“Justice is the only balm that can enable us to live on,” says Pilar Vera, President of the Association of Victims of the Spanair Disaster (2008, 154 dead, 18 injured), in the documentary Frankenstein 04155 about the Alvia disaster: “A country that does not recognize its mistakes is a country that is doomed to repeat them.” Five years after its premiere, the award-winning film by Aitor Rey is immersed not yet aired on TVE, according to families shattered by the rail disaster, on the tenth anniversary of the tragedy of the train that derailed outside Santiago on July 24, 2013, killing 80 and injuring 145. Ten years of waiting and ten months of trial will conclude next week with the approval of sentencing, with prosecutors and prosecutors almost unanimously agreeing that the macro trial proved two things: that blame was not just on the driver and that there was the so-called “Corner Pact”, the conspiracy “of the authorities” to cover up “the truth” about the lack of protections on the track. At the last moment, the public prosecutor withdrew their charges against the director of the Adif traffic safety authority responsible at the time of the accident, Andrés Cortabitarte.
Not only the train drivers, but also the independent experts and the EU expert Christopher Carr defended in the trial that the high-speed line was inaugurated on the last eight kilometers before the Santiago train station, the accident section, without any safety measures against possible “human error”. The implementation came at a time when a change of government was being brought about from PSOE to PP and from José Blanco to Ana Pastor as Minister for Public Works. Although up to 22 Adif (railway infrastructure managers) managers were removed from the list of accused along the way – a court in Coruña – the trial, which has been taking place in the Cidade da Cultura de Santiago since October, sat on the bench alongside driver Francisco Garzón, the director of road safety. However, on the day he presented his conclusions, the prosecutor in this case, Mario Piñeiro, withdrew his charges against this charge of Adif. From that session onwards, in the hearing room, all the emphasis was on around 90 lawyers: those of the people’s prosecution practiced by two victims’ associations and those of individuals representing the survivors and relatives of certain deceased passengers.
Jesús Domínguez, President of the Platform for Victims of Alvia 04155, in front of the Santiago train station.ÓSCAR CORRAL (EL PAÍS)
Jesús Domínguez, President of the Alvia 04155 Victims Platform, claims that the case can be summed up in “two key summonses”: “the one that the driver received from the air traffic controller” and which made him give up the idea that he was near the fatal Angrois curve – so feared by Renfe pilots at the time – “and the one that the prosecutor received, we assume, from a superior like the State General Attorney received to drop the charges against Cort “a bitarte”. Álvaro García Ortiz denies that there was any “interference”, but in a 180-degree turn, on June 20, Mario Piñeiro abruptly changed his mind and joined the theses of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, an institution representing Adif in this case, which carried out the most acrimonious interrogations of the trial against experts, witnesses and even victims, without the judge, María Elena Fernández Currás, she rebuked. Just a few months earlier, Piñeiro claimed that “the tragic accident would not have happened” had Cortabitarte “assessed and managed the risk of speeding on the track at the time.”
In a tweet this week about “10 years of ignoring and lying,” Victim Platform salvaged a compilation video of bombastic statements by politicians who promised to get “the truth out” and didn’t when they had the power and opportunity to do so. From Mariano Rajoy and Pedro Sánchez to Alberto Núñez Feijóo, from Yolanda Díaz to Pablo Iglesias. “You have my promise that I will not rest until I learn the truth,” Ana Pastor said. “It is absolutely indecent that some sort of pact of silence was made,” Iglesias exclaimed. “We all mourn the unrest of the families,” Feijóo proclaimed in a broken voice in an act of Galicia Day, while the police with their banners blocked the way to the victims’ building. “It is very sad that families can no longer mourn today because the responsibilities have not yet been clarified,” criticized Díaz.
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“Dog doesn’t eat dog”, sums up the spokesman for the victims, who feel that their personal tragedies are being crushed by the “reason of state”, in a trial in which Adif and Renfe, but more the first than the second, have around 58 million in compensation and, above all, international prestige at stake. Domínguez, who was seriously injured in Angrois, says that in the files he is preparing to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the victims, he will highlight the role played by the lawyer and prosecutor in Galicia who handled the case. The latter, Javier Suárez, head of the Galician Bar Association, said in his final report last Thursday that it was “difficult to apologize for something you don’t feel responsible for,” although he bemoaned the government’s “lack of empathy” towards the passengers of that Alvia S-730 train, a hybrid model christened Frankenstein by the machinists’ union.
