This Tuesday, the hotel association of Las Palmas issued an untitled and unsigned document attacking the Ser chain, something that has generated outrage on social networks among pro-ecotax activists. Was it a press release? Was it a press release? It was a document with the FEHT logo and it did not express who the media could contact to clarify data or expand information. That is to say: it was a document from the FEHT but it was not very clear what the text was referring to, attacking a journalist who had interviewed the president of the FEHT, José María Mañaricúa, during the morning. The clash was such that Mañaricua ended up claiming his right to speak "for freedom."
The author of the FEHT text would have been the director of media relations of the FEHT of Las Palmas, the Tenerife journalist and audiovisual producer Juan Manuel Bethencourt (this April he presented an interesting documentary on the Canarian women's struggle in La Palma by the General Directorate of Autochthonous Sports (PP). Almost at the same time that his boss was interviewed in Ser Las Palmas, in the same building, the press chief was a talk show host for Canarias Radio Autonómica in an informative content space under the direction. of the journalist Miguel Ángel Daswani, who was once the press chief of the president of the Cabildo of Tenerife, Rosa Dávila (CC), in the Government of the Canary Islands. Bethencourt was a CC councilor in La Laguna and director of Diario de Avisos En. Part of the gathering was giving his opinion on the interests of RIU in Fuerteventura and the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, without warning the listeners that he was an employee of the FETH.
While all this was happening, on the upper floor of Radio Autonómica, Mañaricua was 'assaulted' with questions by a journalist from the Prisa radio group in Las Palmas in the same Mapfre building. The journalist asked the president of the Las Palmas hoteliers if he was going to raise the salaries of the cleaning employees in the hotels. And Mañaricua, who arrived late due to traffic problems and even asked for water because he was suffocated, responded by remembering that when Jesús de Polanco had hotels in Tenerife, the cleaning employees at the Jardín Tropical or Abama hotels earned more than the cleaning employees. of the radio station he owned. The journalist would have been very upset if the founder of Grupo Prisa and the presence of the group in the hotel sector at the time were mentioned..
The response did not please the journalist from Ser Las Palmas, who urged the business leader not to interfere with the employees' salaries and urged him to concentrate on giving him the response he was asking for. But the president of the FEHT of Las Palmas could not finish giving an answer. With the comparison Mañaricua intended to highlight that, contrary to general theory, hotel cleaning employees were well paid. Mañaricua was on a floor of the Mapfre building in Las Palmas being 'assaulted' in Ser Las Palmas while his press chief, in the same building, on Autonomous Radio spoke as a talk show host with Daswani about tourism, the eco-tax crisis, minors migrants, Costas' skills and, incidentally, about a novel based on Max Weber's thesis "and the current strange strange times." After that interview, Mañaricua ordered Bethencourt to send a protest press release. A media source received a call from the FEHT to disregard the FEHT statement. But the digital newspaper Atlántico Hoy, social networks such as the old Twitter, X, and Cadena Ser itself throughout Spain brought out the cavalry. That broke the strategy of cooling the fever of the FEHT of Las Palmas created by the FEHT itself.
