Twenty years have passed since the most significant terrorist attack suffered by Spain, both in terms of the number of victims and its political consequences.
It took place on the eve of the general elections to be held on March 14th, 2004.
A few minutes after 7:30 a.m. on March 11th, as droves of commuters readied themselves to ride the Madrid train to work or school, ten explosive devices detonated practically at the same time in four suburban trains, resulting in 192 dead and almost 2,000 wounded.
The bombing seems to have followed a typical pattern for attacking convoys, so that the foremost vehicle is struck first to immobilize those behind it. The first bombs went off on a train parked at the Atocha stop, immobilizing the line before several trains behind it were bombed while parked at stops.
This points to the military/mercenary provenance of the executors of the attack.
In line with this, an explosive deactivation technician (TEDAX; Técnico Especialista en Desactivación de Artefactos Explosivos) would tell judge Del Olmo who oversaw the subsequent legal proceedings that the bombs were very likely military grade.
At first, everything seemed to point to the Basque terrorist group the ETA, which was in those days severely cornered by Spain’s PM Jose Maria Aznar’s People’s Party government.
Indeed, it was feared that a reaction from the ETA, a show of the groups’ continued commitment to the slaughter of innocents, was impending, and so, popular opinion generally assumed the attack must have been carried out by the ETA.
In fact, a van belonging to the ETA had been found two weeks before the Madrid train bombing in the locality of Cañaveras, with explosives and a sketch of the Madrid train system inside.
The then-Minister of the Interior Ángel Jesús Acebes described the ETA as law enforcement’s main suspect during his midday address. Half an hour later, however, PM Aznar no longer mentioned the Basque terrorist group when he spoke to the nation.
The speech was a strange one. Said the PM: “We will not change our regime on account of terrorists killing, nor on account of their ceasing to kill.”
The term “regime” seems somehow out of place, as does the reference to their “ceasing to kill.” It has been suggested that this phrase was not meant for the public but for certain international actors trying to change the Spanish system of government, perhaps in return for the ETA ceasing from violence.
Aznar, in any case, was not clear about ETA involvement, and his government was now somewhat ambiguous about ascribing these attacks to them. In fact, others were far more vehement about this: the then-regional governor of the Basque Country, Ibarretxe, together with the Catalan separatist ERC, all publicly blamed Basque terrorists for the attack.
It is also now largely forgotten that the leader of the Socialists in the Basque Country, Manuel Huertas, appeared on television with flyers that had allegedly been circulated on Basque trains days prior to the attack, warning passengers not to use Madrid trains until after the country’s general election.
Even on the morning of the attack, some already pointed out that the modus operandi here, however, did not fit with that of the terrorist group, and Arnaldo Otegui, leader of its political wing, was quick to disassociate himself from the bombing.
Spanish society, for its part, was, for the moment, united, and something like the mass reaction against the ETA murder of councilman Miguel Angel Blanco on July 10, 1997, could have been intuited.
The imminent elections, however, which augured poor results for the Socialist Party’s (PSOE) Rodrigo Zapatero, would prove decisive in politicizing the attack and dividing the country.
Barely a few hours after the bombs had gone off, when the number of dead and wounded was not yet known, the media began framing possible perpetrators in electoral terms: if it were the ETA, that would benefit the PP; if it were Islamic terrorists, that would benefit the socialists. Why? Because Aznar had involved Spain in the U.S. criminal occupation of Iraq, and now Madrid’s citizens were suffering the backlash.
The narrative was quickly constructed that the PP would try to push for ETA involvement, and that the government was lying to hide the truth.
The speed and efficiency of leftist organizations in politicizing the attack to blame the Aznar government was impressive. That evening, many PP headquarters were cornered, some of them vandalized and their occupants harassed.
Which is not to imply that this was an exclusively media-generated reaction. Aznar had not properly taken the temperature of Spanish society, failing to reckon with the degree of opposition in Spain to U.S. military interventionism.
News coverage now referred to new evidence: a Kangoo van in the vicinity of the Alcala de Henares train stop in which police found seven detonators and a tape with verses from the Qur’an.
