Former President of the Government José María Aznar arrives at the Francisco de Vitoria University in Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid (Spain) on February 5. Carlos Luján (Europa Press)
Tomorrow, like every March 11, the Castilian hero José María Aznar will have lost the opportunity, and there are now 20, to correct the lie he fabricated by attributing to ETA the authorship of the biggest attack in our history, with the purpose of obtaining a supposed advantage in the elections that were to be held three days later.
His was a non-biodegradable lie, which continues to poison coexistence in our country and which could only be overcome by public rectification of its author.
Far from that, an increasingly narcissistic former president reiterates, against the evidence of judicial rulings and parliamentary investigations, that he always told the truth and that others have unjustly accused him.
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The great hoax of 11-M: this is how the conspiracy theory was created after the attacks
The lie is an artifact of very varied typology.
Some are capable of sailing under the radar for a long time only to explode years later.
Like Aznar's emphatic statement at the beginning of the nineties that the Popular Party was “incompatible with corruption” (a phrase that some PSOE leader repeats these days regarding the
Koldo case
).
That missile exploded 20 years later when Bárcenas' papers came to light.
The string of scandals that has landed some popular leaders in jail, including several members of his Council of Ministers, has not prevented the Castilian hero from claiming his total ignorance of the facts.
The 11-M lie demanded an immediate detonation for electoral use three days later.
There is a non-verifiable theory that states that the fraudulent accusation of authorship was at the basis of the defeat of the PP.
The French newspaper
Le Monde
headlined the day after the elections that Spain had punished the state's lie.
The German version of the
Financial Times
told the German secret services that Aznar had endangered European security by maintaining responsibility for ETA when there was material evidence pointing to Islamist terrorism.
He also stated that his reputation had been shattered.
But beyond the immediate electoral impact, the narcissism of the Castilian hero would not allow him to recognize that he had lied, and together with Pedro J. Ramírez and Federico Jiménez Losantos, along with a large band of snipers, he fabricated the conspiracy theory, according to which 11-M was the result of a plot devised by ETA and executed by a band of jihadists aided by police accomplices, all with the purpose of unseating the Popular Party from power.
An unusual narrative capable of turning any chance coincidence into irrefutable proof and that could never overcome the scrutiny of the Prosecutor's Office or the court.
Although some of the most feverish defenders of the conspiracy ended up abandoning that train towards the abyss, the Castilian hero managed to enunciate in his parliamentary appearance on November 29, 2004 a miraculous phrase that has remained attached like the flag of Iwo Jima: “ "Those who planned 11-M are neither in remote deserts nor in distant mountains."
And Aznar has clung to that statement, without the need for factual evidence, in all of his subsequent appearances.
His most repeated phrase has been that he would not change a comma.
He doesn't even need to remember in detail the terms of his lie, he just needs to quote his signature message.
In this way he has built a story that survives 20 years later, and that has muddied our political life and ruined the credibility of the media in the process.
In 2004, the PP introduced doubt about the legitimacy of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's electoral victory into the public debate for the first time, something that had not occurred in the midst of the confrontation between González and Aznar in the 1990s.
The well-remembered “go away, Mr. González,” of which Aznar boasts so much, was the result of the heat of the political battle, but it did not dispute the legitimacy of the opponent.
This barrier was torn down in 2004 and has entered the public debate every time the PSOE has come to power, either by a constitutionally recognized motion of censure or by an electoral victory.
In the current popular argument, Sánchez has thus become a usurper of La Moncloa, which places the PP on the path of expansive populism, which denies all legitimacy to the opponent.
It is worth remembering that Trump entered politics accusing Obama of not being a native American, which made him a
White House
squatter .
It is comforting to hear José María Aznar say that he would not have voted for Trump, nor against Hillary Clinton nor against Biden.
On the contrary, it is disconcerting to hear him say that countries are destroyed by the delegitimization of their institutions, as if it had nothing to do with the battery of doubts that his party has sown since 2004 about the legitimacy of the electoral victory obtained by the socialists after the Atocha attack.
The delegitimization of institutions has no specific limits, it can include justice if it issues a ruling on 11-M that establishes the sole authorship of jihadism, something that is not to Aznar's liking.
Or the Constitutional Court in office, understanding that its sentences have an unequivocal political bias.
In a recent public intervention on the FAES agenda, Aznar called for us to be especially cautious in times when misinformation has taken over public space.
Once again, the former president expresses himself as if he had nothing to do with the dissemination of the most absurd theories that his media allies created to support ETA's participation in 11-M.
Perhaps the star case is the article that Pedro J. Ramírez published in
El Mundo
in June 2009 under the pretentious title of
I accuse
.
In it he included a nominal list of 18 officials related to the criminal investigation who, in his opinion, prevented determining the real authorship: the investigating judge, the members of the court, the prosecutors in the case, the police commanders... The entire hierarchy, except the magistrates of the Supreme Court that a year earlier had ratified the sentence with minimal adjustments.
The false story that Aznar promoted among his followers, among whom he has an undisputed wealth of leadership, contained almost all the ingredients that have made the latest generation of populism their own.
This pioneering condition satisfies his narcissism, definitively convinced of having been the best president since the Transition.
That must be why he responds to any uncomfortable question with an equine-sounding laugh.
In light of some of his heaviest legacies, it would be appropriate to say to him, as Pilar Manjón, then president of the 11-M victims' association, would say: what are you laughing at, Mr. Aznar?
This is an article written for
Ideas
by
Jesús Ceberio
(Hondarribia, 77 years old), director of EL PAÍS between 1993 and 2006, in connection with his new book,
The Call
(Debate), published this week.
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