The Government will appoint Leonardo Marcos as the new director of the Civil Guard on Tuesday

He has a degree in Law, has experience in the Administration and will succeed Mercedes González, the shortest term in democracy

MADRID, 9 (EUROPA PRESS) - The Government will appoint in the Council of Ministers next Tuesday the current director of Civil Protection and Emergencies, Leonardo Marcos, as the new director general of the Civil Guard, the Ministry of the Interior announced this Friday.

In this way, Marcos will replace the until now director, Mercedes González, who will have to leave office to go on the PSOE lists in the general elections on July 23 and after two months as head of the Armed Institute, the person who less time has held the post since 1978.

The Executive of Pedro Sánchez will appoint Marcos at the proposal of the heads of the Interior and Defense ministries, Fernando Grande-Marlaska and Margarita Robles, Interior has indicated in a note.

Born in Valderas (León, 1958), the next director of the Civil Guard has a degree in Law from the Autonomous University of Madrid. He studied the Senior Management program at the National Institute of Public Administration and belongs to the Superior Corps of State Civil Administrators, the Ministry explained.

He is, since January 2020, general director of Civil Protection and Emergencies, a department dependent on the Interior. Before, among other destinations, he was secretary general of the Government Delegation in Castilla y León, inspector in the General Inspection of the Ministry of the Interior, deputy director general of Human Resources at the National Institute of Statistics and deputy director general of Postgraduate and Doctorate in the Ministry of Education. And he served as Information Counselor at the Spanish embassies in Argentina, the United States and China.

With Marcos as general director of Civil Protection and Emergencies, Interior points out that the National Civil Protection System has undergone a process of "empowerment and reinforcement" through new instruments and coordination mechanisms that have "considerably" increased its "efficiency".

He points out that this efficiency has been verified during his tenure in episodes in recent years such as the pandemic, the volcanic eruption of the island of La Palama, the Filomena storm, the DANAS and other disparate meteorological circumstances or the large forest fires suffered in numerous points from the country.

Among the "milestones" reviewed by Interior is the approval, in December 2020, of the first General State Emergency Plan (PLEGEM), with which coordination between all administrations was reinforced and created the National Emergency Response Mechanism, that allows mobilizing all the resources of the System between autonomous communities in situations that have not been declared of national interest.

Another of the new mechanisms is the State Plan for Civil Protection against the Risk of Tsunami, which, approved in June 2021, establishes the organization and procedures to ensure an effective response from all public administrations to emergencies of this type through a alert system to notify civil protection authorities and public emergency services, as well as citizens who may be affected, with special attention to the most vulnerable people.

The Ministry that Grande-Marlaska directs also lists that, in June 2022, the General Directorate of Civil Protection and Emergencies activated the System of Notifications to the Population in the event of emergencies or catastrophes. Integrated into the National Alert Network, the RAN-PWS allows the widespread and immediate sending of alerts in SMS format to the mobile phones of people who are in areas affected by emergencies or imminent or ongoing catastrophes, which facilitates a much faster response. quickly in situations of special gravity.

And, in October of last year, the V Plenary Session of the National Civil Protection Council unanimously approved the Horizon 2035 Plan, developed to guarantee an effective response to emergencies and catastrophes, as well as equal protection throughout the country.

The objectives of this plan are to strengthen the operational, managerial, planning and coordinating capacity of the system's bodies; order your resources to ensure their interoperability and support; guarantee the planning and response capacity of the different Public Administrations and increase the resilience of society by promoting a culture of prevention.

REPLACES GONZÁLEZ

In compliance with Organic Law 5/1985 of the General Electoral Regime, Mercedes González is obliged to leave her position as general director in order to be eligible as a deputy for Madrid within the list of the PSOE for Madrid led by the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez . She will go in number 10.

The BOE published the appointment of González on March 29 and on April 4 he took office at the head of the Civil Guard in an act chaired by Grande-Marlaska and Robles. The current general secretary of the PSOE Madrid Capital, replaced María Gámez in office after her resignation due to the accusation of her husband in a derivative of the ERE case of Andalusia.

The still director of the Benemérita promised before the leadership of this institution to be "inflexible" against corruption and to perfect the internal control mechanisms, coinciding her speech with controversies such as the 'Mediator case' and the works of the 'Barracks case', which It affected several retired commanders and others who are active, and with information about the homes that Gámez shares with her husband.