Video: 20 years of the tacky 'Queen Mary 2' in Las Palmas

This year, 2024, two decades have passed since the depredation of Cunard's Queen Mary II in Las Palmas. The work of social engineering, with planes and helicopters flying over the area to the astonishment of the Navy at the Naval Base, an hour of fireworks, produced the presence in the port of Las Palmas of 300.000 people believing that tourists were coming when it was a test of motor control and still, 20 years later, even TV Canaria reported it this way. The people traveling on the Queen Mary II in January 2004 were hundreds of guests and 1.200 service personnel in the testing phase. In other words: the same as four planes of tourists at any given time to come on vacation to Playa del Inglés.

All of that would be a rinse to disguise electoral expenses that were coming because on March 13, 2004 there were elections and the argument was that what the Las Palmas media, with advertising, called "the empress of the seas" was received in the middle of buses , sound, music groups. This week the same ship was in Tenerife and Cunard, which knew about the anniversary, has ignored passing through the damaged city of Las Palmas, which now has a burnt ship paying homage to Columbus right in front of where 20 years ago the Guanchesque Chavismo flooded from Las Palmas deceived.

Because all the people who are usually marginalized in Las Palmas in the high areas came in droves from early in the morning, as a good operation of social engineering. 15 days before, they were cooked over low heat to receive those passengers from the United Kingdom who did not He understood the reason for the crowding to the point where Cunard fired staff due to the entry of street people onto the ship. An hour of fireworks, live connections from Madrid TV channels, interviews with businessmen and the public excited about something they really didn't know about: promotion of port land for real estate companies like Evemarina in what they called La Gran Marina.

That social engineering operation surprised Cunard given that the ship was only in Las Palmas for 12 hours. There was an hour of fireworks, top-level businessmen from the Las Palmas employers' association dancing to folkloric songs. That was in January 2004 during the pre-election campaign period of March 2004 and that turned the cycle of the PP in the Canary Islands with the arrival of Rodríguez Zapatero's PSOE to the executive power. The captain of the Queen Mary II, R.W. Warwick, could not control the human mass of that docking operation before José Manuel Arnáiz, then port president for the PP, said that "when we had to reach the port we did not need to turn on the navigation lights because there were such a large number on Avenida Marítima of flashes that were hardly necessary," said the captain, who added that he felt "overwhelmed."