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TERRORISM

‘I’ll never forgive them’: How suffering from Madrid’s 2004 bombings lingers

Twenty years after Ángeles Pedraza lost her daughter during the carnage of the Madrid train bombings that killed nearly 200 people, she still doesn't understand why.

Published: 11 March 2024 09:20 CET
'I'll never forgive them': How suffering from Madrid's 2004 bombings lingers
María de los Angeles Pedraza Portero, whose daughter Miryam died in a train at Atocha station in the 11M attacks, reacts during an AFP interview in Valdemoro, south of Madrid. (Photo by OSCAR DEL POZO / AFP)

“Although it’s painful and sad every day, when a date like this comes around, it’s much worse. Because after 20 years, I still wonder why, what have these murderers achieved?” Pedraza, 65, told AFP at her home in Valdemoro.

Her memory isn’t what it used to be, but she still remembers “every single minute” of March 11, 2004, when 10 bombs exploded on four commuter trains shortly after 7:30 am, killing 192 people and wounding nearly 2,000.

Her 25-year-old daughter Miryam, she said, would normally take the train to work with her younger brother Javier and as far as the family was concerned, the day started just like any other.

Pedraza was driving to work when she heard initial reports on the radio, but didn’t worry about her kids as the explosion seemed to be at Atocha station in the city centre.

But by the time she got to work, there had been more explosions and everyone was in a panic trying to track down their loved ones. She quickly reached her son who — by a miracle — had overslept, and was safe.

But she could not get hold of Miryam despite trying everything to find her.

“We drove miles to all the hospitals and emergency rooms because every hour, they would release an updated list of those who’d been admitted,” she said.

“All we wanted was to hear her name, but we never did.”

Eventually, they went to an information centre for families where they waited. At 3:00 am, they were told she was among the dead.

‘I’ll never forgive them’

“On that day, you die yourself. Because aside from the immense pain, you cannot understand why,” she said, 20 years of grief etched on her face.

She has since spent years very publicly campaigning for justice as head of the AVT terror victims association. But her son has never once spoken of that day when his sister was killed and he was spared.

“I try not to be bitter and I don’t live with a sense of hatred, but I’ll never forgive those who did this to my daughter.”

As Pedraza was frantically contacting the hospitals, Francisco Alameda Sanchez, who was on the same train but escaped largely unharmed, was down on the tracks trying to help the wounded.

In the first carriage where one of the bombs went off, Sanchez, who was 40 at the time, found himself lying on his back with the train’s doors and windows blown out.

“I wasn’t physically hurt except I had a lot of pain in my ears, so I stayed to help people who were worse off than me,” he told AFP. He likely survived because he was sitting at the furthest point from the blast, he said.

He stayed for three more hours, during which time he witnessed horrors that never left his mind: the screaming, burnt bodies, people without legs.

With no way of carrying the injured, several of them used the train doors as stretchers, which were so heavy it took six people to carry them.

“The smell of burning, of burnt flesh, has stayed with me. And the deathly silence,” he told AFP at Atocha station.

READ MORE: 20 years since the deadliest terror attacks in Spain’s history

‘The fear has stayed with me’

His ears recovered and he went back to work, refusing therapy, thinking he “was strong and could deal with it on my own”.

But 10 years later, he was struggling so he joined the March 11 Terror Victims Association and found a therapist which transformed his life. Since 2016, he has served as secretary of the group, which has 1,900 members.

Even so, he has not shaken off the fear.

“The fear has stayed with me, every time I come here my head starts spinning,” he said, glancing around the huge station which lies close to Madrid’s Prado Museum and Retiro park.

Rut Jezabel Garcia was 24 when the train she was on exploded, sustaining a shoulder injury that needed surgery, and long-term hearing problems as well as years of psychological issues.

“Although I was on the train that suffered the least damage, it was just horrible,” said Garcia, who works in accounting and has a 10-year-old daughter.

“There are images of injured people you can’t get out of your head, even though it’s been 20 years… It was just unreal, like something from a film.”

Since then, she’s never taken the same train and avoids crowds “because I’m afraid the same thing could happen again.”

She still has shoulder pain, hearing problems and suffers from persistent insomnia.

Despite everything, she’s grateful to be alive, although the anniversary will always be difficult.

“For me, the month of March is horrible, no matter how many years pass,” she said, fighting back the tears.

“It’s always bad. If I could, I’d erase it from the calendar.”

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SPAIN EXPLAINED

Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Despite a top secret project to build them during the dictatorship, Spaniards have never been keen on the idea of nuclear weapons, especially since the US accidentally dropped four nuclear bombs on Almería.

Published: 15 April 2024 16:36 CEST
Why does Spain have no nuclear weapons?

Spain isn’t part of the reduced group of nations that have nuclear weapons, which includes European neighbours the UK and France.

It has never tested nuclear weapons, does not manufacture them, nor has it bought them from nuclear allies who make them.

Spain is still a NATO member and doesn’t shy away from involving itself in foreign policy debates, often taking positions against the mainstream.

But it has still never joined the nuclear club nor have Spaniards ever really wanted to, even though former dictator Francisco Franco had different ideas (more on that below).

