It is the deadliest terrorist attack committed on European soil in the last thirty years. On March 11, 2004, ten bombs exploded on commuter trains in Madrid in the morning, during rush hour. The toll is heavy: 192 dead and nearly 2,000 injured. We have in our minds these images of gutted wagons, of bodies strewn on the rails. A trauma for the Spaniards, their November 13th. “In This Life or Another”, online since Wednesday on Disney +, tells the true story of Gabriel Montoya Vidal, aka Baby, 16 years old at the time.
This lost and left to his own devices, from the town of Avilès, in Asturias, in the northwest of Spain, transported the bags of explosives which were used to make the bombs used by Islamist terrorists . His testimony will be decisive during the trial in 2007. The six-episode series, dark and hard-hitting, was inspired by the book of interviews between the young man, who spent six years in a juvenile center before being released , and the journalist Manuel Jabois, ten years after the attack.
We are immediately caught up in the heavy atmosphere of the story. We follow the daily life of this boss of the working-class towns, from this poor corner of Asturias with a mining past. Gabriel grew up in social poverty between a drug addict father, often behind bars, and an overwhelmed mother who tried as best she could to raise her four children.
Bad encounter
He's a strong head, who smokes weed, plays console with his friends, as lost as he is. At the foot of his building, he meets José Emilio Suarez Trashorras, played by the excellent Pol Lopez. A gambler and big mouth, unpredictable and impulsive, he becomes Baby's mentor. And soon involved him in his drug trafficking, first, then explosives, asking him to deliver the famous bags to Madrid. The escalation before the shift into horror.
We quickly get used to the back and forth between Gabriel's childhood and adolescence up to the attacks and the interviews with the journalist, ten years later. The series, breathtaking and very fair, which never falls into caricature, is uncompromising for its main character. She doesn't judge him either, showing the weight of a ruined childhood and bad company in the turn a life can take.
Without ever losing the thread, with rigor and sobriety, she goes behind the scenes of the preparation and the trial of the attacks through the prism of this band of Spaniards, who participated, by supplying the explosives, in this massacre. José Emilio Suarez Trashorras is serving a prison sentence of 34,715 years, proportional to the number of victims.
Editor's note:
4/5
“In this life or another”,
Spanish drama series by Jorge and Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo, with Roberto Gutierrez, Pol Lopez, Quim Avila, Tamara Casellas… 6 episodes of 33 to 45 minutes. On Disney+.