On 12 May 2014, just after 5.15pm, two well-dressed, middle-aged women walked purposefully up the ramp of a footbridge over the Bernesga river in the historic city of León in north-western Spain. First came Isabel Carrasco, the most powerful politician in the city, who was heading to the local headquarters of the conservative People’s party (PP). A minibus was waiting to take her to an election campaign rally with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. After numerous corruption scandals, his party was tanking in the polls, and he needed the support of one of his most successful vote-winners. At barely 5ft tall and 59 years old, Carrasco was a bold and colourful dresser. She was wearing a purple jacket with pink cuffs, black Chloé jeans and fuchsia platform shoes.
The woman who walked up the gentle arc of the bridge a few metres behind Carrasco was overdressed for a sunny afternoon – in a designer parka, baseball cap and leather gloves – but seemed otherwise unremarkable to Pedro Mielgo, a retired police officer who passed them both. Perhaps that is why, when the first shot rang out, he thought it was a firework.
When Mielgo looked back, however, he could see Carrasco sprawled on the ground. The other woman was leaning over her, a pistol in her gloved hand. She fired three more shots at Carrasco’s head – which bounced violently against the ground – and then turned around. After putting the gun in a shoulder bag, the woman pulled a scarf over her mouth and walked calmly past Mielgo before heading towards the centre of this placid and charming provincial city.
The assassin quickly melted into the sluggish afternoon street life of León, crossing the narrow riverside park and turning into a street of four-storey apartment blocks with shops and bars at ground level. Mielgo followed at a discreet distance, phoning the police as he went. He lost her by the Colón market, but then rounded the corner of the Gran Vía de San Marcos and saw a woman who – although she was now wearing a white jacket – he thought he recognised as the killer.
Mielgo waved down a passing police car. By now, the woman had got into the passenger seat of a parked, silver-grey Mercedes SLK 200 sports car, although there was no one in the driver’s seat. “That’s her. Be careful, she has a gun,” he shouted. The police officers approached the car and asked the woman for her identity card, which revealed that she was 58-year-old Montserrat González. Moments later, a younger woman approached them, explaining that she was González’s 34-year-old daughter, Triana Martínez. Triana said her mother had been with her the whole afternoon.
A quick search of the car turned up no weapon. The home address on the back of the women’s identity cards was the Plaza de los Marqueses in the hilltop town of Astorga, 30 miles away. That square is best known as home to the city’s police headquarters. The women explained that the police station was their registered home, since González’s husband, Pablo Martínez, was Astorga’s chief of police. Martínez was one of the half-dozen most senior officers in León province. Despite this strange twist, Montserrat and Triana were immediately taken to León’s main police station for questioning as murder suspects.
While Mielgo was following the mysterious killer, León’s emergency services were dealing with something they had no experience of – a cold-blooded assassination in the middle of the day in a public place. Carrasco had been shot in the back and, as she slid to the ground, grabbed hold of the bridge’s handrail, twisting to see her attacker. Two more .32 calibre bullets had then been fired into her head, killing her instantly.
The victim, who presided over the powerful provincial government, or diputación, from her office in a cloistered 16th-century bishop’s palace, was known to everyone in León. The murder had been committed at one of the most dramatic sites in the city. “It was almost like a ceremonial killing,” recalled Ángela Domínguez, the former editor of the local edition of El Mundo newspaper. Emergency service radio recordings reveal one shocked ambulanceman blurting out a phrase that many would have recognised: “She’s the one who had 12 jobs, and 12 salaries!” It was a reference to the number of official and semi-official posts Carrasco had accumulated during her five years as diputación president. With her multiple jobs, incomes and perks, she had become a symbol of how politicians were milking public funds while other Spaniards struggled to cope with the recession that had devastated the country since the 2008 financial crisis. In a country with 25% unemployment, here was a woman with 12 jobs.
Many people in León recall exactly what they were doing when they heard the news. Miguel Ángel Zamora, a reporter at the Diario de León, was talking to a policeman after his car had been damaged by another vehicle. “I heard the victim’s name over his radio. I couldn’t believe it,” he told me. He rang his news editors, who thought he must have got it wrong. Confirmation arrived with the first photographs. A sheet covered the corpse, but the loud, fuchsia shoes were instantly recognisable. Isabel Carrasco, the woman known as the “Margaret Thatcher of León”, was dead.
