Évole has a double portion this Sunday. The La Sexta program dissects in two consecutive episodes (52 and 51 minutes) how the government of José María Aznar tried to endure between March 11 and 14, 2004, the ambiguity regarding the authorship of the Madrid attacks, those who are about to turn 20 years old.
“If it is ETA we win on the street, if it is not ETA we may lose,” Pedro Arriola, the leading sociologist of that government, apparently said at a meeting of the crisis cabinet that met in Moncloa a few hours after the explosion of ten bombs on four Madrid Cercanías trains, leaving a final toll of 193 dead.
In the wake of this theory, Évole analyzes with interviews with eight journalists who lived on the front lines that day how the government tried to influence the media and institutions.
It was ambitious: Aznar even forced the UN itself to speak out against ETA, when all the evidence that scientific and intelligence agents were accumulating clearly pointed towards the authorship of Al Qaeda.
As it was.
In the documentary Iñaki Gabilondo, Mamen Mendizábal and Javier Álvarez from the SER network are interviewed; José Antonio Zarzalejos and Cruz Morcillo, from the ABC newspaper; and Óscar González, Fran Llorente and Josep Puigbo, from TVE.
The first installment focuses on the same day the 11th, when at first everyone (everyone: politicians, police, journalists) thinks about ETA’s responsibility; when Lehendakari Juan José Ibarretxe appears to attribute it to that terrorist group; when the leader of the Abertzale left, Arnaldo Otegi, appears to deny it; when signs of Al Qaeda begin to appear; when Aznar and his Interior Minister, Ángel Acebes, appear time after time to reinforce the idea that it was ETA.
The documentary truffles interviews, and memories of calls, and police investigations, with the appearances of Acebes.
Hardcore porn: at 12 in the morning, the general commissioner of information explains to the minister that a van with explosives, detonators and a tape with verses from the Koran has been found at the Alcalá de Henares Cercanías station, and at 1:30 p.m. Acebes and says: “ETA was looking for a massacre in Spain.”
And so on throughout the 11th and 12th, opening a slight hint of “there are two lines of investigation” when there is only one.
In the midst of the morass, Évole rescues the cover of La Voz de Galicia, which on the 12th categorically titled that it was authored by Al Qaeda. (La Vanguardia challenged Aznar, who called the director (like others) to swear that the signature was from ETA, and this newspaper maintained from the first day that the evidence offered by our sources pointed to Al Qaeda, despite the insistence of Interior otherwise).
Zarzalejos – one of the recipients of Aznar’s calls – says that he would have liked to “get it right from the first minute.” “The president was calling him: who doesn’t believe him?” says its editor Morcillo, who was critical of the editorial line. Since mid-morning on the 11th, his sources have assured him that it was Al Qaeda.
“The polarization we experience today is the result of that division,” says Gabilondo.
Another unusual thing happened: the then president of the United States, George Bush (Aznar’s ally) called the embassy to offer an interview (he called!) and it was recorded at the embassy, ??something unheard of. Well, the interview was never broadcast, because it would have meant linking the massacre with the Iraq war, that is, with that alliance, that is, with Al Qaeda. TVE rescues it 20 years later and will broadcast it on Tuesday.
The result of the documentary is devastating for that government, because as the hours go by the police accumulate evidence that points to Al Qaeda but Acebes continues to have to come out and show his face (sweat) to try to reach the elections on the 14th with ambiguity. .
But everything collapses on Saturday afternoon, when the police arrest three Moroccans and two Indians, and the ambiguity must disappear and is replaced by indignation.
That Saturday night, TVE pulled out all the stops, eliminating the programming planned to broadcast “Murder in February”, about the murder of the (socialist) politician Fernando Buesa.
Évole collects a fragment of an interview he did with Aznar in 2021 about 11-M, and where he says: “The government can be accused of anything except one thing: not telling the truth.” Ángel Acebes, for his part, has not spoken about the matter for twenty years.