The Minister of Culture of Castilla y León, Gonzalo Santonja – or 'don Gonzalo', as he likes to be called – was born in 1952 in the town of Béjar in Salamanca and has always known how to move in circles of power and adapt to the political and social circumstances of the moment with a single goal: to obtain an income. From communism to the far right, for Santonja there are a few decades and circumstances: his own. On this Friday in question – after Abascal's order to break the autonomous treaties with the PP – Santonja has changed his coat again and He remains under the command of Fernández Mañueco's PP.
Santonja has always managed to hit the right triggers, sometimes drawing on his communist past and his imprisonment and exile during Franco's dictatorship; although he never spoke about the immediately subsequent phase in which, as a supporter of Herri Batasuna, he attended lectures and meetings, a fact that Vox learned after signing him.
The introduction of the far-right formation was the writer Fernando Sánchez-Dragó, a personal friend of both Santonja and Abascal. In February 2023, Santonja remembered Sánchez Dragó, who received the Castilla y León de las Letras award shortly before his death, granted by the Ministry of Culture. He regularly gives public lectures, often going back centuries or quoting various literary, historical or philosophical figures to frame his reasoning and decisions.
His most controversial hours as a Vox advisor came in 2022, when the Junta de Castilla y León brought them to him to avoid questions about the irregularities he had been allowing for more than a decade in favor of Santonja. Twenty years ago, at the height of the rise of Spanish as an export value, the regional government decided to create the Castilian and Leonese Language Institute Foundation, with the aim of studying and disseminating the origins of Castilian.
In principle, there was to be no director, but someone (another board member) thought that the foundation needed an academic layer. It is not clear whether it was Santonja, winner of the National Essay Prize and the Castilla y León Prize for Literature, who made or received the offer, but the fact is that he was appointed director in 2002 and that in the information provided to the media, the essayist and Spanish scholar appeared as a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, while he only became one two years later, in 2004.
Those who know the counselor say that he always used half-truths and those circles of power in which he moved easily, so that no one would contrast the facts. Thus Santonja, who appeared as an unpaid director in the budgets of the Language Institute, managed to earn two at the same time without anyone pointing it out. In 2002, the board granted him a service commission (a temporary appointment with which a civil servant fills special positions or functions that are not specific to the position for which he is appointed) at the Ministry of Education and Culture.
The commissions are for one year and can be extended for another year, but Santonja managed to keep it that way until 2013 and for eleven years he received his salary of 50,000 euros without this circumstance becoming public. So much so that the board of the Foundation, always chaired by the Ministry of Education and Culture and then, after being split in two, by the Ministry of Culture, approved the “director’s fees” for years, but without specifying that Santonja was paid, which was not the case. He combined the management of the Language Institute with his position as professor at the university, but on the basis of that assignment he worked only for the Institute.
The work was awarded to the Language Institute, which was then invoiced separately.
Santonja thus earned two salaries: one of 50,000 euros for the service committee that camouflaged his salary as head of the Institute, and one of 16,000 that the Board of Directors approved in the belief that his dedication stemmed from pure academic dedication. According to Santonja, those extra 16,000 euros were “a supplement” after obtaining the professorship awarded to him by a tribunal whose members, except one, ended up doing various tasks for the foundation, from writing books to coordinating or curating exhibitions.
But in addition, Santonja received that second salary by invoicing the “transfer of intellectual rights” to his company, Monbrún SL, and on the other hand he added other amounts for “illustrating and laying out books”, even if those illustrations were not his, nor did he have to pay royalties for them. as he did with an essay on Mariano José de Larra for which he used an etching by Rosario Weiss, owned by the National Libraryor include on the same invoice from 2009 supposed illustrations and layouts of books published up to two years earlier. After elDiario.es revealed this, the current Minister of Culture defended these accusations, explaining that a publications director was needed at the Institute and that no one had been hired “for economic reasons”. What he did not say is how he, as director, decided to assign himself those “layout” jobs and how he set the price, and above all why the board was never informed of the tasks he was taking on.
A contract to advise yourself
In 2013, for unknown reasons, Santonja was without the service commission he had held for more than ten years and had to return to Complutense to teach, but he continued to bill the Institute. He did not last too long. In order to make his work at Complutense compatible, in 2016 he made sure that the foundation hired his services as 'scientific director'. On January 1 of that year, he signed a contract stating that the foundation was interested “in advice on the scientific direction of the content of various exhibitions and cultural projects” by Gonzalo Santonja, then professor in the Department of Spanish Philology II of the Faculty of Philology of the Complutense and that the “researcher” was willing to do so. But Santonja had been doing that work since 2002 and in this case the contract was that he had to advise himself.
The contract was justified on the basis of article 83 of the Organic Law of Universities, which regulates the compatibility of university professors with works and projects of a scientific nature, and had a term of four renewable years. As indicated in that contract, Santonja had to report regularly to the foundation and hold monthly consultations with those responsible, ignoring the fact that this could only happen with himself as director of the foundation and with the management, since the board met only twice a year. The foundation paid the Complutense – and this to Santonja – a total of 96,000 euros for those four years of 'scientific advice' and reimbursed travel expenses. The salary of a professor is around 85,000 euros per year and Santonja added another 18,000 euros per year to that, thanks to that secret contract, to pay his salary as director.
From PP darling to advisor at Vox
Santonja’s situation exploded in the summer of 2021 when the Ministry of Culture, owned by Ciudadanos, took advantage of the fact that his retirement date was approaching to try to do without him discreetly. Although Gonzalo Santonja was prepared to leave the Foundation, when the time came he refused, and the board voted to leave the management to an advisory board. However, the statutes had been changed to require a quorum to vote for resignation, and this was not obtained, although there was a majority. With one foot already out, Santonja was in charge of leaking to the media that the Foundation was leaving because of the ‘hostilities’ that Ciudadanos was suffering. He also addressed each patron of the Foundation to say goodbye and attack the party: “From my life experience – I was imprisoned during the Franco regime – I know that setbacks pass and that clientelistic networks perish on their own, especially when promoted by those who are in the process of political extinction, but the Spanish will continue to exist, a cause that has been and will continue to be ours.”
Since Gonzalo Santonja took office as councillor, his portfolio has processed 42 files of cultural interest, although the most controversial is that of the fascist pyramid of the Italians in Burgosa procedure endorsed by the University of Burgos in a one-and-a-half-page report and another by the Fernán González Institute, directed by René Jesús Payo Hernanz, which received the Castilla y León Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities. In fact, Payo Hernanz also read the speech on behalf of all the winners on April 18, a task usually assigned to the winner of the Literature Prize – Fernando Arrabal – who did not attend the event.
In these two years, Santonja has also dedicated himself to language, sport and bullfighting: he has organised prizes in the bullfighting research worth 20,000 euros and supported, among other things, the celebration of the Novilladas Circuit 2023. Culture has also promoted and strengthened cultural foundations such as the Siega Verde Foundation, the Las Médulas Foundation or the Atapuerca Foundation. Recently, the Cortes has also approved the Law on Cultural Heritage, practically a copy of the norm that Ciudadanos presented when it governed together with the Popular Party. It has also strengthened the Symphony Orchestra, the Youth Orchestra and the Language Institute.
Santonja always manages to make the political dance work for the better, as when he managed to get the Junta de Castilla y León to defend him from receiving two salaries, something that is forbidden. The reasons were obvious: the government was in the hands of PP and Vox because of a government pact that was blown up on Thursday, but Santonja was appointed advisor by Vox, who allowed this irregular situation and facilitated it in the phase of the Institute of Language was the People's Party.