Not everyone was dismayed by the assassination. “There was shock, but not much sadness. You didn’t hear people saying: ‘Poor her’,” said Zamora. The list of her enemies was so long, some joked, that the police would never find the killer. It had sometimes been said that the only way to unseat Carrasco would be to murder her. Nobody had meant it seriously, but now it seemed that someone had taken it that way.
By the time of her death, and despite her party’s repeated successes at elections in León, Carrasco had become one of the most controversial and feared politicians in Spain. In her lifetime, people had gossiped viciously about her, often looking over their shoulder to make sure they were not overheard. Some saw her as a sort of praying mantis, seducing and devouring her victims, or as a despot who delighted in destroying her enemies. And as León and the rest of Spain slipped ever deeper into recession and angry pessimism after 2008, resentment towards her had grown.
Carrasco could be vulgar. “I remember having to explain to her in a restaurant that you can’t just pick your teeth with a yoghurt top in public,” said one friend who asked to remain anonymous. She was constantly in and out of cosmetic surgery clinics and was unabashed about it – showing off the stitches and scars behind her ears while proclaiming that “the time comes when we all have to do this”. When she became head of León’s diputación, she refused to follow tradition by hanging her predecessor’s portrait in the palace’s cloisters. Instead, she became the first to hang her own picture.
Carrasco had come a long way. She was a railwayman’s daughter, raised down the tracks from León in a small, poor village called Campo y Santibáñez. She was part of a generation of Spaniards who entered adulthood just as the country was leaving behind the right-wing Catholic dictatorship of General Franco and embracing democracy, progress and optimism. Women, who had previously needed their husband’s signature to open a bank account and could not legally get a divorce before 1981, were finally free to pursue their ambitions outside the home. Yet such opportunities were still largely restricted to those born into privilege. Carrasco was from a humble background, but she was clever and pushy. She studied law and passed the ferociously competitive civil service exams, to become one of Spain’s youngest tax inspectors. As a young woman, her energy and charisma were already legendary, as was her temper. “I even remember her being angry on her wedding day,” a childhood friend recalled.
A brief marriage produced a daughter, Loreto, when Carrasco was 25, before she left her husband and began a rapid rise through the PP. In 1987, at the age of 32, she became the provincial delegate of the regional government of Castilla y León. “León had never seen a woman in power,” Susana Vergara, a local journalist, told me. “She was young, uninhibited, clever and capable. It was like planting a bomb in a world full of men.”
In 1991, Carrasco returned to the tax office to run the team investigating large companies and wealthy individuals. When one well-off León family protested against the fines levied on them and insulted Carrasco personally, the fines were tripled. Carrasco enjoyed power, and knew how to impose it on others. “She could walk into a meeting full of men, and five minutes later be completely in charge,” said her friend (and lawyer) Carlos Rivera. He saw her as a gutsy, capable woman set on taming a city traditionally run by conservative men. “She was quick, impatient, fast-talking and liked to win.”
Local party leaders were impressed, and in 1995, Carrasco returned to politics as the finance minister in the regional government of Castilla y León. Eight years later, she became a senator in Madrid. Finally, in 2007, she was appointed head of León’s diputación – a powerful position that gave her control over a budget of €130m.
The press had taken to Carrasco when she first appeared in León, though her brash, open manner shocked some people. She refused to bow to expectations about how a woman should dress, speak or behave. “I once heard her say loudly at a public event: ‘I’ll got to bed with whoever I want, because I’m a free woman,’” recalled Vergara. Everybody in León recalls one photograph in particular, when Carrasco turned up to a 2003 campaign event wearing a diamante choker that spelled out the word “SEX”. If they did not like it, Carrasco seemed to be saying, that was their problem. “They can suck my pussy!” was one of the cruder phrases occasionally heard ringing around the diputación palace when Carrasco was angry, which was frequently the case.
When she took office in July 2007, Carrasco’s first target was the cosy and corrupt business community that dominated León. She waded into this world with reformist glee, according to Rivera. “Her biggest enemy was the business community of León. To them, she had three defects. She was a woman, she was clever and she didn’t forgive people who stole.”