“Maximum enjoyment” for Garzón
The only person who apologized from the moment of the accident in this decade was the worker who was in the control room that day. And so the victims’ lawyers and Renfe’s lawyer recalled in their conclusions, who also this week called for “maximum leniency” for Francisco Garzón. “It is obvious that it deserves it,” stressed the representative of the service operator, which, along with Adif, is the other public company of the railway system to be held civilly liable. For Renfe, the accident happened because in that unfortunate section (a bend at the exit of a tunnel where they had to drive at 80 km/h and which the Alvia entered at 190) “the driver was the only guarantor of a safety system that the managers thought was right”, but that “was not enough”.
There were no signs or beacons to compensate for the technical decision to dispense with the automatic braking and safety system ERTMS on the line (and later also its equivalent on board the trains), which was spontaneously taken as part of a project change. “We have the impression that Adif did worse than Renfe at the hearing because it was shown that there had to be measures to avoid putting all the responsibility in the hands of one human being and that Adif and Cortabitarte [el alto cargo que daba el visto bueno con su rúbrica] They had to do a risk analysis for the whole thing, which they didn’t do,” recalls Jesús Domínguez. The spokesman for the Platform of Sacrifices defends that a risk analysis of each subsystem in a route that integrates many elements does not guarantee anything: “You can have a certified slide that, if you place it on the edge of a ravine and do not assess the risk of the whole scenario, is completely dangerous,” he compares.
Francisco José Losada, lawyer for another group of victims, the Apafas (Association of Victims of the Alvia de Santiago Railway Accident), believes that “there was a very high probability of an accident in Angrois, which would have happened if a risk analysis had been carried out.” According to the lawyer, “the trains ran unprotected at the only dangerous point on the route… That day it was a phone call, but on any other day it could have been something else.” “A second layer of security was missing,” he adds. According to him, it is “proven” that Cortabitarte broke the rules by allowing this situation. It is precisely the sea of rules that will be clarified next week with the passing of the verdict, with the almost unanimous opinion amid public and private allegations that the macro trial proved two things: that the culprit was not just the driver, and that there was the so-called ‘curve pact’, the conspiracy of ‘the authorities of the state’ to cover up ‘the truth’ about the lack of protections on the track. Prosecutors withdrew their charges against Adif’s then Director of Traffic Safety, Andrés Cortabitarte, at the last moment.
“Blame the blame on the last link”
“Ten long years have passed, demanding clarification of responsibilities at all levels and fighting against the institutions involved and against the state itself, which has used every means to hide the negligence and rule-breaking behind the tragedy,” the Alvia Victims’ Platform announced in a reaction statement after witnessing the prosecutor, who was physically sitting next to the lawyers representing those injured in the accident, switch trenches. “The public prosecutor tells the public that it depends on whether a disaster of this magnitude occurs in a high-speed train, whether a call is made or not,” criticized the association, referring to the telephone inquiry that the inspector had decided at the worst moment to speak to the train driver just because, as the former Renfe employee admitted in court, he “had nothing to do”. The fact that signs and beacons were actually needed in this section was clearly confirmed a few days after the accident, when those responsible immediately ordered them to be set up.
“The explanation for this twist in the script is simple,” claims the Majority Association: “The prosecutor, whose head is appointed by the government, accused an organization, Adif, owned by the state and which is precisely defended by the prosecutor himself, whose head is also appointed by the government.” “Once again, the state goes back to square one, to the curve pact of the various governments to single out the driver as the sole culprit,” something that “disturbed the EU” and is why Cortabitarte ended up on the bench. “The state machine has worked all these years,” warns the group led by Jesús Domínguez again, “putting all the blame on the last link in the chain, the driver, avoiding any kind of responsibility and polluting public opinion.” “If Garzón had died in the accident, I don’t know if there would have been a trial,” said the victims’ spokesman, who was pulled out of a car with broken legs ten years ago. The person who rescued him amidst the chaos, soot, smoke and darkness told him only one thing before he entered the convoy to collect the dead: “You were very lucky.”
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