“Hang on, you know how it is.”

The Government of María Guardiola and the leadership of her party have for months covered up the complaints of “sexist treatment” and “abuse of power” by the mayor of Navalmoral de la Mata, Enrique Hueso, towards a councilor on his team, Paula González Morato, who has ended up leaving the municipal government. elDiario.es Extremadura has had access to a document and an audio, which reveal the councilor’s attempts to inform the party leadership of the situation and the evasions of the regional leadership of the PP.

The conflict is not new. According to sources consulted, the first complaints date back to April, when González alerted the PP, at the provincial and regional level, of the mayor’s attitudes. Nobody responded. Given the lack of solutions and an “unsustainable” situation, the councilor sent an email to María Guardiola and other leaders on December 1 in which she denounced that she had been suffering for months “bad responses, lack of respect, abuse of power and displacement” by Hueso.

The most serious thing, as the document details, is the conscious inaction of the PP’s organic structure, which dragged out its complaints: “Hold on”, “You know what Enrique is like”, “We will talk to him”, “We will take measures.” However, the young woman complains that none of this has come to pass, “on the contrary, the party has covered it up and I can’t, nor do I want to, put up with it anymore.”

González relates how the situation has generated “anxiety and discomfort” in him, making it impossible to work alongside the councilor. Furthermore, she warns that she is not the only victim, ensuring that there is evidence that another teammate has suffered the same treatment and that the party has always responded “with evasion as an answer.”

The audio that confirms that the leadership knew it

The regional leadership of the PP was fully aware of the seriousness of the events and the “political risk” that it entailed, as demonstrated by an audio sent by the spokesperson for the PP of Extremadura, José Ángel Sánchez Juliá after receiving the complaints. In the recording, Sánchez Juliá explicitly admits the gender component of the conflict and his fear that it will transcend public opinion: “I am very concerned about the situation at Navalmoral […] because here at the end someone is going to explode and how they label us […] “Because of the sexist treatment he is giving to his colleagues, there is going to be a mess.”

The spokesperson acknowledges that he has tried to mediate with ‘Lau’ (in reference to Laureano León, president of the PP of Cáceres), urging him to intervene: “Lau, don’t leave him, I am very concerned about the situation […] sit with him [con el alcalde]because you have to sit with him and then you have to sit with everyone.”

Despite recognizing that sexist treatment could be a lethal “label” for the party, the effective response towards the victim was null. In the audio, the spokesperson admits: “He told me that he is going to try to sit down with him next week,” a delay that exhausted the councilor’s patience.

Resignation and silence of Guardiola

Given the lack of protection and the confirmation that the party’s strategy was to buy time, Paula González formalized her resignation as a councilor of the Popular Group on December 2, becoming a non-attached councilor. “After a period of deep reflection and faced with the obligation to be consistent with my principles, I have decided to abandon my status as a councilor of the Government team to become a non-attached councilor,” announced who until that moment had had responsibilities for Children and Youth in the moralo city council.

The mayor of Navalmoral de la Mata has denied to elDiario.es that he had had problems with the former PP councilor: “I have not had any clashes with her, another thing is the interpretation of what I can say to you right now and you can take it one way or another.” But he admits that “things may have happened” within the “normal day-to-day situations at work.”

11 days after the resignation of Paula González, last Saturday, María Guardiola had Enrique Hueso at a rally in which the national leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, also participated. At that campaign event, and in front of the mayor, she denounced the “machismo and hypocrisy on the part of the left,” which she accused of giving “lessons in feminism” while, in her words, they cover up “harassers and abusers when the protagonists are their own thing.”

Feijóo also pointed out the socialists for trying to “cover up a pack of sexists and corrupt people” and launched a slogan: “In the face of the degeneration of the PSOE, regeneration; and in the face of the sexists, a woman: María Guardiola.”

Guardiola’s cousin and driver dismissed

The concealment of the situation in Navalmoral de la Mata comes the same day that several media outlets publish that a cousin of María Guardiola whom she hired as a driver was in the surveillance system against sexist violence, Viogén, for a crime of coercion against his ex-partner. The Board has avoided confirming this information for hours and finally has directly disseminated the dismissal of the aforementioned.