Yet Carrasco’s efforts to curtail corruption were only ever partial, and constrained by her own love of power. Speculative, get-rich-quick deals involving real-estate developers, local politicians and savings banks helped push Spain into its dramatic double-dip recession in 2008. Even today, the country’s GDP has yet to return to pre-crash levels. At León’s local savings bank, Caja España, the board – many of them politicians, with Carrasco as vice-president – handed out risky loans to fellow directors in 2008, including the bank’s president. When the loans were not repaid, the bank lost €60m. Had she lived, Carrasco would, like the rest of the board, now be under criminal investigation.
Rather than take people to court, Carrasco built dossiers that gave her power over them. “Whenever we broke a scandal in the paper, I would go to see her, and she would open a drawer full of files and say: ‘Is that all you have on them? You don’t know half of it,’” said her friend Ángela Domínguez.
Carrasco was also a formal suspect in the irregular hiring of 40 clerks who were given jobs for life at the diputación in 2007, shortly after she arrived. Many of those handed the jobs – after getting such impossibly high marks in the exams that the local ombudsman concluded they must have seen the questions first – had links to politicians. The only surprising thing about the story was just how blatant the cheating seemed to be.
“That’s how diputaciónes work in cities like León,” says Rosa Seijas, a temporary clerk who sat the exams and sued after failing to win a place. “I remember the first time I worked there [as a temp], people kept asking me: ‘Who do you belong to?’” The implication was that she owed her job to one of the local politicians.
Rivera claimed the scandal of the 40 clerks, which was eventually thrown out of court on a technicality, caught the newly appointed Carrasco by surprise. She had regretted letting it go through and set about cleaning up the regional government. “All cronyism came to an end,” he said. There were angry meetings at which Carrasco demanded to know who had put whom on the list. As Carrasco accumulated power, she made what Rivera calls “intimate enemies” inside her own party. She did not bargain or take prisoners. León’s power brokers never forgave her.
Over time, her style became as bullying and confrontational as that of her worst male predecessors and rivals. She would bawl and swear at her subordinates, humiliate her staff in public and squash journalists or political rivals who dared challenge her. “She hated it if you got ahead of her,” admitted Rivera. “And she was rudest when she got lost on a subject.” But that happened rarely, and she respected anyone who stood up to her. Friends found her loyal, but admit she could come across as hard and cold. “She didn’t show affection or approval in a normal way,” said Rivera.
In the province’s villages – where she felt most at home, and to which she allocated significant public funds for infrastructure projects – people loved her. In the city, apart from among a group of faithful friends, Carrasco was increasingly feared and scorned, even by fellow members of her party. She did not build teams, because she distrusted people and thought she could do better by herself. She governed with imperious disdain, expecting others to rubber-stamp her decisions.
She grew more and more paranoid about her enemies, both inside and outside the PP. She took on posts that previous diputación presidents had delegated to others – hence her “12 jobs” (she actually held 13), on the boards of local institutions or presiding over public-private consortia such as the city’s airport and tourism board. Most had attendance pay or perks attached. Yet no one was ever able to pin corruption charges on Carrasco. For some, that is proof that, whatever her failings, she was first and foremost a dedicated public servant. Others claim she was simply too clever to get caught. At the time of her death, she was being investigated for only one alleged infraction – of claiming twice for mileage. By the standards of Spanish politics, that is a minor offence.
Although her notoriety was concentrated within the province of León, Carrasco’s murder was headline news across Spain. A solemn funeral was held at León’s 13th-century Santa María cathedral, known as the “house of light” for its spectacular gothic stained-glass windows. Prime Minister Rajoy and his socialist predecessor, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, both of whom had lived in León as children, were among the mourners. Jesús Ramos, an architect and one of Carrasco’s most intimate friends, stood at the door awaiting the coffin. “She was one of the most honest and loyal people I have known,” he told me. Her 33-year-old daughter, Loreto, and Carrasco’s live-in boyfriend of over a decade, Jesús López, were inconsolable.
