The tricks of socialist media to cover up the government's role in the Adamuz accident

The government of Pedro Sánchez is in a desperate situation due to its key role in the deterioration of railway infrastructure in Spain.

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A fatal accident that has caused great outrage

Railway chaos has long been a source of complaint due to the government's mismanagement, and more specifically that of the Ministry of Transport, headed by the socialist Óscar Puente. However, the terrible train accident in Adamuz, which left 45 dead, has provoked outrage among many users, especially after it became clear that the disaster was probably due to a fracture in a rail of the track on which the Iryo train was traveling, which was the first to derail, an accident that in turn caused the derailment of a Renfe Alvia train traveling on the parallel track.

Trying to shift the focus away from the tracks, under the government's responsibility

The government had been trying for days to keep all hypotheses open. The aim of this strategy was clear: to prevent public attention from focusing on the deterioration of the infrastructure, which is under the Ministry of Transport's jurisdiction through ADIF. On Tuesday, a pro-government media outlet, eldiario.es, tried to shift the focus to the Iryo train driver by leaking a recording in which the driver claimed to have suffered a "snag", a hypothesis that would place the blame on the first derailed train.

The leak of the Iryo train driver's recording backfired on the government

In recent days, it has become clear that the situation was so confusing that the Iryo train driver didn't even know that another train had derailed. Far from serving the government's interests, the leak of that recording—probably from the Ministry of Transport—backfired, as it became clear that at the ADIF command center in Atocha they hadn't even been notified of the Alvia derailment.

In a country where millions of drivers have been forced by the government to buy tracking devices to remotely locate their cars in case of an accident, an entire train had derailed and ADIF (Spain's railway infrastructure manager) hadn't even noticed. On Tuesday, we learned the astonishing fact that the ADIF control center asked the driver of another train to go and see what had happened, forcing him to walk several kilometers along the tracks with a flashlight to discover the situation. An unusual situation in a world where even refrigerators are connected to the internet.

The ridiculous attempt by SER and El País to downplay the state of the road

Given the failure of the leaked recordings, two other pro-government media outlets made a final, desperate attempt yesterday to downplay the track fracture by interviewing a train driver who claimed to have noticed nothing wrong with the infrastructure. Cadena SER shared this quote on Twitter, which wasn't even a direct quote: "I drove past the accident site 40 minutes earlier and didn't notice anything." This station, a media outlet closely aligned with the PSOE for decades, omitted the fact that the train driver had not gone on the broken track (the one for the Iryo train), but on the other one, something the railway worker himself made clear in the interview.

Cadena SER was already receiving a barrage of criticism for this ridiculous manipulation when El País decided to break the news on its Twitter account, indicating that the train driver passed through the Alvia track but omitting that the fractured track was the other one. Like Cadena SER (which is also owned by the PRISA Group), El País focused on an irrelevant detail instead of paying attention to the more important facts revealed by the train driver.

The relevant facts that SER and El País chose not to highlight

In the SER interview with the train driver —with questions clearly aimed at covering up the government's responsibility, even mentioning data on track renewal investments—this railway professional had acknowledged "problem areas," including Córdoba, where "it has been necessary to reduce the speed" citing various reasons, such as that "the cafeteria staff are having trouble or even because some passengers are uncomfortable with the vibrations they are experiencing or the train itself is requesting it, because it is experiencing vibrations that exceed the thresholds defined for the equipment itself." Curiously, neither SER nor El País considered this information relevant for a headline, perhaps because it highlighted that the infrastructure, which is under government control, was clearly deteriorating.

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Photo: Guardia Civil.