(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Del crimen inicial al poder criminal)

Let us not get too distracted by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his jewels. Because it is true that his own abusive and criminal vocation became clear very soon after he arrived at La Moncloa riding on the dead and wounded of the Atocha attack in 2004. Just as it is true that it was he who laid all the political, amoral and criminal foundations — with his pacts with murderers and his deployment of perverse laws for revenge and civil-war agitation in Spain — so that, after those revealing years of total betrayal of the Spanish people by Mariano Rajoy and his gang of Montoro and assorted “kitchen” operatives, Pedro Sánchez could find the Spanish situation ripe for the taking: to seize every institution and literally put an end to any possibility of the State functioning with the slightest probity.

There is an abysmal lack of honesty in all those real or feigned expressions of surprise voiced these days at the latest revelations concerning José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Whether over those jewels used for money laundering and the efficient transport of great value. Whether over the accusations by former Venezuelan political prisoners about the blackmail this wretched little man exerted to win favors from the narco-murderer Nicolás Maduro. Whether over the dealings — more than murky, downright sinister — that will be revealed one after another.

That he has dragged his daughters into a scheme that entangles them for life in ties with some of the most abject figures of organized crime is almost logical. His participation — as enthusiastic as it is self-interested — in the plans of the drug-trafficking criminal gang of Delcy Rodríguez and company only reveals the abyss of vileness hidden behind that smiling little simpleton’s face and unhurried voice.

You will forgive me the petulance of recalling two books I wrote about the regime Zapatero was inaugurating, published by Imelda Navajo at La Esfera de los Libros, titled Libelo contra la secta (“Libel Against the Sect”) and Días de Ira (“Days of Wrath”). Of course, since both were published once I had already escaped the social-democratic paradise of El País and its realm of Babelia, both books were gaslighted in the media and — although treated with affection by some members of that tribe of analysts and columnists of the day — they did not, of course, provoke the debate I intended. A debate concentrated on denouncing the imminent danger of the destruction of every last remnant and glimmer of the rule of law and democracy in Spain, arising from Zapatero’s aims and methods. Today, some two decades later, these have finally crystallized into the aims, methods and attitudes not of a more or less corrupt group of people, but of an international criminal organization to whose interests every decision of government in Spain is subordinated.

Everyone is now rightly laughing at Luís Arroyo — that self-serving, demagogic, tacky and fraudulent figure of Zapaterism and Sanchism who now runs the Ateneo — over the appraisal he made of the jewels Zapatero kept in his office. He deserves it. But those jewels are mere chicken feed next to the sums being weighed by the DEA, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice and, I suppose, the UCO, in the dealings in which Zapatero’s direct or indirect starring role is under investigation. For everyone also knows that if those jewels serve to move, say, a million and a half euros from one place to another, the profits from the other smuggling operations under investigation run into the billions — and of course many of them are impossible to carry out without the collaboration of the Venezuelan government, of Sánchez’s Spanish government and of the PSOE.

If to all this you add that we now know the Attorney General’s Office in Spain not only persecutes members of the opposition but mounts operations against the judiciary itself, we are left with precisely the picture that those who read my books called catastrophist or apocalyptic. I congratulate myself that so much has come to pass and that so many Spaniards today — unlike when those books were published — are now conscious that we are governed not by the corrupt but by organized crime.

The only factor that makes today’s situation objectively better than that one is the existence of Vox, the origin of the lucidity in the face of the gravity of the crime of which Spain is the victim. “Under Zapatero we were terribly badly off, with every lane set for catastrophe, and we did not know it. Today things have worsened to an extreme degree, but we are better off because many of us Spaniards are conscious of what is happening to us.” We have been kidnapped. They are robbing us as if there were no tomorrow. And they are preparing an immense electoral fraud to try to make their power, their impunity and their unbridled criminal activity last forever.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.