'Crime de Polop', the sewers of a town where death was hated

• The phrase: 'The mayor does not arrive alive at the end of the year'
• The trial: Viscera, drugs and prostitutes
• The summary: The struggle for urbanism that preceded the crime

Everything was known in the small town of Polop. Its inhabitants were well aware of the deep disagreement between their mayor, Alejandro Ponsoda, and Juan Cano, 'number two' of the City Council and the man in the shadow of his electoral successes who had no problem in airing with hostile and direct ways the animosity he felt towards him before being accused of planning his murder. In Polop everyone knew but nobody spoke . Until Ponsoda was shot on October 19, 20007 at the door of his house.

The crime uncovered a relationship of intimate enmity and now, the trial, has put in the public showcase a story of miseries, lumpen and untreated grudges that never healed . Each of the witnesses who has sat before the jury has opened the basement of a personal and political relationship condemned to failure. The testimonies are antagonistic.

Some have talked about Cano as if he were the devil against Ponsoda. Others, however, say that after the crime he became the protector of the daughters of the mayor to whom he gave money from the City Council box and for which he was concerned. The jury must determine if it was one thing or the other. The ease and determination attributed to Cano never married Ponsoda's weak and calm character. In the weeks before the murder, everything became unsustainable while life was unchanged in Polop .

«One day, Alejandro summoned me in his office at City Hall. I didn't want to talk and he gestured to me. To listen to him, I had to get so close that I was almost on top of him, ”recalled this week an intimate friend of the murdered mayor who is also the head of Civil Protection. What Ponsoda feared or did not fear is something that will never be known because no one was verbalized.

With these stories it is inevitable not to look towards the last lash of a world that was believed to be extinct: that of rural and deep strife . Seen from the urban prism, many of the testimonies of the deceased's friends, on the one hand, and of the main accused of plotting his crime in a brothel, on the other, seem taken from another era. After the crime, the neighbors were involved in a climate of tension that, judging by the pulpits that have spilled in the courtroom, continues until today .

The Prosecutor's Office and the Civil Guard have no doubt that Cano orchestrated everything because of his hatred of his party partner and because he wanted his job. His defense, however, presents him as a man of character who served investigators as the head of a Turk to close a crime that resisted them.

But the trial is also serving to attend the embarrassing spectacle in which some of the defendants and witnesses proposed by the defenses have blushingly naturalized the sordid world of prostitution . His description of the darkness of the night and its contours has been very graphic. The lightness through which they have traveled through them, too.

They have spoken bluntly about employment contracts that were not officially done because they could not account for the extortion work for which they were required as well as the schedules and conditions of the “girls” of the club as if they were a merchandise, dehumanizing them completely.

One of the agents of the Civil Guard who has sat before the jury detailed the abuses to which one of them was subjected in the Messalina brothel , meeting place - always according to the summary - of Cano and the rest of the accused, among them the owner and the manager of the club, Pedro Hermosilla, an old Civil Guard acquaintance for the problems that were experienced in his business.

Cano, known in the nightclubs as 'the director' - was in front of a branch of the extinct Savings Bank of the Mediterranean (CAM) - and Salvador Ros, 'the shoemaker', were regulars at this local alternate located on the outskirts from Benidorm, according to the researchers. The protected witness has placed them in the booth planning the end of Ponsoda between bottles of alcohol, cocaine and women.

They, on the other hand, have insisted during the second week of the trial that their bad relationship makes that scenario impossible for both the prosecutor and the Central Operating Unit (Uco) of the Civil Guard. It is clear that the low instincts of politics that - the accusations on the basis of the agents' work insist - went hand in hand with the people's disputes that only from there can be understood, with reaching the command stick to, supposedly, paint a Urban map that ventured promising . Some theories that Cano rejects. So do many residents of the town. «He is not able to do something like that. It has its character but from there to the other… no, ”explained another witness, his friend at the trial.

In Polop it is still hard to talk . Many of the witnesses have been hermetic and little given to dig into what was happening and to give explanations to the jury. Outside the stage, in the town, it's something else. Those related to Cano do not forgive the daughters of the deceased and those indicated are them. After all, many people in Polop are indebted to him for having placed his children in some work.

Many say that, in the life of Ponsoda, Cano was dying to parade with the command stick in the processions of his town and that he twisted the gesture because he did not like being in the second row, a place that corresponded to him as town councilor. Apparently, on the day of Ponsoda's funeral, Cano was also upset .

«The closest friends take care of organizing it and Juan Cano must have seemed too much, he told me. He said he thought we were going through, ”said one of the witnesses.

The last goodbye to the mayor was massive, directly proportional to the sympathies he woke up in Polop, where he swept elections after elections and where he was much loved. A few days later, Juan Cano occupied the position of his companion whom, according to him, "wanted." It was still two years before Polop's sewers sprouted . This time yes, in view of all.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• Civil Guard
• UCO

Courts 'Polop', the struggle for urbanism that preceded the mayor's crime

Murder 'Polop Crime': viscera, drugs and prostitutes

Courts A witness to the 'Polop case': "I heard 'pam, pam, pam'. I still have it in mind"