He has been retired for 20 years, the same time he spent in the Mayor’s Office. He left the political front line in 1999, after CC’s victory in La Guancha. Although he has been in the shadow of the municipal PSOE and has even promoted pacts with the PP, he has also distanced himself and is now even very critical and fears his disappearance in 2027 from the City Council if he does not introduce profound changes, especially in his leadership. At 76 years old, what José Bernardo Grillo has not done is stop talking and thinking like a politician as soon as he is given the opportunity and some of his convictions are forceful, such as that the north of Tenerife has been abandoned since San Juan de la Rambla to Buenavista, that Icod cannot be called a hospital and that it should have been done in the Orotava Valley.
-How are you?
“Well, the truth is that well.”
-You left politics in ’99: did you never get over the defeat?
“I wasn’t surprised. Here, the right was between 40-odd and 50%, almost touching 50, and that is what happened. The most we ever had was eight councilors and there comes a time when there is wear and tear. We had been there for 20 years, people get tired and we also made mistakes… I expected it because we were 7-6 with CC for three terms and those elections coincided with the Bango case, for which Miguel Ángel Labrador ran here for the PP, but In that case, his plan was no longer worth it and that concentrated the vote in CC because, if not, they don’t win either.
-Elena Luis always said that she won by going house to house…
“No… If the PP did not have that problem, it would not have won those CC elections.”
-Already then, and if it had been possible, would there have been a PSOE-PP pact against CC?
“Yeah”.
-Since ’99, the PSOE has only come to power with the PP… That defeat marked its future: they had two councilors several times and, now, only once…
“That has been because the candidates have not had the profile that the people wanted… I left five councilors. The problem is that CC didn’t know how to win either. Her behavior was horrible, revengeful, terrible.”
-Well, after 20 years, sometimes wounds remain…
“But, for example, in San Juan de la Rambla, when Manolo Reyes (AIS, then PP, but no longer a candidate) lost, no one insulted him. The problem is not knowing how to win: they insulted, lied, slandered… That created an anti-CC feeling in La Guancha.”
-Did you never consider returning or, at least, were you asked to?
“No, I knew that everything has a stage. Of course you have politics inside you, that’s clear. Some even recover it, like Cejas (Granadilla), although they later win elections in the courts…”
-Not even going to the Town Hall since then…
“No, I was in ’91, but no… After that, not anymore…”
-However, he continued in the shadows and engineered the PP-PSOE pact: out of simple revenge?
“Yes, but only in 2015… Let’s see, even then it was clear that CC was not going to win. I had information, I knew they were losing, I spoke with Elena and she told me it was true, she went to Parliament and left Araceli as number one… “
-Was it cowardice?
“I don’t know, but I did know I was going to lose.”
-And yet, after being key in the Social Services law with the PSOE in 2019, CC set it aside: were you surprised?
“The thing about La Guancha was more of a personal matter with me, a war. There was a problem of interests of another type and it was a shame because, especially in his first term, he was able to turn the people around and lost it; In the end, they did nothing.”
-Business pressure?
“I think it was the other way around, pressure from herself on herself. She believed that the city council was a company, but hers, and that cannot be done. And in her CC they located her, got to know her, and her own people defenestrated her.”
-Why this prolonged conservative turn here?
“We had the right candidate, Jerónimo Morales, but he didn’t want to. He would have won, for sure, in 2015. In addition, local politics are very tough.”
-Isn’t it worth it…?
“No, it is very hard to hear that you are stealing, that you use cards, lies or false reports that, on top of that, there are people who believe them.”
-Did you have a bad time?
“Not me so much, but my family, yes, and also my councilors, because they told us everything.”
-Despite the national panorama, do you believe in this PP-PSOE pact, is it much easier in small towns?
“The PP carries out a light policy here, with almost no ideology. However, he has an opportunity and he is not taking advantage of it either.”
-Is the PSOE considering something?
“I don’t know, because, although I am still affiliated, my relationships are now null. I do not agree with the current line and prefer almost not to speak… In 2015, I did intervene. The national and regional PP opted for CC, but Antonio spoke to me, I told him that he should make an agreement with CC and he told me that he did not want to, that if I, as president of the PSOE, forced the two councilors to allow him to govern, that It would be the agreement, and that’s what we did: we let him govern as a minority. Now, however, the PP gets its result because there are socialists who prefer to vote for it rather than for the PSOE or CC. The socialist councilor has only been left with 200 or so votes… But the PP is not doing well either.”
-Can CC win again?
“If they don’t remedy it, yes. And if the PSOE does not look for a good candidate, if this girl does not leave and they renew the party, she will be left without representation. CC is not doing anything either, but they are giving it to them as a gift.”
-If you were mayor, what would you do that you don’t see now?
“Fix the town hall because it is not working: the town is paralyzed; trade, sinking; agriculture does not exist; The ponds, empty since July, do not add water: CC does not add or buy water and I think it is a strategy for other interests. It’s the same with roads. For example, now they are talking about a 1.2 billion train, a highway from La Laguna to La Orotava, but the money that is for the ring between Icod and San Juan de la Rambla has been taken away, the four million that Ángel Víctor left for be auctioned. They have also removed another work in La Laguna and two in the South.”
-Faustino Alegría says that this region is abandoned, do you agree?
“Of course it is…”
-And what has the PSOE done?
“He began to correct this in 2019: he launched the Santiago-El Tanque section of the ring, with the tunnel, which has already been joined; There was money for the second phase from Buen Paso to San Juan de la Rambla, with all the reports and expropriations resolved, and I was going to draft the project from there to Los Realejos, but now we have gone back; He is lost…”.
-Does that explain the left turn in this region?
“Clear. The former mayors of the PSOE meet often and we believe that the roads on the island are bad. If they were decent, normal, like those on other islands, some with much less population, the flow of people who work in the south could stay in Garachico, Buenavista and others and not rent there, because it could be a quarter of an hour.
-What would you do with the section of the Los Realejos ring?
“There is no solution other than a tunnel, with a little more money. But, for example, we voted against the hospital in Icod, although calling it a hospital is an insult to all the people of the north. There is nothing there, but a small clinic. In fact, the Icod health center was going to close to put its doctors there, but there is nowhere to put them because that large building is, in reality, a nursing home.”
-Well, more money is now announced for the South… Is it putting the focus back there?
“They have never put it in the North. When Rumasa was expropriated (1983), a group of mayors (Santiago Luis, Graham, me…) went to Madrid to speak with a certain Rojo, who was director of Insalud, to ask for a hospital in the Las Águilas hotel (Puerto). We had no experience, we told him, and it was true, that this hotel looked like a hospital because of its rooms and that it would be great for the more than 200,000 inhabitants, just like La Candelaria or the HUC, apart from another one in the South. Rojo told me that he was a ghetto, but going to the Cobiellas was not… A governor did not report in favor and we did not know how to defend him either.”
-Did you bet too much on what was agreed upon?
“Clear”.
-Were you surprised that Torres did not repeat as president?
“No, because some of the counselors were very bad or inadequate. It’s about what people want. I never saw a counselor leave the office, go to the towns, do politics… Office politics was done.”
