“Were they killing her with tequilas?”. The first control session in the Madrid Assembly after Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s troubled institutional trip to Mexico has turned this Thursday into a cascade of ironies from the opposition about the supposed “extreme risk” that, according to the Madrid president, she faced during her stay in the Latin American country. The plenary thus staged the clash between an Ayuso determined to denounce an alleged political boycott orchestrated from La Moncloa and a left that has ridiculed a narrative it considers exaggerated, victimizing, and full of accusations without evidence.
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The socialist spokesperson, Mar Espinar, led the harshest offensive. “Did you expect them to send the GEO so you could stroll around calmly insulting people around the world?” she snapped from the podium, before finishing with another jab: “I think two Desokupa thugs suit you better, ask your colleague Vito Quiles for them or have your boyfriend pay for them with Quirón’s money.”
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Más Madrid also exploited the mocking tone. Its spokesperson, Manuela Bergerot, questioned the dangers denounced by the Madrid leader: “What risks did you face in Mexico if there aren’t even waves in the Caribbean?”. Bergerot also accused Ayuso of having traveled to “humiliate Mexicans” by claiming the figure of Hernán Cortés and summarized the tour as an “international ridicule”: “Booed, angry, and without a single investment or pact that benefits the lives of Madrilenians.”
Ayuso, who before the plenary tried to smooth the ground with a radio interview to set the narrative of the day, again attacked Pedro Sánchez’s government and raised the tone of her accusations by asserting, without providing evidence, that the president asked Claudia Sheinbaum to “ruin” her Mexican tour to counteract the reception organized months earlier by the Community of Madrid for the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. “I imagine Sheinbaum melted with our president and, on the way back, she did him the same favor,” the Madrid leader ironized in statements that were quickly labeled sexist on social media.
Already in the regional chamber, the Community president insisted on presenting her trip as a mission frustrated by political interests and defended her claim of Hernán Cortés, a figure especially controversial in Mexico due to the violence associated with the Spanish conquest. In that context, Ayuso denied the Maya or Aztec civilizations by stating that “Mexico did not exist until the Spaniards arrived”… “before there was ‘another civilization’.” From there, she accused the left of practicing a historical “revisionism” obsessed with “creating sides and talking about the dead.”
“Ask the Mexican president and the Mexicans what is at Guatemala street, 24, in Mexico City; what is underground. Ask what Mexico’s past was before we united in mestizaje,” she defended from the podium referring to a civic-religious structure dedicated to displaying skulls of sacrificed people, mostly war captives, as a warning of power to the empire’s enemies.
The controversy over the cost of the trip also hovered over the plenary. Ayuso still has not clarified how much the institutional tour cost – she defends that she was invited to most of the trip although her regional spokesperson has assured it was charged to the regional budgets -. But she did respond, however, to PSOE’s criticisms by assuring that neither she nor her team “travel with prostitutes,” in a veiled reference to other recent political scandals. The Madrid president also tried to compare her situation with that of other regional leaders, such as Salvador Illa, traveling in California. And she accused the Executive of applying a double standard.
“With the nonsense that Sánchez’s government has said about the United States Administration, why is it not supposed that Illa went to provoke? Why doesn’t the US government have to boycott the event?” she asked.
The background of the clash remains Ayuso’s security during her stay in Mexico. The Madrid president has maintained these days that she had to be escorted “to the plane door” and that the government did not worry at any time about her situation. “They had all the time in the world to criticize me, but not to wonder where I was or who provided me security,” she lamented. However, sources from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have assured that the regional leader rejected the protection offered by the Spanish Embassy and never expressed any concern during the trip.
