Jardim's Justice, Part 3

‘Political Police’?

If his references to his friends, the Blandys, are laughable, more worrying are his statements about the Investigative Police. Are they merely a form of political opportunism, or does Jardim try to intimidate it and condition its performance?

The accusation that the Investigative Police acts as a ‘colonial occupation force’ were not limited to the Lobo case, they were repeated in 2005, when the Golden Whistle investigation [over football corruption] reached Madeira. ‘I don’t understand how these things always happen at election time’, said Jardim. ‘If the Investigative Police adopts the behavior of a political police in Madeira, it will suffer the consequences’. Going back in time to 1999, Jardim accused the director of the Investigative Police of trying to influence the municipal elections for having stated that the Regional Government had for a long time denied the reality of pedophilia in Madeira. Jardim said he would not admit that the police ‘just because they are under wing of the Republic’ should take on the nature of a ‘political or colonial police’. And he went on ‘the issue will be brought up in the Government meeting, and if we understand that the gentleman heading the Police Department has usurped his functions, he will be denounced through the normal hierarchy, beginning with the Minister of the Republic, who should call attention to the fact that the peripheral services of the state are not meant to enter politics’. The director of the Investigative Police did not rise to the provocation; the fact is that news about pedophilia in Madeira had always been automatically attributed to ‘campaigns against Madeira’.

Jardim used exactly the same terms in 1997, in reaction to the visit of the Werkgroep Morkhoven, which came to Madeira to deliver proof that linked Madeirans to a Belgian pedophile ring. In this very context, the Regional Counsel of Jardim’s party, the PSD Madeira, in a press release, referred to terrible campaigns being mounted against Madeira ‘which nurture separatism, namely against the person of the President of the Regional Government.’