The deceased was one of the determining figures of politics in the Valencian Community when she signed the motion of no confidence in 1991 that would end up elevating the political career of the former minister | Since 2009, when she stepped down as municipal advisor after 14 years in office, she lived away from public life.
Was the turncoat most famous in Spain ago three decades and a figure determinant that changed the direction of politics not only in Benidorm, but also in the whole of the Valencian Community. But has dead in the strictest privacy from his home, without his death revealing until several days later.
María Sánchez Trujillo, better known as Maruja Sanchezpassed away suddenly on May 26 as a result of heart failure.
Withdrawal from public life and completely removed from the media focus that persecuted her for years, after signing the motion of censure in 1991 that allowed Eduardo Zaplana access to the Benidorm Mayor’s Office and that would later elevate his political career, he was 81 years old and she has already been buried in that same privacy, surrounded only by her direct relatives and a small circle of friends.
Her name will go down in history for everything she starred in with her husband and collaborator, the also deceased Pedro Martínez, in those days of fall 1991: trips, hideouts, bodyguards, pressure, money, secret meetings and a pact with which the Popular Party managed to oust the PSOE from the mayor’s office of the tourist city after eight years in government, thanks to the help of a defector. A qualifying that, however, she herself never finished assuming:”They wouldn’t let me work. I had no choice but to leave.”
In May of that 1991, the country had held municipal and regional elections. In Benidorm, the socialists led by Manuel Catalan Chana, managed to revalidate the Mayor’s Office with a tight result of 11 councilors compared to 10 for the PP and they entrusted the Social Welfare powers to the dancer and dance teacher that they had signed a few months before trusting in their electoral pull.
It barely lasted six months. On October 16, 1991, Maruja Sánchez gave the “scare” and caused withdrawal from the Benidorm socialist municipal group, repeatedly alleging that her teammates did not let her work. The next day, she and her husband started a tour throughout Spain to hide and escape the pressures of his former classmates, while negotiating with Zaplana himself and his successor at the head of the Mayor’s Office, Vincent Perez Devesathe motion of censure that soon after they would end up signing.
The attempts of the then general secretary of the PSOE, Miguel Mozofor convincing her. On October 24, Maruja Sánchez came out of her hiding place to be photographed with the PP staff. Two days before they had presented the motion of censure signed in the City Council, which would end up taking shape on November 22, when a massive plenary session was held that gave Zaplana the command rod and that Maruja had to leave escorted and with her car shaken by supporters of the local PSOE.
From there, everything was easy for marriage. At least, in the economic plane. The fugitive mayor, since then always escorted by two bodyguards, returned to take over the powers of Social Welfare until the end of the legislature, when she no longer appeared on any municipal list. Not even she wants in the PP. But this party knew repay him for favors rendered. They gave her a position as municipal adviser and an office in the bullring that he would maintain for other fourteen years more, with the successive governments of Pérez Devesa and Manuel Perez Fenoll, despite not having been assigned any specific competence.
Just another vote of no confidencein this case the one supported by the also defector Jose Banuls and in the opposite direction, of the PSOE against the PP, brought with it the termination of Maruja Sánchez as adviser to the City Council, in September 2009.
Meanwhile, her husband, Pedro Martínez, also held a position as council advisoruntil his dismissal after the municipal elections of 2007, while other relatives of the exedil temporarily found accommodation as officials in the City Council or in other entitiesas the then public television Channel 9.
Shortly before being dismissed after prospering the motion of censure that exalted Agustín Navarro, Maruja Sánchez he did not want to leave empty. “The motion was almost miraculous, actually. I was fed up with the behavior of the socialist government of Benidorm because it prepared motions to help those most in need and they They knocked them down on me like I was crazy. Neither Zaplana nor the PP bought me. The only thing Zaplana did was commit to supporting all the responsibilities that I had taken on in the Department of Social Services. Zaplana’s political caste should not be discovered,” he declared in an interview with this newspaper in September 2009, the last one he gave before retiring from public life.
The rest is history.