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MADRID: One year after historic floods killed 229 people in Valencia, the Spanish region’s leader Carlos Mazon has faced mounting criticism over his handling of the disaster and defied calls to resign.
The eastern region bordering the Mediterranean had woken up under the highest red alert for torrential rain on October 29 last year.
But for five hours, the conservative Mazon, 51, was absent from the front line of an emergency response widely condemned as inadequate.
Above all, the late sending of a mass telephone alert to residents at 8:11 p.m. sparked fierce scrutiny of his agenda and a debate about whether that delayed potentially life-saving action.
“If Mazon had really been where he should have been, the alarm would have arrived on time,” leftist MP Agueda Mico, of the regionalist Compromis party, said on Tuesday.
Regions are primarily responsible for managing emergencies in Spain’s decentralized political system, but Mazon has denied accusations of dereliction of duty during the country’s deadliest natural disaster in decades.
“I did not switch off my mobile, I was not unreachable, I did not lack coverage, I did not lose interest, nor was I lost,” he told local newspaper Las Provincias in a rare interview since the tragedy.
According to the Levante newspaper, a colleague told Mazon there were already “many deaths” when he arrived in the evening at the seat of the regional government after a lengthy lunch.
Mazon resumed work at 7:45 p.m. and joined a critical emergency services meeting at around 8:30 pm, shortly after the telephone alert had been sent.
But the warning was too little, too late: muddy floodwater was already gushing through towns south of Valencia city and claiming lives.

- Shifting narrative -

Mazon said he spent four of his five hours of absence having lunch with a journalist to offer her a job.
This came after he had initially claimed to have eaten with a representative of Valencian businesses, but the person in question quickly came out to deny that account.
The remaining hour of Mazon’s absence — a critical period during which regional authorities hesitated about sending the alarm — remains shrouded in mystery.
The journalist, Maribel Vilaplana, broke her silence last month, saying they left the restaurant “between 6:30 and 6:45.”
But sources close to Vilaplana, contradicting Mazon’s narrative, revealed that he then accompanied her to search for her car instead of heading straight to his office.
An unexplained gap persists in his account of events from 6:57 to 7:34, when Mazon made and received no calls, according to a list he submitted to a parliamentary committee.
At 7:36 pm, the list shows he turned down a call from his then-top emergencies official, Salome Pradas, now under investigation for her role in the handling of the floods.

- Conservatives ‘undermined’ -

Although not under formal judicial investigation himself, Mazon has spent a year resisting intense pressure to resign.
Thousands of protesters have descended on Valencia’s streets every month demanding he quit, while 75 percent of the region’s residents want him to go, according to a poll published on Monday by Las Provincias and conservative daily ABC.
Experts view Mazon as a burden for the national leader of his opposition conservative Popular Party (PP), Alberto Nunez Feijoo, who prefers to dodge the topic.
Mazon “undermines Feijoo as a leader” and gives the Socialists “arguments to respond to corruption accusations” against Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, said Anton Losada, a political science professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela.
For Paloma Roman Marugan, associate professor of political science at Madrid’s Complutense University, the PP has entered “a rabbit hole” that could have been avoided “with a swift resignation that never happened.”
“But bringing him (Mazon) down is a tricky puzzle” for the PP as the party has no obvious replacement and wants to avoid early elections, she told AFP.

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s decision to shift the nation’s most advanced aircraft carrier to South America in his campaign against drug cartels is pulling the ship out of the Mediterranean Sea at a time when a tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has been threatened by new strikes in Gaza.
The US is set to be in the fairly unusual position of having only a single aircraft carrier deployed and none in the waters off both Europe and the Middle East. The change is especially stark after the US joined Israeli strikes on Iran in June and has engaged in some of the most intense combat operations since World War II against Yemen’s Houthi rebels in the Red Sea.
Aircraft carriers, with their thousands of sailors and dozens of warplanes, have long been recognized as one of the ultimate signifiers of US military might and the nation’s foreign policy priorities. There have been five carrier deployments to the Middle East since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, including two carriers in the region at multiple points this year and last.
The new orders for the USS Gerald R. Ford illustrate the Trump administration’s increasing focus on the Western Hemisphere and mark a major escalation of firepower as the US military ramps up fatal strikes on alleged drug boats. With a buildup of warships, aircraft and troops already in the region, Trump himself has signaled what could be next.
Speaking from another aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, in its home port of Japan, Trump noted the US attacks at sea and reiterated that “now we’ll stop the drugs coming in by land.”
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine colonel, questioned how long the Ford would be able to remain in South America, when only three of the 11 US aircraft carriers are typically out to sea.
“It’s such a powerful and scarce resource, there will be a lot of pressure to do something or send it elsewhere,” Cancian said. “You can imagine the peace negotiations breaking down in the eastern Mediterranean or something happening with Iran.”
The USS Nimitz also is deployed but is heading home from the South China Sea to the West Coast before being decommissioned. It recently lost two aircraft — a fighter jet and a helicopter — in separate crashes that are under investigation. A third carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, is not deployed but is conducting exercises off the coast of San Diego.
The shift is happening just as violence has flared up again in Gaza despite a ceasefire that Trump helped broker after two years of war. The Israeli army launched a barrage of attacks Tuesday as tensions with Hamas grew two weeks into the fragile ceasefire.
Carrier’s move adds pressure on Venezuela
Meanwhile, the US military’s growing presence near Venezuela and its 13 fatal strikes on alleged drug boats have stoked fears that Trump could try to topple authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro, who faces charges of narcoterrorism in the US
In response to questions about the speculation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted Saturday that the US is taking part in a counterdrug operation. And he again accused Maduro’s government of participating in the shipment of narcotics.
“This is a very serious problem for the hemisphere, and a very destabilizing one,” Rubio said. “And that has to be addressed.”
Maduro said in a recent national broadcast that the Trump administration is manufacturing a war against him.
“They are fabricating an extravagant narrative, a vulgar, criminal and totally fake one,” Maduro added. “Venezuela is a country that does not produce cocaine leaves.”
Experts say the US forces in the region aren’t large enough for an invasion. But they could help push out Maduro — and possibly plunge the nation into chaos.
“There’s a really high potential for violence and instability,” according to Geoff Ramsey, an expert on US policy toward Venezuela who is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. If Maduro loses power, he said Venezuela could “devolve into a Libya-style meltdown that could last years.”
Land strikes are ‘a real possibility’
The Ford strike group, which includes five destroyers, will add to an unusually large US military buildup in the waters off Venezuela. The Navy already has eight warships in the region — three destroyers, three amphibious assault ships, a cruiser and a smaller littoral combat ship that’s designed for coastal waters. It was not clear if all five of the destroyers in the Ford strike group would make the journey.
A US Navy submarine also is operating in the broader area of South America and is capable of launching cruise missiles. The US military also sent a squadron of F-35B Lightning II fighter jets to an airstrip in Puerto Rico and recently flew a pair of supersonic, heavy bombers up to the coast of Venezuela.
The administration says the military has killed at least 57 people in the strikes against vessels accused of transporting drugs. Trump has declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants because of narcotics flowing into the country and said the US is in an “armed conflict” with them, relying on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration after 9/11.
Lawmakers from both political parties have expressed concerns about Trump’s lack of congressional approval and unwillingness to provide details about the attacks. Others, such as Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, believe the president has all the authority he needs.
The South Carolina Republican said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that land strikes in Venezuela are “a real possibility.”
“We’re not going to sit on the sidelines and watch boats full of drugs come to our country,” Graham said. “We’re going to blow them up and kill the people that want to poison America, and we’re now going to expand operations, I think, to the land.”