Since 1992, Spain has been wondering if a crime can change a society, which answers the question. Not just any crime can do it, but one that meets a series of critical conditions can.. And the disappearance of Miriam, Toñi and Desirée, on the Friday night of November 13, 1992, when they were heading to a party in Picassent, was that unifying factor that changed the rhythm of a country.

It had only been a month since the Seville Expo had closed its doors.. The Alcàsser Crime was, and continues to be, the official crime of Spain. As Eduardo Maura relates, “the year of modernity and diversity ended with Felipe González receiving the girls' families on Christmas Eve”. In his book The 90s. Euphoria and fear in Spanish democratic modernity, explains the dispute between two forces, like a rope competition in which one side seemed to duel against another: modernity and the idea of progress on one side, fear and insecurity in other. In that very theatrical representation, on television, there was also a latent geographical dispute: although not verbalized, it was localized: the fury of Barcelona and Seville, daughters of '92, compared to the unease of Valencia, epicenter of the bad news of the supernova year (as defined by the writer Miqui Otero).

In her book, Maura rescues that episode in which one of the people appearing at the trial, Enrique Anglès – Antonio's brother – receives a reprimand from the judge when he confirms that he had given one version in court and in a television program, another.. “That's TV and this is a trial,” the accused replied with a revealing depth charge.. The staging of misery and base passions was “the loss of innocence” of an entire nation. A broken innocence, Maura writes, that spread “throughout the social and economic geography of the country.”. It can be found in the economic crisis, in the reopening of the Marey case, in the Amedo and GAL cases or in the Balkan War, but above all in two fundamental episodes: the torture, murder and rape of the Alcàsser girls and the controversy on the Bakalao Route”. Both, in the same coordinates.

In Maura's version, both episodes are a good example that between reality and fiction there are fewer meters of separation than we intuited.. “They represented and erected something that is part of what we were being and doing (…) The word that best allows this complex of representation is insecurity. In 1992, Spain is an insecure country in which the most important thing is to manage fragility.”.

In this context, the Bakalao Route, identified as a source of conflict and origin of the threat, is added as a key layer of that fragile state. The Canal + documentary in July 1993, in which Carlos Francino gives voice to many of its protagonists, ends up being the finishing touch. “Let them leave us alone. They oppress us too much,” Maura rescues about the testimonies of that program. “During the week I do what I have to. The weekend is mine and I want to spend it with people who give me good vibes,” is heard. Evasion against widespread dissatisfaction.

“With respect to the images produced by Who Knows Where, the route – says Maura – shows another type of attention to loss.. More than losing something very dear, what is at stake is losing one's own life, losing what makes it worth living.. With this a peculiar game of mirrors is operated: Spain searches for itself with Lobatón at the same time that the lost children strive to build common languages beyond the erosion of the reasons for living and the monotony of the week (…) I “I was twelve years old, I had never seen a disco in my life and I didn't realize it then, but now I see those people and I understand that they were shouting: but don't you see that young people don't fit in your Spain of the future!”.

If it were necessary to confine these two sides in geographical areas, it would be clear that the official story of the Spain of the future was dominated by Barcelona and Seville – and by Madrid, by administrative induction -, while Valencia was like those young people feeling out of place..

Obviously all this tension between reality and representation had consequences. We had to see them a few years later. But a territorial grievance had already ignited. It had nothing to do with identity issues, but with a failed fit in the model: the feeling of being left out of the party..

The former leader of Unió Valenciana – later a member of the local PP, after the phagoticization of the regionalist party – showed with tremendous crudeness the feeling with which his party took advantage of that time. He said in 2007: “I remember until the end of the nineties a Community that was self-conscious wherever I looked: everything important always happened far from Valencia (Seville Expo, Barcelona Olympics, etc.) (…) Then we considered our neighbors better and more prepared than us and the most serious thing is that we had arguments for this derived from historical apathy and from some short-sighted and accommodating politicians, without strength in the decision-making centers. Today, after twelve years of government by the Popular Party, we are the envied ones, we have become a reference for the rest of Spain, and in Europe they know of our good work throughout the global village.”.

Also from football – the usual Canarian in the mine of society – the then boss of Valencia, Paco Roig, traced the growing form of the grievance: “In Valencia they have not built the highway for us, they have not helped us expand the Mestalla field, They don't give us Olympic Games.. Someone should say about the anthem, Valencians en peu alcem-se: here everyone stays seated and whoever gets up they cut their throat,” he responded in 1997 in a legendary interview with the newspaper Levante..

It was the hangover from a party in which Spain had rehearsed its modernity. A rave to which, unusually, Valencia had not been invited. On the contrary, it was the one identified as the origin of fear and dissatisfaction. The years of grievance began.