The fall from grace of the mayor of Algeciras, José Ignacio Landaluce, has been much more than the chronicle of an announced (political) death. The complaints of two women from the PP before the Justice for the alleged sexual abuse committed by Landaluce have definitively broken the cloak of silence that the government team had imposed around what was internally recognized as "inappropriate behavior" of the mayor.
Several councilors in his government were aware of the complaints and internal complaints of several women, although nothing has moved to take the Mayor's office from Landaluce until two of them have decided to take the facts to court and the PP of Cádiz has finally decided to intervene.
None of these councilors would have previously wanted to raise these complaints to the party's management bodies or activate the internal protocols for the prevention of sexual harassment. The moral alibi that was imposed among the PP councilors to justify silence in the face of what was happening is that the mayor "is sick" and the opposition wants to use "his weakness" to win in court what they have not been able to win at the polls.
The official version conveyed by the PP of Cádiz has been that the party has intervened at the moment when it had access to the direct testimony of the two complainants and decided to give them total credibility. This was conveyed in a statement sent to the media last Monday, October 12, after holding a meeting with the 15 PP councilors and telling them that they were going to request the resignation of the mayor and that, immediately afterwards, if he did not agree to leave, they should resign from their positions in the municipal government. Twelve of them followed the party's guidelines and three other councilors have stayed on Landaluce's side.
But, before that Monday, the PP had somehow turned a deaf ear to the signals it had previously received about the unsustainable situation that had been generated in the Algeciras City Council around the mayor.
Landaluce has governed the Algeciras City Council since 2011 and has an absolute majority that has not only served as a shield throughout this time but is the key to maintaining the power of the Popular Party in the Provincial Council of Cádiz and in the Commonwealth of Municipalities of Campo de Gibraltar. Landaluce has also been senator for Cádiz in the last legislature. Putting him in the pillory meant, therefore, putting one of the strongholds of the PP in the province at risk.
The first news regarding alleged sexual abuse came to light on October 28, 2024 when MEP Alvise Pérez published screenshots of WhatsApp messages in which three women linked to the PP municipal group described harassing behavior by the mayor. Alvise Pérez is a political agitator with few scruples, who tends to encourage false or lacking rigorous news. However, the socialist municipal group gave credibility to the content of those messages due to the access to direct testimonies that it claimed it had at the time, and reported to the Supreme Prosecutor's Office those and other facts linked to both the alleged abuses and alleged maneuvers carried out with public funds and contracts to cover them up.
At the same time that the Prosecutor's Office began the investigation, the national leadership of the PP also announced that it would open an information file to get to the bottom of the matter. But the women who were supposedly victims of this harassment (Susana Pérez Custodio and Eva Pajares) publicly denied it. Landaluce then announced that he had requested his voluntary withdrawal from the PP to defend himself against the charges in the pending judicial investigation. Months later, the Prosecutor's Office closed the case and Landaluce went out to public opinion to present himself as a victim of political persecution.
But the PP never readmitted Landaluce as a member. EL MUNDO later learned that the party leadership had received other testimonies that also pointed to the existence of sexist behavior of a sexual nature, this time within the Popular Group in the Senate. But, in all of these cases, the women who said they had been victims of the excesses of the mayor and senator refused to make public or report the facts to justice for fear of not being believed and of public scandal, and they made it explicit even in writing. Sources from the PP explained to EL MUNDO that they felt their hands were tied to act against the mayor, since he threatened to denounce anyone who accused him without evidence or without testimony that publicly corroborated the complaints. As EL MUNDO published, the PP then resolved that Landaluce would not be a candidate again in the 2027 elections but did not force its councilors to withdraw their confidence in him. This contradiction was a source of frequent criticism from the opposition, especially from the PSOE, which insisted on pointing out Landaluce as a sexual harasser.
EL MUNDO learned at the end of July that, once again, a woman had reported to several members of the municipal government of Algeciras that she had been the victim of sexual abuse by Landaluce. The general secretary of the PSOE of Cádiz, Juan Carlos Ruiz Boix, asked the PP for public explanations for this new case, although without giving details of the events. These had occurred on July 10 during a visit to the victim's Mayor's Office and in the mayor's office. The woman did not want to report the incident at that time but she did trust in some type of intervention from the group's councilors to prevent further harassment.
Finally, on Thursday, September 8, the newspaper Europa Sur published that a PP activist had denounced Landaluce before the Supreme Court (the mayor still had his seat in the Senate) for two sexual assaults that occurred in 2020 and 2021. Two days later, the victim of the July attack, after speaking with the president of the PP of Cádiz, Bruno García, decided to report the events to the courts. It was then that the PP launched the machinery to remove Landaluce from the Mayor's Office.
This Friday it was learned that a Violence Against Women Court has summoned Landaluce to testify on October 23. Previously, councilors Jacinto Muñoz and Patricia Bueno will have to testify as witnesses. The first is called to become the new mayor after being designated by the PP as a candidate in the motion of censure that will be held on the 28th and to which the four Vox councilors have joined. The second is one of the councilors (three councilors in total) who have not wanted to abandon Landaluce and continue to be part of his government. The PP has opened an expulsion file against them.
