After the Madrid Bombings: Internal Security Reforms and the Prevention of Global Terrorism in Spain (WP)
Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 02:02 
WP 40/2008 (Translated from Spanish)
At the time of the Madrid bombings on 11 March 2004, Spain was equipped with well-developed internal security structures that were highly efficient in the fight against terrorism. Indeed, the current Spanish democracy has been affected from its very beginning by activities carried out by different endogenous terrorist organisations, though none has been as persistent over time or has produced as many victims and social consequences as ETA. This armed group, ideologically inspired by ethnic nationalism, pursues both political independence and cultural homogeneity for the Basque Country, in which they include four provinces of Spain and three territories in south-western France. In a context characterised by both democratisation and regional decentralisation, the Spanish security forces (Fuerzas y Cuerpos de Seguridad del Estado or FCSE) have confronted ETA for more than three decades, improving their capacity to prevent and combat terrorism under the rule of law.[1] Furthermore, when the 11 March attacks occurred, ETA was going through one of the worst periods of its history, if not the very worst, due mainly but not exclusively to the effectiveness of the Spanish police.
But it is also true that the country’s internal security structures were not as well adapted to dealing with the much more recent challenges of terrorism related directly or indirectly to al-Qaeda, a phenomenon that had spread across much of the world during the 1990s. However, this is a statement that must be considered in more detail. For example, within only two days the central external information unit of the National Police (Cuerpo Nacional de Policía or CNP) was able to identify most of the main direct perpetrators of the blasts on the local trains that were making their way to Madrid’s Atocha station in the early morning of 11 March. They arrested some of them and then located an apartment in the nearby dormitory town of Leganés, where other terrorists ended up committing suicide less than a month later, on 3 April, when they realised that the police had discovered them and were surrounding the building they were using as a hideout. While this operation did not result in the arrest of the terrorists, who chose instead to blow themselves up, causing the greatest possible damage, it very likely did prevent those responsible for the 11 March attacks from carrying out others, either in Madrid or beyond, over the following months.
It must also be borne in mind that starting in November 2001, the Spanish police dismantled the al-Qaeda cell that had been established in the country during the previous decade and whose links with the Hamburg cell, which included many of the perpetrators of the New York and Washington attacks in September of the same year, became clear shortly afterwards. This operation was ordered by Judge Baltasar Garzón, the National Court (Audiencia Nacional) judge who was well-known at the time for the attention he was already paying to the problem of global terrorism and its implications for Spain. These and other police actions were possible because the corresponding police information services had been investigating this international terrorist network since the early 1990s and were able to present sufficient incriminating evidence to the courts. Before the March 11 massacre, more concretely as from January 2001, the security forces had arrested a few dozen individuals for their involvement in Jihadist terrorist activities. Also, by that infamous date, several investigations had begun which resulted, since the last quarter of the year, in a series of new police operations focused on global terrorism and in many arrests.
The Spanish police was badly prepared to face the risks and threats of current global terrorism, not so much because this phenomenon was unknown to the few officials dealing with this issue in Spain, but rather precisely because of the fact that there were indeed very few of them in this task, with very limited resources to carry out their work.[2] Things would have likely been different if the decision had been taken in time to give the problem of global terrorism the importance it deserved since at least the mid-1990s, and especially after the 9/11 attacks in the US and the May 2003 attacks in Casablanca, where one of the targets was Spanish. A decision which, based on timely information from the intelligence services and police information units, was ultimately a political one. But the Spanish government, then formed by the liberal-conservative Popular Party (Partido Popular or PP) did not take that decision. Its former President, José María Aznar, acknowledged in the epilogue to a book of memoirs published shortly after leaving office, following the general elections of 14 March 2004, that ‘the very successes achieved in the struggle against ETA in recent years may have led us to lower our guard against the fundamentalist threat’.[3] Some may think that it is easy to build these arguments now and quote this kind of statement a posteriori. However, in January 2003 I completed a book in which I concluded: ‘al-Qaeda has used Spain as one its main European bases. It is likely that the citizens and government of Spain will become targets of global terrorism’.[4]