Some days later, graffiti appeared on the concrete tiles of the footbridge, almost in the exact spot that had been stained by Carrasco’s blood. “Aquí murió un bicho,” it read. “An animal died here.”
Montserrat González and her daughter, Triana Martínez, were unlikely murder suspects. Triana’s father was a senior policeman. Her mother was a 58-year-old housewife who wore Hugo Boss and drove a Mercedes sports car. Slight and pale, Montserrat looked younger than her years. Both women were also members of the PP and had become familiar faces at party conferences, rallies and the annual Christmas dinners at the 16th-century monastery of San Marcos, which had been converted into León’s classiest hotel. Perhaps most shocking of all was that Triana had been one of Carrasco’s protegees.
Mother and daughter had always been close. “They are one and the same,” said a friend, Julia Rodríguez. “Whatever one thinks, the other one thinks. If Montserrat says something then Triana says: ‘Exactly Mama, you’re right.’” Friends joked that Triana’s husband – when she found one – could expect to share his marriage bed with his mother-in-law.
Montserrat’s life had long revolved around Triana, who attended a private school and acquired a degree of small-town sophistication that her mother – raised in a country village – could never match. Triana Martínez was a brilliant, if spoiled, schoolchild. “She always had top grades,” her father, Pablo Martínez, told me when we met in Gijón, the Atlantic port city where Triana grew up.
Martínez seems to have played a relatively minor role in Triana’s childhood – either excluded by her tight bond with her mother or, as he told me, because he worked so hard. In 2003, he and Montserrat moved to Astorga, where he had been appointed police chief. He was delighted with the move, but Montserrat disliked the town. Local people thought she had delusions of grandeur. “She never greeted people in the street,” said Jacinto Bardal, a local PP councillor.
Triana had left home to study telecommunications engineering at university in Santander, 200 miles away, and when she did an Erasmus year at Ulm in southern Germany, her mother visited frequently. After graduation, Triana moved to León, to the delight of her mother, who would eventually move into Triana’s apartment.
The pair shared a fascination with luxury that was mostly beyond their means, and could be seen together window-shopping, or trying perfumes and brand-name clothes. Montserrat acquired expensive bags and boots, though friends wondered where she got the money. One year, she and Triana took a holiday at Villa Padierna – a five-star spa hotel in Marbella which had hosted, among others, Michelle Obama. “They are fantasists, who want the finest things in life,” said Julia Rodríguez, who went on holiday to Prague with them while Triana was a student, but found them more interested in their hotel and its little luxuries than the city.
Triana had come to León in search of a job. Spain’s economy was still booming and in June 2007 she began working on telecommunications projects at the Palacio de los Guzmanes – the diputación headquarters, where visitors are greeted by a mounted medieval knight in armour. She had been given a contact by her friends in the PP, which helped her secure the first of a series of temporary contracts. Fellow workers remember her as cheerful and competent, if a little superior.
When Isabel Carrasco took over as president the following month, she soon became Triana’s friend and protector. She called Triana at all hours, even requiring her to go to her apartment to help install cable TV. Carrasco, in turn, used her influence at the tax office to resolve Montserrat’s problems with her imported Mercedes.
The ambitious young woman felt like Carrasco’s protege and began to dream of two things. First, she wanted a job for life at the diputación, of the kind enjoyed by established civil servants. A recent poll by the AXA Foundation showed that this is the career ambition for a quarter of Spanish students. Second, and against her father’s wishes, Triana wanted a parallel career in politics. She was popular with senior PP officials and, since candidates for elections in Spain must find patrons to put them on the lists presented by each party, well-placed.
By December 2009, Triana’s future was looking bright. She was a PP candidate for councillor in Astorga, and that month Carrasco decided to turn her job into a permanent position. This required the diputación to set exams, which are obligatory for any permanent public job. Anyone could apply, but Triana expected the preferential treatment given to favourites.
Suddenly, however, Carrasco and Triana fell out. Triana would later claim that this was the result of a scene allegedly played out on the sofa at Carrasco’s apartment in January 2010. “She came up close to smell my perfume, and then she kissed me on the mouth … I was scared, but she tried to touch me and put her arm around me to stop me moving away,” Triana testified later in court. “I managed to get away and say that I was leaving.” Carrasco’s friends vigorously deny this. “She had no sexual interest in women,” said Ramos.
