing, but when we did not reach an agreement on whatever it was, then the attacks appeared in various confidential and pseudo media outlets.

Our dismissal was forged in a meeting in Sol [Madrid Government headquarters] called by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez.”

02:41

The tense interview with Ayuso on Telemadrid for the opening of a Valdebebas hospital

The media clack

Esdiario

is a digital media directed by Antonio Martín Beaumont, former regional representative of Castilla y León with AP (first brand of the PP).

In his articles he has referred to Rodríguez in these terms: “great maneuver”;

“no one disputes the brilliance of MAR”;

and the Madrid president in these others: “Give a lesson to the Spanish left”;

“He beats [Pedro] Sánchez”;

“knocks out [Juan] Lobato”;

“Reveals the colossal economic data”… On January 1, 2020, he published: “The director of Telemadrid messes with Ayuso so as not to explain his opaque accounts.”

On the 10th of that same month: “Telemadrid chaos: this is how his director maneuvers to balance his ruinous management.”

On March 14, another headline said: “Telemadrid cuts Ayuso and [José Luis Martínez] Almeida live to broadcast canned Sánchez.”

This last text stated that the general director "failed in a blatant manner to fulfill his obligation as a public service, to which he had committed himself only one day before in a conversation with the regional government."

Esdiario

is one of the media that spread the hoax about the hooded journalists and harassers of minors in the vicinity of Ayuso's home.

Martín Beaumont writes: ”The figure of the president of Madrid is dehumanized with such viciousness that she becomes merely an 'enemy' to be liquidated.

Such a qualitative leap in the public debate puts her own physical integrity at risk.

And I'm not exaggerating."

They also spread the hoax about the harassment of Ayuso's home, as well as the alleged “orders from above” from the Prosecutor's Office regarding the boyfriend of the Madrid president (both the work of Rodríguez), among others,

El debate

,

Libertad digital, Vozpópuli and

a journalist from

The Objective —

the latter later deleted.

A former leader of the PP assures that he has seen journalists “change information after receiving a call from Miguel Ángel, who knows very well, on the one hand, the activity of the press, and on the other, the volatility of public opinion”: “ You can place whatever you want.

He has turned some newspapers into the extension of the Madrid PP because that is much more important to him;

to have national relevance with whatever it is, to finish a work on time.”

TVE journalist Silvia Intxaurrondo remembers that when

Eldiario

published the first information about the fraud of Ayuso's boyfriend, they called the Community of Madrid “to verify.”

“An hour later, the PP tweeted from its official account: 'This morning, Silvia Intxaurrondo's program asked the PP for reactions about information about Isabel Díaz Ayuso's partner.

"They did not ask us about the information that affects Pedro Sánchez's wife, nor do we know that they asked the PSOE for it."

“That was,” says the presenter, “the green light from the PP to begin a dissuasive strategy towards the press: whoever publishes this information will be pointed out”: “Later, what Miguel Ángel Rodríguez does is accuse me in a tweet of charging in b.

That is to say, they not only point you out by name and surname, they create hoaxes to try to dissuade us.”

For Intxaurrondo, those who spread this false information “cannot be called media”: “They are media of extortion and blackmail, which never call to verify what they publish and which make more and more noise.”

After the disproportionate attack by the Treasury, by the Prosecutor's Office, by Perro, by the vice president, by the Transport thief, by PRISA who does not pay taxes in Spain, by the Intxaurrondo that charges in B on TVE and is removed from the program... they cannot kill Díaz Ayuso!!

We like fruit!!!

— MÁR (@marodriguezb) March 14, 2024

Knife Dinner

Neither Rodríguez's tactics nor the reaction when he is revealed is new.

May 1997. The then president of Antena 3, Antonio Asensio, appears in the Congress of Deputies.

He denounces that the then Secretary of State for Communication and spokesperson for the Aznar Government threatened him to break an agreement with the PRISA group, publisher of EL PAÍSo, on the television rights of football clubs.

Asensio provided notes written by several directors of the chain—Manuel Campo Vidal, José Oneto and Jesús Hermida—who were the recipients of threats against him: “Asensio does not know what he has done by signing with [Jesús de] Polanco and it is going to cost him very much.” expensive";

“Tell your boss that he will end up in jail like Mario Conde, that we are going to go after him”;

“His bodyguards are not going to be of any use to him because the Government has many more”… Rodríguez then justified himself: “If I said it, I did not do it with the intention that tomorrow I was going to do something, but rather within the confidence that existed among us.”

When EL PAÍS asked her last week about the threats to a journalist from

Eldiario

, she responded along the same lines: “I speak that way with people I trust.

It is a harsh way of saying that they were inventing a case where there was none.”

Campo Vidal, then vice president of Antena 3, remembers today: “When we signed the pact with Polanco, on Christmas Eve 1996, the Aznar Government took it as a betrayal.

Then there was a dinner for Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and Jesús Hermida with their respective partners.

According to Hermida, at one point during dinner, Rodríguez stood up and staged the betrayal by pretending that they were stabbing him with a knife.

A few days later, in addition, an anonymous complaint was filed against Asensio at the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office [it was filed in 1998].”

In the letter that Campo Vidal wrote for Asensio and that he, in turn, delivered to the parliamentary commission of Congress, it is added: “December 28, 1996. At my request I held a meeting with Pedro J. Ramírez, director of

El Mundo,

at the Villamagna hotel, at 8:00 p.m.

Pedro J., without losing his composure and in a correct tone, told me that the best thing would be for him to call you in California [United States] and for you to return to undo the pact of December 24.

When I expressed our disagreement with that proposal, Pedro J. told me: 'So the only thing left to know here is whether the Government will dare to make Antonio Asensio

its Rumasa case or its Banesto case,

proceeding with the intervention.'

Letter from Manuel Campo Vidal to Antonio Asensio

On July 10, 1998, at the end of the questions at the press conference after the Council of Ministers, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez reported his own resignation as spokesman for the Aznar Government, assuring that it had been "a personal decision."

By then, PP leaders, several ministers and his CiU parliamentary partners had requested his dismissal.

Years later, Aznar turned to his services again.

In 2005, the first anniversary of the 11-M jihadist attack, Rodríguez prepared a video for his foundation, FAES, which accused the terrorists of carrying out the attacks “to change the Government of Spain” and the left of lying to “take political advantage of the drama”, that is, just what the PP had done.

The recording is full of allusions to ETA.

A few days ago, on the 20th anniversary of the massacre, FAES recovered that thesis: the hoax about the hoax.

Like every time there is a problem.

Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and José María Aznar, in La Moncloa, during the first PP Government.

Jose R. Platon (Cover/Getty Images)

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