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Juan López-Herrera . Seville, 1961. The diplomat and writer has published the novel 'The adventures of the ingenious detective Frank Stain' (Editorial Funambulista), a satire that evokes the darkest years of the corruption of the PSOE in Andalusia.

The confinement has been made easier with the publication on the Internet and by installments of his third novel. I am very happy because that was our purpose. My editor, Max Lacruz, and I decided to launch into this experiment by mixing the old and the new: digital broadcasting and serialized publishing in the style of the nineteenth-century newsletter or Dashiell Hammett's first black novels. The reception has been very good. Is corruption better digested in terms of humor? Apparently yes, but humor is always a burden of depth. Even the kindest humor is corrosive. His novel is a parody of a crime novel inspired by 'Don Quixote' about the corruption of the PSOE in Andalusia. A honest and gray official of the Board goes mad by forcefully reading a crime novel and ends up believing himself to be the reincarnation of Sam Spade. As a modern Don Quixote he sets out to fight corruption and, like the hero of Cervantes, he does not fare very well. The successive governments of the PSOE in Andalusia for almost 37 years give for many books. They give for an illustrated encyclopedia. The feeling of impunity was such that the Andalusian government set up a client system to distribute hundreds of millions without control: the EREs. It is the inevitable result of almost four decades of all-powerful power. And civil society has been conspicuous by its absence. As Berta González de Vega recalled in the presentation of the book, the legendary Andalusian humor has been very uncritical and quite submissive with the regional political power in these 37 years. The alternation in power is a measure of democratic hygiene. What is the risk of humorously tackling a corruption case like the EREs? Perhaps something that constitutes a very serious attack against the common good is trivialized. But it can penetrate more among the people. Yes, because humor reveals that, underneath the pompous speeches, power is naked. The encounter between the protagonist of his book and the president who fights against corruption, but has so many things in The head that has forgotten to create the office to combat this scourge is revealing. It is revealing because it highlights the real priorities of power, but the blame once again lies with civil society, which does not control compliance day by day. effective political commitments. Politics is too important to be left entirely to the politicians. Susana Díaz called her husband, who was a UGT worker, "stiff." There is also a stiff in her novel. My novel is a work of fiction. All characters and situations are the product of the author's imagination. And in Andalusia there are many stiff. In the ERE, one of those involved boasted to his mother that he had money to roast a cow. In its book, the NIIDEA Agency (New Institute of Innovation and Development of Andalusia) accumulates bills to "roast 200 cows". Let's say it is a poetic license enhanced with a dose of the proverbial Andalusian exaggeration. where the controversial 3% of commissions for public adjudications come from. Corruption is not an exclusively Andalusian phenomenon nor is it limited to one party: you only have to remember the scandals in Gürtel, Púnica, Palau, Pujol, the case of Miguel in the Country Basque .... Spanish corruption is deeply democratic: it is ideologically and geographically well distributed. Instead of coffee for all, commissions for all. At the presentation of his book, via streaming and in full confinement, ex-minister Alfonso Dastis and essayist Elvira Roca Barea attended. What a level! I did not know they were going to attend and I was very happy, as was the case with other attendees whose presence was a very pleasant surprise. As the moderator Sergio Martín said, confinement has opened new possibilities that we were not aware of: a conventional presentation surely would not have had such a large and high-level audience as the virtual presentation that we did. He has been a diplomat in Brazil, South Africa, Belgium, Cuba, Peru, United Kingdom and France, are we Spaniards the champions of corruption? No, we are not. But we are one of the countries in which the fight against corruption is most mediated by party sympathies: if it is not ours, it is corruption; if it is one of ours, it is a conspiracy. In the 90s he was deputy chief of Protocol in the Presidency of the Government, at the stage of Felipe González. Tell us a little secret ... Like Bartleby, Melville's scribe, "I'd rather not." And it is not that there are great secrets. His first novel, 'La cream coneshion', fell like a shell in certain sectors of Seville. Have they forgiven him? I hope so. I read it again recently and it was a white-glove review considering what has been seen since. Have you never been tempted by politics? We civil servants have a legal duty to act in our work in accordance with the principles of neutrality and impartiality, and it seems to me that one of the great ills of Spain is that there are too many civil servants who make party politics within the Administration. Outside of it, obviously, we are all free citizens. Is the corrupt born or made? Both. There are innate talents and there are those who learn after years of training: you start by asking for invoices without VAT or charging in black and you end a good day paying in brothels with representation expenses.

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