The two women also argued at work later that year, according to some witnesses, with Carrasco warning Triana that she could either be an ally or an enemy. When exams for the new job were finally held, Triana sent an urgent text message to Carrasco. “Sorry to bother you, but the exam is tomorrow and I need your help to pass,” it read. In other words, she was asking for the exam questions – but there was no reply. Instead, a second candidate appeared from out of town and was supposedly seen wandering off with the examiner. Triana filmed them with her phone, but did not formally challenge the appointment when the job was handed to her rival. Like many other people, Montserrat was convinced that Carrasco had brought in another candidate with the intention of denying her daughter the job. It was early 2011; Spain had fallen into a catastrophic recession three years earlier and unemployment was now 24%. Triana was out of favour, and out of work.
Carrasco then pursued her daughter with blind hatred, Montserrat later claimed, blocking her attempt to take up a council seat in Astorga after another councillor resigned, demanding the return of €11,000 allegedly overpaid to Triana by the diputación and getting the tax office to send claims totalling €6,000. She was convinced Carrasco also prevented her daughter finding work elsewhere in the city.
Triana became clinically depressed, and lost weight. Her father advised her to leave León and take her skills elsewhere. “But she wanted to be near her mother,” he told me. “That was her priority.” So Montserrat moved in with her daughter. Her husband, who stayed behind in Astorga, did not complain. He insists that his wife and daughter barely spoke to him about Carrasco. “That was something between the two of them,” he said.
A year before the murder, Montserrat approached Carrasco at a party and called her a “shameless daughter of a whore”. “What are you doing to my daughter?” she demanded. The normally sweet-natured Triana had also lost her temper when told by local councillor Bardal that she could not stand as a PP candidate again. She and her father, she said, would make sure the PP lost the next local election. Carrasco complained that Triana was turning out to be “wicked and rebellious, though the mother is worse”. By this time, Montserrat had decided Carrasco had to die. “It was my daughter, or her,” she said later. “Bad weeds must be torn out.”
Police were under intense pressure to solve one of Spain’s most shocking recent murders quickly and efficiently. The victim was a senior politician from the country’s ruling party and television news shows – enjoying a respite from corruption scandals and unemployment – were speculating wildly. The alleged perpetrators, meanwhile, were part of the wider police family and needed careful treatment. León was not used to being at the centre of national events. It had a force of experienced investigators headed by the capable new comisaria provincial, María Marcos – but two veteran detectives were also sent from the bigger city of Burgos. It was they who interviewed Montserrat and Triana the following morning.
The footbridge and the spot where Montserrat had been arrested were only 500 metres apart, yet trawling through rubbish bins and dredging the river bed produced nothing. All they had was Mielgo’s eyewitness report and, in the boot of the Mercedes, they had found a Hugo Boss parka that resembled the one seen on the murderer.
The evidence, however, soon built up against Montserrat. A search of the León apartment revealed that she owned a small pistol – not the one used in the crime – and an array of ammunition, including .32 calibre bullets. She also had two-thirds of a kilo of marijuana. A photograph found on a laptop showed a smiling Montserrat and her daughter beside a towering cannabis plant. This was one of several that grew beside the chicken run in her own mother’s village backyard. The police chief’s wife, it turned out, was an enthusiastic consumer and cultivator of cannabis.
It did not take long for Montserrat to confess. She must have known, in any case, that forensic tests would prove that she had recently fired a weapon. She had acted alone and out of hatred, she claimed. She would explain everything if they promised to release her daughter.
Montserrat claimed that she had heard many tales from her husband about the Gijón underworld and that she knew where to get hold of a pistol in that city. She had bought one from a drug trafficker and rapist who, conveniently, had since been murdered. She had been trying to kill Carrasco for more than a year, frequently waiting outside her apartment building with a pistol in her pocket, but had stopped after a neighbour became suspicious and confronted her. On the day of the murder, she had walked past the building again and, she said, got lucky. Carrasco was, unusually, on her own. They knew the rest. And she was not sorry.
