In the Knight Corps home there are painters in these first days of the year. Manoli, the mother of Carlos Body (Badajoz, 1980) – the new Minister of Economy, Commerce and Business of the Government – had planned for some time to “fix up the house a little”, in the Valle de la Serena (Badajoz), a town of just over 1,100 inhabitants, 35 kilometers from Don Benito. The surprising appointment of her son has not changed the daily routine, although the town continues to revolutionize these days when it is known that Nadia Calviño’s successor is the son of the marriage of lifelong teachers. Manoli’s neighbors continue to congratulate her when they pass her on the street. Those closest to him come to the family home to remember how proud Gregorio, the minister’s father, would have been of his son, who died a few years ago, when he was only 50.

The figure of the maternal grandparents, Cándida and Pablo Caballero El Pinche, appears in all conversations. “They have always been a very endearing example for us,” comments from the Association for the Defense of the Heritage of the Serena Valley. Now deceased, they ran an iconic grocery store on Hernán Cortés Street, where they were well known for dealing daily with most of the neighbors. At his inauguration, the minister had endearing words for his grandfather, whose obsession, the politician highlighted, was always “for his children to have the education that he had not had.” A worker since he was 9 years old in the town’s tungsten mine, he dedicated himself to loading sand onto his donkey and transporting it. Since then he was known as “El Pinche.” So that his children would not have to go through the same calamities, he sent them from a very young age to study in Badajoz. That spirit of improvement that his grandfather always sowed (his father, Valentín, was a Civil Guard) was already impregnated in the following generations. Hence, Carlos’s parents decided to go in the late 80s to a Spanish school at the Swiss Embassy in search of new opportunities, learning languages ??and opening their minds, even though Manuela had a position as a teacher at the Virgen school. of Guadalupe de Quintana de la Serena. And they did it with their children who were still very young: Carlos was 9 years old and his brother Gregorio Pablo, a little older, today a renowned surgeon in Madrid.

The family stayed in Switzerland for five years, after which, already with the French language under their arms, they returned to Badajoz. Carlos first began studying BUP at the Maristas de Badajoz where, in addition to getting good grades, he would begin to develop another of the great facets for which he is remembered today in the capital of Badajoz: his football career, as confirmed by the director of the center, Elm Silos. “They came from Switzerland and that, at that time, was quite a novelty,” he comments while he does not hesitate to describe him as a “brilliant” student, but, above all, a “good person.”

After finishing the COU, the passion for football was not forgotten by the current minister, who began studying Economics at the University of Extremadura (he graduated in 2003) -his father had done so in Mathematics-. Both brothers signed for Puerta Palmas, a modest club in Badajoz where they played two seasons, in the first of which they achieved promotion to Regional Preferente for the first time in the history of this club. Carlos was a defensive midfielder and Gregorio was a center forward, as his then coach, Santos Granado, remembers. “He arrived when he was 19 years old and from the first moment I found that he was very polite and very respectful, with the world, although he was not very talkative… And he even got along with me sometimes because he wasn’t always a starter, but I got along well with him “. His coach defines him as a “very tall” footballer, a trotter in the center of the field, with more fighting ability than technique, and he distributed when he had to distribute because it was played on dirt fields, full of mud, and against very veteran people. “, he recalls.

Married and father of a 9-year-old girl, the new minister has not lost his passion for sport, who, putting football aside, now stays fit and in shape by running, prepared for the obstacle course that awaits him. as the head of the public accounts of the State…