By Saray Encinoso
When the journalist Juan Cruz (Puerto de la Cruz, 1948) decided to write Ciudadano Polanco. The facts of a life (Editorial Debate, 2021), did not want to “defend” the most relevant businessman in the media that there has been in Spain, “just explain it” and, on the way, give an account of a man who marked for years the future of the publishing and journalistic life of this country when democracy was making its way. Polanco was the businessman who founded the Santillana publishing house, who promoted the newspaper El País and who led the Prisa group until his death in 2007, but also the man who was nicknamed Jesús del Gran Poder and climbed the steps of the Audiencia Nacional for one case, Sogecable, which had been built to remove him from decision-making.
To talk about the concept of justice, how long the shadow of suspicion is and how the journalistic profession has changed, Cruz presented his book this week in his hometown, invited by the city council. For an hour and a half, the author told how and why Ciudadano Polanco began to take shape in 2003, but did not see the light of day until 2021. 18 years ago, Polanco asked Cruz to write down the facts of his life. He wanted to show the world how he saw himself and not how his enemies had made sure he was seen.
The Prisa group, which he headed, had been accused of a crime of misappropriation: incorporating into its assets the money from the bonds that Canal + subscribers deposited as guarantee of the decoders necessary to access their television services. However, despite the fact that the judge who instructed the case, Javier Gómez de Liaño, had already been sentenced years before for prevarication, after a few recordings, the businessman gave up and the transcripts were kept in a suitcase. Polanco was tired, he believed that the effort would be in vain.
Now deceased, and at the request of his children, Cruz resumed the project, which he enriched with interviews with those who worked with the businessman during those years. The result is a set of views on the role played by this man, but also on those years that shaped the current Spain and that defined the structure of the media in our country.
Juan Cruz, in addition to rigorously exercising his work as a journalist throughout the more than 400 pages of this book and going to all the sources that had a close relationship with Polanco – from newspaper directors to politicians, through lawyers and relatives-, has an added experience: he also maintained a fluid relationship with him throughout his life and was a direct witness to many of the events that are narrated in the book. He has been part of El País since it was founded in 1976, and directed Alfaguara for years, when it was part of Santillana.
He knows, first hand, how El País lived on 23-F because he was there – his father called him to the newsroom to unsuccessfully ask him to return home – and how the Santillana group – thanks to Polanco, but also, and a lot, to his daughter Isabel- he built a bridge between Latin America and Spain that many others have later traveled.
Each interviewee has their own experience and opinion about Polanco, but they all agree that the man who never read the newspaper the night before it was published was as demanding as he was even-handed. Cruz, although he does not expressly say why he had the need to write this book, he does suggest: “Justice is in us; we all have a duty to be fair, journalists, teachers, carpenters… ”. And giving explanations of a person and a “forgotten” time can also be a way of being fair.
