“The penalties for poaching must be toughened and the ecological crime extended to the hunting of protected species. Otherwise, we will run out of grizzly bears that in Spain covered the entire national territory in antiquity”. These are the last words he uttered Ramon Tamames in the hemicycle of Congress of Deputies. They were produced in June 1989, in defense of the brown bear and displaying the iron defense of environmentalism that characterized him during his years as a communist deputy. The next time he speaks in the lower house, it will be to champion, from the other side of the ideological spectrum, Vox’s motion of no confidence against the Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez.
Almost 35 years after he sued the then Minister of the Interior, Jose Luis Corcuera Cuestaturning poaching into a “serious ecological crime”, Tamames, a former leader of the PCE and of UI, will return to the hemicycle hand in hand with the extreme right at 89 years of age. He will surely relive when he opposed the entry into NATO, when he defended hundreds of newsstands and when the PSOE allowed himself to be convicted. Taking a brief look at this past in the Chamber, it is logical that his new traveling companions are surprised.
Forging your style
Tamames’ political career began in the winter of 1956 when a group of young people promoted a manifesto against the Franco regime and ended up laying waste to their bones. in the Carabanchel prison. Among them was the writer Fernando Sánchez Dragó, close to Santiago Abascal and that has served as a bridge between the two. On his release from prison, Tamames He began to serve in the PCE and two decades ago he was part of the Executive Committee of the Party. In those years he forged his own political ideology and in the first legislature of democracy after the approval of the Constitution he entered Congress as a deputy of the PCE.
From the hemicycle of Congress, he protested against the “international whaling moratorium and the preparations for hunting it by Spanish ships”, against the urbanization process of the Balearic island of La Dragonera and even against the fines imposed on hundreds of newsstands for closing their businesses in February 1980 as a gesture of protest against the attacks suffered at their stalls. These proposals, today, would drive them United We Can where, remember, is the PCE that Tamames abandoned in 1981.
‘No to NATO’
He returned to Congress in 1986, but this time as the founder of Izquierda Unida. And in this legislature, the third of democracy, was when he was most active. He called for more means of prevention against the forest fires in summerdenounced the spill of chemical products in the Gulf of Cádizworried about brown bears (as we have seen) and even about the exploitation of Antarctica. “It seems to me that all this is a sample of the enormous voracity, of the voracity of economic interests,” she predicted on this last issue.
In his activity as a parliamentarian, he addressed other issues that are still topical today, such as the NATO membership or the “denuclearization” of Spain. “The PSOE has gone from its principles of neutrality and its clear antagonism to the insertion of Spain in NATO to a situation in which militarism predominates and currently to a kind of worship of nuclear deterrence,” he came to blurt out. to the then foreign minister Jose Fernandez Ordonez. Now, Unidas Podemos launches similar accusations at the Socialists.
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His passage through the lower house was not limited to defending his initiative. Congress also had to debate a request from a court to be able to prosecute Tamames, since being a deputy he was registered. Accustomed to the high voltage of current politics, this anecdote may surprise you, but the former leader of the PCE was denounced for accusing the Secretary of State for Cooperation with Latin America of “snorting cocaine.” “I know that there are secretaries of state who snort cocaine“, Tamames said in a radio debate on Antena3 in 1987. When asked to give a name, he did not hesitate: “Luis Yanez. According to my news he snorts and I’m sure there are many others“.
Yáñez denounced him for violating his honor and Congress accepted the request for him to be tried. Another old acquaintance of Spanish politics enters this story, Manuela Carmena. It was the former mayor of Madrid who sentenced Tamames to publish a rectification in the main newspapers for not having been able to prove that Yáñez snorted cocaine. What Carmena did not accept were the 10 million pesetas claimed by the Secretary of State considering that the attribution of drug use does not constitute an injury to “good reputation”.