The multiple attack of March 11, 2004 in Madrid, which is now 20 years old, marked a before and after in everyone’s memory, and a great rupture in the lives of the victims (193 dead and nearly 2,000 injured ) and their families. But it also marked a turning point in the fight against terrorism and in the political and media management of terrorism. Two decades later, these are some of the lessons learned and the lessons learned from the worst attack ever recorded on European soil.
“We victims learned that there are victims who like it and others who don’t.” At 41 years old, two decades after the bombs that the terrorists placed on the trains heading to Atocha tore off part of her face, Zahira Obaya continues to live with a little white gas in her left eye. “I have gained my new identity with her. “This is me, this is who I am,” she says. Working in film production, she travels “from here to there,” and assumes that, “at least three times a day,” someone is going to ask her the question: “What happened to you?” Her answers vary. Sometimes she dodges the answer and responds with “ugh, that’s a long story.” Other times, she tells the truth and waits to see the reaction of her interlocutor. “Normally, they don’t know where to turn or they respond with disbelief,” she says. She has it tattooed on her face that day and also the following ones. Those in which “a social gap was opened so big that no one has been able to close it” yet, because “they did not want to accept what happened and that they did it wrong.” “I still have to listen to people who tell me that I am not open to hearing the other thing,” she says. And she concludes: “We victims learned that some of us like it and others don’t, and it would have been enough to recognize our mistakes.”
Justice changes the reactive approach to the preventive one. Prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, who led the Prosecutor’s Office team that represented the public prosecution in the trial for the 11-M jihadist attacks, assures that those events confirmed some statements. “We had a very powerful anti-terrorist police force with intelligence services that within a few hours already had very reliable information about the attacks and that made it possible to locate the perpetrators very quickly,” he says. “It was also found that justice was agile, transparent and public, with the live broadcast of a trial in which the rights of the accused were scrupulously respected, there was no criminal law against the enemy, and the victims were generously compensated,” he says. Finally, “it was found that there was poor political management of the information about what happened, the information management was not adequate, which generated great mistrust and distrust towards the Government,” he points out. “I studied the entire summary and there was not a single clue that linked ETA and not a single falsified piece of evidence.” That’s it for the findings, the prosecutor points out from his office. But Zaragoza assures that this meant a reorientation of the anti-terrorist fight towards prevention. “From a judicial point of view it led us to reflect on how the fight against terrorism should be focused. Until then it was reactive, that is, after the attacks; But this forced us to change the focus towards a more preventive action, creating and applying new criminal types in the legislative reforms of 2010 and 2015: integration, recruitment, indoctrination, training, etc. that allowed us to intervene in the preparatory phase of potential attacks. Nothing like that could be repeated again,” he explains.
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New police agencies and tools. The creation of the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO) was determined by the fact that the perpetrators of 11-M had been financed with money from drug trafficking. “Until that moment, this possibility was not contemplated, contrary to the precepts of the Islamic religion,” recalls a person in charge of the anti-terrorist services of the General Information Commissariat of the National Police. “The fact that, until late in the investigation, the data from the investigations of the Judicial Police, for example, about El Chino, were not cross-referenced (Jamal Ahmidan), a key player in the organization of the attack, made us see that greater internal coordination was necessary and that is why CITCO was created,” he explains. In addition, international cooperation was greatly strengthened and developed, another of the keys in the anti-jihadist fight, at the same time that the PNR – the Passenger Record Name of airlines – or smart borders was implemented in Europe. “Although Spain has always been a leader in the fight against terrorism due to its unfortunate history, 11-M made us provide ourselves with new tools to anticipate possible attacks,” says the agent.
The Tedax: “Communications should be done by professionals.” Much of the crucial information was provided by the explosives disposal specialists of the National Police (TEDAX). They were the ones who determined that the material used could not be Titadyne because it was white (and not reddish), which had also acted with much more power and speed. And, therefore, it must have been another type of dynamite. It was also TEDAX who analyzed the two bags that did not explode, in one of which the telephone card that led to the perpetrators of the massacre was found. Their professionalism, knowledge, experience and good work was key to the development of the investigations. “M11 and the days, weeks, months and years that followed have taught us that communications should be done by professionals, not politicians, as happens in the Anglo-Saxon system,” says Juan Jesús Sánchez Manzano, who was head of the TEDAX. at that complicated moment and suffered media and political harassment to accept the error that unleashed the theories conspiracy about the possible involvement of ETA in the massacre. And he adds: “The media, all of them, must contrast their information: no one called me to ask me, not even our press office.” According to him, “M11 served to show exactly what neither politicians nor the media should ever do, that is: make electoral use of information, publish things without verification and re-victimize the victims.”
The power of hoaxes. The journalist Gumersindo Lafuente said last week at the presentation of the book Voices of 11-M: Victims of lies (Víctor Sampedro Blanco, Editorial Planeta), that “the profession of journalism in Spain has suffered a lot due to this matter.” During that presentation, at the Ateneo de Madrid, in which several journalists participated in addition to the author of the book and also several victims and professionals involved in the investigation of the attacks, it was recalled that still a third of the people asked about the brutal jihadist attack He continues to have doubts about authorship. “Resisting is not consenting to lies,” Lafuente paraphrased the French philosopher and journalist Albert Camus. “And the journalistic profession as a whole, more or less, allowed the lie,” he argued. “The proof of this is that journalists who were protagonists in the construction of these hoaxes, such as Federico Jiménez Losantos, Pedro J. Ramírez or Casimiro García-Abadillo, have emerged completely unscathed. Not only have they not paid for it, but they have received awards in these 20 years, they have had tribunes, they are financed by Ibex companies despite being instruments of political agitation. And the worst thing, on public television that we pay with our taxes, they are invited, they have been whitewashed.”
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