Julián Muñoz will go down in history as the mayor who left Marbella Town Hall bare, taking dirty money into the family home in trash bags, as his own wife, Mayte Zaldívar, stated verbatim and publicly. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison, including the total number of crimes required to serve that sentence. Cachuli, as he is known, spent intermittent years behind bars for embezzlement of public funds and ongoing corruption, but he was released from prison because they considered him a risky patient with serious respiratory illnesses.
Ignoring any pathology, the former mayor of Marbella continues to be the best customer of the tobacco shop next to his home, where, until now, he bought a few packs of cigarettes every day. These days he’s making headlines because he publicly stated that he “suffered from rampant cancer,” something his closest friends already knew. One of these people details to LA RAZÓN how he shared it: “Julián informed friends in the group on WhatsApp that he had cancer. He has regular cancer. “We are very worried about him, many think he has little time left.” Another friend explains to us that when he saw the images on television, he went to see him at his daughter Eloísa’s house, where he is being treated. She said she found him in a very good mood and joking, although she warned him: “I’m more badass than ever, I don’t know if I’m going to make it.”
The alarm went off in Marbella and it was even necessary to deny that the exedile was dead. Last Sunday, a close friend with whom he had appeared in photographs in different publications, without any relation to him, contacted this media to inquire: “I was just told he died, is that true? “We haven’t spoken in a while and I’m speechless.”
In Marbella, there are mixed feelings about the former mayor’s illness. For Diego Escalona, spokesperson for the “Marbella Complains” movement and one of the “Marbellaros” who has most denounced corruption through his program and the excesses of “gilism”, he tells LA RAZÓN : “People are already fed up with Julián Muñoz appearing in the media from time to time to expose his ills. It’s not a subject. The problem is that he is paying the 46 million euros he owes to Marbella City Hall, of which he has only paid 1,021 euros. And I’m not saying it, the National Court is saying it. If he wants to leave in peace, he must return this money which does not belong to him. And now everyone who claims to support him is just making sure that not a single euro of the total amount they made disappear is lost.
Escalona feels that there are people who have still approached him to ask for money or settle scores. “He was recently seen entering and leaving a phone store in Nueva Andalucía. Now let everyone think what they want. We’re all going to die, don’t let him show mercy. For more than five years we have put a photo of Julián on our platform every Easter Sunday, because here in Marbella many call him Julián the Risen.
His intriguing walks
Since Cachuli left the Costa del Sol hospital to go free, he has been seen in different areas of Marbella and in different situations. Visit to the municipal market stand, where Mayte Zaldívar runs the small bar Sitio 85 with her current partner, Fernando. Or on the way to the Del Río pharmacy, in San Pedro de Alcántara. Perhaps the promenade that attracts the most attention is that of Banana Beach, the site of the first illegal license granted to build 238 houses in a green space, by the sea. This is the first conviction of the former mayor of Marbella, as well as six other councilors from the Independent Liberal Group (GIL).
There are images that show the former mayor with his granddaughter and her boyfriend opening the door of this urbanization and entering inside. The deceased Carmen Sevilla and Yola Berrocal had their attic in this illegal place, which was judicially condemned to demolition.
Julián Muñoz is sentenced to 22 years in prison, in addition to those still awaiting trial. In the countless occasions he has sat on the bench, his mantra before the judge is always to hold Jesús Gil responsible for everything: “I don’t blame the dead man, but I had no part in it. “Everything was done as we were told.”
Penance for his Sevillians “early in the morning”
Women have always been the cause of Julián Muñoz’s downfall. The pink circus of his life transcended him from start to finish. From his wife, Mayte Zaldívar, who attacked her companion on television and spoke of her husband’s corruption at the head of the council, assuring this black money entered the family home in garbage bags, to Isabel Pantoja, who ended up being incarcerated for her dealings with him. And without forgetting the “blonde” who brought him back to prison because of some Sevillians “early in the morning” who made the prison surveillance judge suspect that she had released him due to illness. The magistrates found it “aesthetically striking that a person who justifies being sick to serve his sentence at home comes to get up late at night”.