The former Minister of Social Policies of the Community of Madrid, Alberto Reyero, has once again publicly requested that deaths in nursing homes during the pandemic be clarified. This time, the former leader of Ciudadanos in the previous government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has done so through a petition on the change.org platform to collect signatures for the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate what happened in these centers and to create a committee in Congress.
Reyero resigned from his position in the regional executive in October 2020, seven months after the start of the pandemic, after denouncing the protocols of the Ministry of Health, which denied the referral of the elderly from residences to hospitals during the most critic of the first wave. In a commission in the Assembly, when he was still a councilor, he described these instructions as unethical and possibly illegal.
Already at that time Reyero was “absolutely in favor” of creating an investigation commission in the Assembly to analyze what happened in the residences during the pandemic, which Ayuso has refused since then. Some emails were even made public addressed to the Minister of Health, Enrique Ruiz Escudero, in which he criticized the protocols.
At the end of June 2021, the former Madrid councilor publicly reappeared to once again demand an investigation commission in the Madrid Assembly, to shed light on the death of more than 7,000 elderly people in just two months in Community centers. A commission in which, in his opinion, President Ayuso and himself should appear.
“I still think that the appropriate format to tell my version is the parliamentary one, and if that does not happen, I will have to find some way to be able to tell my version, because I think that the people of Madrid deserve that those of us who have intervened in public affairs Let’s give people answers about what has happened. And what better way than for opposition groups, deputies from all political parties, to be able to ask about what happened at that time,” he said in an interview with elDiario.es.
Now, Alberto Reyero has shared through his Twitter account the campaign on the platform to collect signatures, initiated by the director of Público, Manuel Rico, and the director of the UV Human Rights Institute, Fernando Flores, to investigate ” seriously” what happened in the residences throughout the country, after the closure of the parliamentary commissions in Madrid, Catalonia and Castilla y León.
I have already signed https://t.co/pkjmYxIL4s
– Alberto Reyero (@albertoreyero) February 4, 2022
This petition is in line with that made by organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International. Precisely, the latter denounced a few days ago that the Prosecutor’s Office has filed 89% of the proceedings for deaths in residences. The NGO has reviewed the processes that affect more than a hundred residences in Madrid and Catalonia and assures that the authorities “have failed to comply with their obligation to thoroughly and adequately investigate the violations of the right to life in the residences”, where they have deceased 35,670 people.
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