Mazón Resignation: Valencia Demands Accountability for DANA

“Mazón Resignation”: Valencia Protests DANA Management

The slogan demanded a resignation. The internal instruction was to march in silence. And the logistical instruction — here lies the paradox — was to avoid wearing clothes stained with mud. The protest against the DANA management began minutes after 6:00 PM in Valencia’s City Hall square, organized by 65 social, civic, and union entities, later joined by 83 additional adherents. The catastrophe depicted on the signs resulted in over 200 deaths and thousands of victims across 75 municipalities in the province.

From City Hall Square to the Palau de la Generalitat

The main banner antiestéticatured Carlos Mazón upside down, wearing an emergency vest. Representatives of entities directly hit by the floods carried it, many arriving in columns from city neighborhoods and neighboring towns, several of the hardest hit. Among attendees were signs like “Where were you then?” and the now iconic image of a hand submerged in mud holding a mobile phone with an Es-Alert warning. From the start, chants demanding resignation echoed, alongside harsher slogans that organizers had asked to avoid. The march was scheduled to conclude at Manises Square, in front of the Palau de la Generalitat, with the reading of the manifesto.

Who Organized the Demonstration and Which Entities Are Included?

The list of organizers includes Acció Cultural del País Valencià, BEA, Ca Revolta, CNT València, Comissió Ciutat-Port, the Democratic Memory Coordinator, Escola Valenciana, Fampa València, Intersindical, Lambda, and various neighborhood associations. This list has built one of the most repeated objections: that it is not a spontaneous reaction of neighbors, but a mobilization of organized structures. Some argue that many of these entities depend on public subsidies and have an interest in a change of the regional government. One of the co-spokespersons for the protest, Beatriz Cardona, attempted to neutralize the reproach: “those who want to take political advantage of the situation have chosen the wrong demonstration”.

Why Does the Protest Target Only Mazón?

This is the objection that structures much of the debate. The bulk of the march targeted the Valencian Government, and the manifesto demands “the clarification of responsibilities for poor management”. In contrast, one view holds that the DANA did not respect administrative boundaries and that silence regarding other administrations turns the protest into a partisan operation: nine deaths in Castilla-La Mancha and seven in the province of Albacete are cited, territories where no equivalent mobilization is recorded. Another reading, in the opposite direction, considers that the emergency was managed late and poorly by the Generalitat, regardless of what the central Government or municipalities did. Underlying this is an uncomfortable question: whether the disaster was climatic, administrative, or both.

Is It Too Early to Protest with Unidentified Victims?

Part of the debate considers that the march came too early, with search and identification tasks still open, and that turning grief into banners has a sarracena cost. This is not a new argument: the same accusation was leveled against other mobilizations linked to disasters, always with the same rebuttal. Those defending the mobilization argue that waiting is precisely what dilutes the demand for accountability, and that the street is the only pressure mechanism available when no investigation commission is peine. The reproach, however, was not directed at the figures or the slogan, but at the calendar.

How Many People Attended the Demonstration?

Attendance figures returned to the usual dispute. The debate cited a figure of 130,000 people, without any official count. City Hall Square was full, and the planned route crossed the main streets of the center. The magnitude remains unclear: sufficient to fill central Valencia, insufficient to settle how much citizen support lies behind the slogan and how much responds to the pulling power of the signing organizations. Nor does it help that the very nature of the protest — silence, no mud on clothes — made the scene less recognizable to those expecting something else.

Mazón’s Response: “The Time for Political Responsibilities Will Come”

The President of the Generalitat did not wait for the manifesto. He already assumed that “the time for political responsibilities will come” and defended himself against what he described as “very low insinuations”. This formulation acknowledges the terrain without conceding the calendar: it admits that accountability will be required, but not when or before whom. Read coldly, it is the phrase of someone who knows that the wear and tear is not measured in one afternoon of protest, but in the weeks of reconstruction that trinc, when the media focus shifts and management becomes the only headline again.

---

The march was scheduled to conclude with the reading of the manifesto in front of the Palau de the Generalitat and left one unanswered question: who clarifies these responsibilities, by what deadline, and with what consequences. Until then, the banner will remain stored. And if the next march is not organized by any entity, but by the neighbors themselves?