One of my earliest memories from that Thursday morning is arriving at my desk a little before nine and finding that some colleagues didn’t know what had happened. In 2004, mobile phones didn’t have internet access or free instant messaging, and many people woke up to their day without radio or television news until breakfast. Yet my first habit upon waking was to turn on the radio, and I heard the Madrid train bombings live as they unfolded.
In a surprising turn, without the Interior Ministry suspecting a thing, a small group of Islamist radicals managed to assemble explosives, buy mobile phones at markets, and fuse the two into bombs hidden in handheld backpacks. They placed them under seats on trains that detonated around 7:30 in the morning. The fact that they could pass unnoticed by police was as shocking as the way the 9/11 attackers in the United States commandeered four planes and piloted them into their targets, causing thousands of deaths.
Another consequence of the Madrid attacks, if there can be a second memory beyond the 193 lives lost, was the birth of conspiracy theories in Spain. For years, Madrid’s newspapers and radio stations wove daily, almost absurd efforts to extend the conspiracy narrative surrounding the 11M incidents. The idea allegedly originated from José María Aznar’s government on the day of the explosions. Even after police investigations dismissed ETA as the perpetrators in the initial hours, the government of the Popular Party aimed to prolong the possibility of ETA’s involvement. Over time, this attempt morphed into a tangle of fabrications and misinformation in media aligned with the PP, which took root in part of the Spanish population. To this day, some supporters insist the authors were not ETA but a shadowy alliance of Moroccan secret service agents, Spanish police, and members of the PSOE from those distant years in 2004.
Aznar’s appearance before the Congress Commission on the 11M, asserting that the intellectual authors of the attack “were not in distant deserts,” seemingly backed the ETA-PSOE conspiracy narrative and its political utility to unseat the government. That moment marked the emergence of ongoing political sharpness in Spain. The two Zapatero administrations were viewed by the right wing and its media as the product of covert plots that enlisted every known foe of Spain: ETA, the PSOE, Moroccan secret services, and far-left protesters. In recent times, figures like Isabel Díaz Ayuso have become emblematic of a political climate where outrageous statements go unchallenged by some quarters. For the conservative bloc and its allied media, Zapatero’s rise was possible only through the attacks, a narrative that framed the conflict as a clumsy state surrender to ETA. Then came Pedro Sánchez, labeled by critics as a traitor or an intruder in their political landscape. For some voters, the outcome appears less important than the belief that both leaders were forged by hidden pacts with various adversaries.
Recently disclosed is the fact that, the day after the attacks, George Bush, then president of the United States, and his wife granted an interview to TVE at the American Embassy in Washington. That interview never aired, puzzling the White House, which asked TVE’s Washington correspondent why. The explanation was straightforward: while Bush alluded to possible ETA involvement, the interview largely reflected similarities between the bombers and the methods seen in the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
Yet the aim here is not to dwell on government missteps. Twenty years on, the focus remains on the victims and the injured, and on the lives that were forever altered by those events.