An unnecessary equidistance before 11-M

Equidistance, trying not to opt for two contradictory versions or opinions, is not only not always desirable in journalism, but on many occasions it must be banished.

Just as it is not possible to be equidistant between the victim and the perpetrator, it is not admissible to consider it between the truth and the lie.

In both cases, the journalist must abandon that position and opt for the victims and the truth.

The documentary

that Amazon premieres this Friday, coinciding with the anniversary of the jihadist attacks that caused 192 deaths on March 11 in Madrid, plays at times, precisely, to be equidistant.

More information

'11M' on Netflix: The day that shook Spain, 18 years later

It does so between the truth —contrasted not only judicially with an already final sentence, but with multiple investigations— that delimits as far as possible who committed that massacre and the so-called conspiracy theory, which even then a part of the Spanish political class and of journalism tried to sow in society to make believe that behind those attacks there was a hidden black hand.

And, furthermore, when today marks the 18th anniversary of an attack, the largest in Europe, more than enough time for those ideas to have been discarded from any public message.

The Amazon documentary, directed by Carlos Agulló and produced by Luis Velo, has many virtues.

From photography to a good musical setting, going through the selection of the scenarios in which the characters who give their testimony to the camera are interviewed.

The narration is agile and, although in total there are almost four hours of documentary divided into four chapters, it is easy to see.

However, he sometimes abuses slow motion and, above all, the testimony of politicians and journalists, to the detriment of those who were, much to his regret, the real protagonists in those days: first of all, the victims and the people who at first turned to help them and, later, the police and civil guards who investigated those attacks until arresting part of their perpetrators.

It is precisely in the proliferation of those secondary testimonies where

it is equidistant, admissible when it addresses the political battle that followed the days after the explosion of the bombs and until the holding, three days later, of the general elections that the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero ended up winning, but rejectable when it comes to telling viewer the reality of the attacks.

At the start of the last episode, the then President of the Government José María Aznar —who appears numerous times throughout the documentary series—, the former Madrid president Esperanza Aguirre and the journalists Federico Jiménez Losantos and Pedro J. Ramírez once again try to inoculate the doubt that the convicted jihadists were really the real authors or instigators of the massacre.

It is true that Agulló intersperses his testimonies with those of judges,

Too bad, because it is also in the last chapter that, in its final minutes, manages for the first time to move the viewer by reproducing the testimony that Pilar Manjón, mother of one of the deceased and then visible head of one of the victims' associations, he offered in the parliamentary commission that was investigating the attacks and that left the politicians speechless that day.

Good culmination for a documentary weighed down by an unnecessary equidistance.

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