In fact, Spaniards seem to have an indifferent if not abnormally negative view of nukes, largely stemming from an accident by an American air force on Spanish soil in the 1960s.

READ ALSO: How important is nuclear power to Spain?

A 2018 study on state attitudes towards nuclear weapons concluded that Spain had “little to no interest in nuclear weapons.” Yet Spain still benefits from NATO’s so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’ defence and has nearby neighbours, including France and the United Kingdom, that are nuclear powers. It is also home to several American military bases.

In that sense, Spain balances a somewhat unique position of being pro-nuclear for other countries and as a broader defence deterrence at the global level, but not on Spanish territory because it knows that would not sit well with Spaniards.

But why is this? Why doesn’t Spain have nuclear weapons?

Anti-nuclear sentiment among Spaniards

According to an article for Institut Montaigne by Clara Portela, Professor of Political Science at the University of Valencia, the Spanish people are “sensitised on nuclear weapons, if not negatively disposed towards them.”

Much of it comes down to history and, in particular, an accident involving nuclear weapons on Spanish soil. As part of post-war defence and security agreements Spain made with the U.S, American nuclear weapons were kept on Spanish soil.

Spaniards weren’t keen on the idea. Portela notes that “their presence at the Torrejón base near Madrid was a controversial issue” among the public, but it was an accident in 1966 that really soured Spaniards to nuclear weapons after an American aircraft carrying a hydrogen bomb crashed and dropped the device in the waters near the town of Palomares off the coast of Almería.

READ ALSO: Ten of the best documentaries about Spain

The incident caused “one of the bombs to fall to the seabed and leak radioactivity” into the surrounding area, Portela states, something that would have no doubt hardened many Spaniard’s perceptions towards nuclear weapons, especially as the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still in living memory for many.

A NATO-nuclear referendum

This scepticism towards nuclear arms was solidified twenty years later in a referendum on NATO membership. Though the government of the day campaigned for continued membership of the military alliance, it made it conditional on Spain also continuing as a non-nuclear power. A clause in the referendum consultation outlined this condition: “The prohibition to install, store or introduce nuclear weapons on Spanish soil will be maintained.”

Spaniards backed their continued, non-nuclear NATO membership by 13 percent.

A year later, in 1987, Spain formally signed the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), further cementing its non-nuclear stance.

And that was it — with this and the result of the referendum, Portela suggests that “the issue of nuclear weapons was all but archived. It hardly re-surfaced in public debates for decades.”

An atomic bomb of the type nicknamed “Little Boy” that was dropped by a US Army Air Force B-29 bomber in 1945 over Hiroshima, Japan. (Photo by LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY / AFP)

The nuclear dictator?

Despite the Spanish public’s distrust of nuclear weapons, there was one Spaniard in particular who was quite keen on the idea: Franco.

In what may be one of the most terrifying historical ‘what ifs’ ever, the fascist dictator wanted to equip Spain with a nuclear arsenal, started a project to do so, and came very close to achieving it.

The ‘Islero Project’, as it was known, was top secret and lasted for several decades of scientific research until it was finally abandoned in the 1980s after his death.

Firstly, a brief consideration of the geopolitics of the time is worthwhile here, and it concerns the Americans again. When the Second World War ended in 1945, Spain immediately became isolated on the international stage owing to its support for Nazi Germany and fascist Spain. It was excluded from the UN and shunned as a real player in international relations.

As the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation grew throughout the 1950s, Franco’s fierce anti-communism combined with the strategic geographical positioning of Spain led the U.S. to form closer ties with the dictatorship, promising financial aid and image rehabilitation in return for allowing American military bases in Spain.

READ ALSO: Where are the US’s military bases in Spain and why are they there?

The Junta de Energía Nuclear was created in 1951, undertaking research and atomic energy development more broadly, and it sent promising researchers to study in the U.S. When they returned, the Islero project continued in secret.

Rather bizarrely, it was the accident at Palomares years later that actually gave the scientists the key to designing an atomic bomb. Unconvinced by the American’s explanations for the debacle, the Spaniards working on plans discovered the Ulam-Teller method, which was fundamental to the development of the thermonuclear bomb or H-bomb.

However, the project was then frozen by Franco himself because he feared the United States would discover that Spain was trying to develop its own atomic bomb and impose economic sanctions.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Spanish scientists secretly restarted the project, but in 1982 the new Socialist government discovered the plans and disbanded the project. By 1987 the González government announced Spain’s accession to the Non-Proliferation Treaty NPT and the issue has rarely even come up as an issue since then.

And despite that, Spain is a NATO member, regularly attends the G20, and often plays a leading role on the global stage. Certain elements of the dictatorship had eyes on building a nuclear arsenal, but it never happened. Franco ultimately worried about the economic repercussions of being discovered, and Spaniards were themselves sceptical about the idea based on the experience in Palomares.

In terms of nuclear weapons, Spain is what Portela describes as a ‘de-proliferation’ state – in other words, a country that aspired to have nuclear bombs but reversed it.

It doesn’t look like changing anytime soon either. A survey in 2021 showed that Spain had the highest level of support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, with a massive 89 percent majority.

READ ALSO: Why is Spain not in the G20 (but is always invited)?

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