11 de marzo de 2004

We usually approach history from long arcs of time. But what happens if, for once, we focus our attention on the specific moments that have most marked our collective past? The protagonists, their actions, their emotions, their desires, their doubts and their mistakes go to the center of the story, burst with the force of unpredictability, and we relive them as if it were the first time. In this new collection, some of the best historians show us that nothing can be taken for granted, and how certain events can leave a deep trace in a country. At 7.36 am on March 11, 2004, three days before the general elections, there were ten almost simultaneous explosions in four suburban trains in Madrid. The result was 192 deaths, 1,857 wounded and a political earthquake whose reverberations still mark Spanish society. Mercedes Cabrera, a prestigious historian and candidate for Parliament in those elections, dispassionately narrates the attack, the information war that followed, the persecution and death of the terrorists and the long political and judicial epilogue of a brutal attack that shook Spain and fractured many of the prior consensus.