One of the great tragedies of Spain is that it lives more comfortably with a lie than with the truth. For years, the right has been stuck in such a loop, from which it hasn't been able to escape, twenty years after the 11-M massacre in Madrid. Those tragic days, from March 11th to 14th, the day of the Spanish general election, form part of one of the great lies practiced by a government in our times, taking advantage of a terrorist attack to try to influence an election. The victory of the Socialists (PSOE) under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was a necessary turning point in response to the intolerable atmosphere of those days. The electoral calculation of the People's Party (PP) that if it was not the work of the Basque terrorist organization ETA, they would lose the elections, led the government of José María Aznar to an exercise in information manipulation that evolved as it was ruled out that ETA was behind the massacre and the authorship was exclusive to Islamic jihadism.
Twenty years have gone by since then, but in many ways it feels like much less. When, this Monday, the Fundación para el Análisis y los Estudios Sociales (FAES), Aznar's think-tank for the launching of political messages, published a statement defending that PP government and insisting they had not known about the evidence that they were accused of hiding, it is lying. As it is also doing when it says that never, in any case, did the Spanish government receive any official document that definitively ruled out ETA's responsibility and affirmed without hesitation that the jihadists were behind it. Years later we can say that, with regard to official documents, we know a lot about how they work and that if they didn't actually reach your one's desk, it's simply that there must have been an order for the communication to be essentially verbal.
The FAES says that there is an impulse to attribute to the Aznar government and, by extension, the PP, the responsibility for having deliberately lied after the massacre of 11-M. And the think-tank is right to assert that, since the PP lied. Perhaps not in the early hours of the morning of March 11th, when the information was certainly diffuse, since it was the sheer impact of the news that dominated more than other details. But towards noon, those of us who lived through that terrible day from positions of communication responsibility know that the possibility that it was ETA faded with unprecedented speed as the hours passed. On Thursday afternoon, in a conversation with the Israeli journalist Henrique Cymerman, it emerged that the Mossad services had given him valuable information that left a single line of investigation: Islamic terrorism.
The Spanish right has not wanted to turn the page and has preferred to continue living with the lie two decades later.
It is surprising that 20 years later the FAES, far from correcting itself and acknowledging the error that was made, continues to refuse to accept the truth. That was the first great global news hoax of the modern era, as no one could imagine that Aznar and his government were lying. So much so that, at noon, even the UN condemned that attack by ETA, and the Basque lehendakari Ibarretxe, pressured by Aznar's government, also condemned the attack by the Basque terrorist group, even after Otegi, for example, had already ruled out that the authorship was of ETA. The Spanish government lied and pushed many others to lie, including many media outlets. The Spanish right has not wanted to turn the page and has preferred to continue living with that lie two decades later. And, while they are at it, criticizing the amnesty law as a political measure in which division prevails over concord.
The mobilization of passions over reality. Riding on the lie so as not to destroy a narrative. Whether or not there are deaths involved. Anything goes.