“You’re going to shit, clown.” This phrase, addressed to the refugee councilor of La Laguna, Alfredo Gómez, led this Monday before a city court to also councilor Santiago Pérez (Avante La Laguna) for a complaint for a minor crime of threats. The trial was seen for sentencing after Pérez ratified that he did pronounce those words and that Gómez did not know how to specify exactly what type of fear they instilled in him before the judge, that is, what type of damage did he fear when he heard “you are going to shit, clown.”
Before the hearing was held, Gómez, who acted as his own lawyer, asked the judge that the case be transferred to the Supreme Court, given the status of registered Santiago Pérez, a senator for the Autonomous Community. However, in his complaint, the councilor had not stated that circumstance, as the judge highlighted. “A delaying maneuver,” Santiago Pérez later told journalists to qualify the whistleblower’s ruse: “I wanted to stretch the gum, probably following the instructions of the Canarian Coalition, and then say that I take advantage of the jurisdiction like Fernando Clavijo.”
The judge did not compromise, so the trial was held after a short recess.
The events that were judged this Monday occurred in a recent plenary session of the City Council of La Laguna, when the turncoat councilor -gone from Ciudadanos- tried unsuccessfully to get a motion of disapproval against Santiago Pérez, against the mayor of the city, against the Councilor for Culture and against the President of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, for understanding that all of them had committed irregular acts related to minor works in the homes of the last three. The motion did not prosper because it was not even unanimously supported by the party that now supports Alfredo Gómez, the Canarian Coalition, nor by the PP, an eventual partner of the nationalists. At the last moment, Santiago Pérez took the floor to relate the accusations that the refugee councilor had leveled against him and announce, consequently, that he would act against him before the courts of justice. Hence, as he reiterated today in court, the phrase “you’re going to shit, clown.”
In addition to Santiago Pérez, the turncoat also brought the socialist councilor Badel Alonso to trial on Monday, who in the same plenary session told him “if I weren’t a councilor I would split you right here.” Alonso declared in his discharge that such a threat could never be materialized because he is a councilman. The witness provided by the complainant did not contribute much to clarifying what happened because he could not specify the fears that the two accused would instill with the phrases that led them to this trial.
At the end of the hearing, Santiago Pérez told the journalists that Gómez had accused him in that plenary session on April 21 “of not exercising my responsibilities as Town Planning Councilor in defense of legality in the face of the works that were carried out in the mayor’s home, even knowing them, by collusion and complicity. And if those accusations were true, they would constitute a crime of prevarication on my part. But they are false, and I have documented it before the Plenary Session of the City Council with reports from officials, ”he said.
It was in this context “in which I stated that these slanders against Gómez were made in writing and with absolute premeditation. They were made in plenary with the public projection that it entails, and therefore I announced that I was going to exercise my rights because that behavior has a name in the Penal Code and I said that whoever had done them should abide by the consequences of their actions.
Santiago Pérez also recalled that in the last plenary session, in which he did not intervene, “the provocations, the insults, the humiliating phrases, and above all the slander returned, which have been accredited by us before the Court through literal certifications of the things that Alfredo Gómez has been saying and that he tried to blur in the trial.”
The councilman maintained that “I could have denied the facts or refused to testify, but I understood that it was my obligation as a citizen and as a public representative to tell the truth. I believe that I must act frankly in court.”
However, he regrets that “everything paints a discouraging picture in which the waste of turncoating in all institutions ends up in the sinkhole of the Canary Coalition, which uses them either to regain power as in Santa Cruz, or to unfairly attack municipal governments. such as that of La Laguna, or incorporating into their ranks glittering stars who do not leave their seats, as is the case of Vidina Espino or the ineffable mayor of Mogán”.