According to the official version presented to the public, the Kangoo van had been used by terrorists to move around Madrid and place their bombs. From Alcala de Henares, they would ride train lines leaving for Madrid and deposit their deadly cargo.
At one point, a backpack was discovered in the Madrid neighborhood of Vallecas containing twelve kilos of explosives. These explosives, however, contained shrapnel, unlike the bombs that had been detonated on the 11th of March. This means they may have been unrelated to the Madrid bombings and may have been part of a sloppy psychological operation (one without knowledge of the original bombing and so potentially unrelated to it) meant to manipulate public opinion.
Meanwhile, actual physical evidence, such as the bombed train wagons, was destroyed by authorities.
The first of the fundamental proofs to build a case for the “official” version of events, then, was this Kangoo van.
It led to massive street demonstrations, in the context of which the film director Pedro Almodóvar apparently accused Aznar of trying to stage a coup d’état.
Speaking of coups d’état, we should point to another bizarre element here: an attempted coup d’état had taken place in the Spanish-speaking African country of Equatorial Guinea (in which Margaret Thatcher’s son had, it seems, been involved) a little bit prior to the Madrid bombings. During the trial of some of the conspirators, one admitted that their orders were to carry out the change in government for Equatorial Guinea before Spain’s general election.
Investigative journalist Luis del Pino, on whose research I am drawing throughout, speculates that this was meant to provide cover for the Spanish operation: if, subsequent to the ramshackle coup, anyone was to detect the presence of Spanish-speaking mercenaries in Spain, they would attribute this to the African affair and not pursue them with particular urgency. But again, this is merely speculative.
The conspiracy theory suggested by del Pino that ties the above together runs roughly as follows: Plan A was to ascribe the attack to the ETA in something akin to the UK’s 1998 Omagh bombing, for which a dissident faction of the IRA was blamed, and condemned by the leadership of that group. But Aznar rejected the offer to transition to a new “regime” in Spain (presumably integrating the PP into the same geopolitical alliance network as the PSOE), in return for the ETA condemning the attack and abandoning violence. For this reason, Plan B was activated, namely the planting of a series of dubious pieces of evidence pointing to Islamist culprits.
But who drew up these Plans A and B? Different possibilities have been floated, focusing on international actors unhappy with a possible U.S. pivot by Bush Jr. towards allowing Spain to pursue her strategic interests in return for Aznar’s support of the Iraq war. Such a pivot would have upset the European balance of power centred on the Franco-German axis and the U.K.’s imperialist pretensions (including its illegal colony in Gibraltar as safeguard against a possible future Spanish assertion of its strategic importance as the entry-point into the western Mediterranean). France, Morocco, and the U.K. would have had reason to want Spain to remain a second-tier country in Europe.
For his part, Jose Manuel Villarejo, former officer in Spain’s National Police Corps, has stated that he has no doubts that it was France and Morocco who planned the train bombings.
Zapatero of course won the elections and normalized relations with the ETA’s political arm. Any commemoration of the massacre would suffer from politicization and serve to further divide Spanish civil society, with some blaming Spain’s participation in the occupation of Iraq for galvanizing Islamist ire and others blaming the PSOE for obfuscating the truth of the bombing.
The pitiable fact that a frontal attack on Spain was treated by Spaniards as an occasion to divide and render themselves easy propaganda fodder is a testament to the atomization and degradation of the nation’s civic consciousness.
To this day, Spain has no foreign policy platform articulating a coherent national interest. Spanish politics bifurcates between leftist, Soros-style social disintegration aligning with Latin America’s Foro Sao Paolo and, therefore, indirectly, with its patrons (including, in the case of some elements of the Spanish Left, Putin’s Russia), and a Right willing to shore up U.S. foreign policy decisions, even when this means supporting jingoism and a war economy.
Their false ‘socialism’ and ‘patriotism’ are the cloven hoof under which the Spanish fatherland continues to languish.
In closing, for a deep dive into the above, I would direct interested readers to the eight-part documentary by the Terra Incognita Youtube channel, “11-M: El Principio del Fin.”