The murder weapon was finally discovered late on the day after the crime. A 39-year-old municipal police officer, Raquel Gago, rang a colleague to say she had seen a suspicious bag hidden among the mess on the back seat of her own car. It must have been placed there, she said, by Triana Martínez. Inside the bag, police found a snub-nosed .32 calibre Taurus pistol with its identity numbers filed off.
Gago was, apart from Montserrat, Triana’s best friend. She had stopped by their flat for coffee after lunch on the day of the murder. The policewoman had seen her friend again some 10 minutes after the shooting, when Triana walked past her as she chatted to a traffic warden beside her parked Volkswagen Golf. Triana had asked if she could leave something in the car while she went to buy fruit, but never came back.
Police began to suspect that Montserrat had had an accomplice as she plotted what was meant to be a perfect crime: her own daughter. Triana now had to explain how she got hold of the weapon – and disposed of it – so quickly.
Triana told investigators that she thought she had quashed her mother’s fantasy of killing Carrasco long before. On the day of the murder her mother had called her, hysterical, saying she had sighted Carrasco and planned to shoot her. Triana had told her to stop and then ran towards the bridge. She arrived in time to see her mother walking back into town and throwing a bag down the garage ramp of an apartment block. They did not speak, but Triana realised that the bag might contain a gun, and so retrieved it. She had then bumped into Gago, put it in her car and gone on to find her mother being arrested.
“That was when she called me,” her father – an outwardly modest, conservative man with a policeman’s trademark inscrutability – told me later. “It was like being immersed in cold water and then having an electric charge shot through me.” Lying to protect your own family – even in a court of law – is not a crime in Spain. Triana claimed that, believing her mother had used her father’s gun, she had lied in order to protect both her parents.
Investigators were not convinced. They had found a search for pistols on Triana’s laptop and notebook jottings on guns that were for sale in her handwriting. Even Gago’s story did not add up. Why had it taken her 30 hours to report that the murder suspect had placed something in her car? The case was strange enough already, but when the police officer was formally accused of conspiracy, it become even more bizarre.
Montserrat claimed the police had promised that, if she confessed, her daughter could walk free. But that did not happen. By the time mother and daughter went to trial for murder in León’s central court in January 2016 – with snow on the hills and a damp, penetrating chill on the streets – both women had spent 20 months on remand in jail. (Gago, facing the same charges, had been bailed.)
Formally, the nine-person jury had to decide on the guilt or innocence of the three women (with Montserrat now claiming temporary insanity). But the victim’s own guilt was also being debated, with public opinion as the jury. León itself had already turned its back on Carrasco. Few people attended the events commemorating the first anniversary of her death. The local PP, now run by what Rivera called her “intimate enemies”, tried to pretend that she never existed. “During her life she provoked terror and panic,” explained Susana Martín, a local journalist who interviewed Montserrat and Triana in jail. “But now she still provokes fear.”
Both mother and daughter appeared convinced that Triana would be found not guilty. They were wrong. The judge gave Montserrat and Triana sentences of 22 and 20 years, but when Martín visited them in prison a few months later they had not lost their capacity for fantasy. They were sure that Triana would be released on appeal, and even asked the journalist to wait to take photographs until then. “I am an engineer,” Triana scoffed. “What kind of a genius plans a murder in the middle of León at five in the afternoon?” Yet that appeal failed and, like Gago (who was deemed an accomplice and handed a 12-year sentence), they now await a final supreme court decision. Montserrat, who is also appealing, remains unrepentant. “I just want to get out so I can tell everyone the truth about Carrasco,” she told Martín.
Spain’s first Twitter hate-crime arrest was that of a 19-year-old student in Valencia who greeted Carrasco’s death with the tweet: “That’s the way! Kill them all.” The applause that greeted the murder in certain quarters owed much to the mindset of Spaniards who were fed up with politicians lining their pockets while they themselves scrabbled for jobs, had homes repossessed or coped with dramatic falls in income, according to Ángela Domínguez. Carrasco’s tyrannical reputation – and the corruption rumours – had helped make her a target. “Part of society saw it as an almost necessary ritual,” she said. “There is a shared responsibility.”
Although people in León complained privately about Carrasco, few had dared to confront her. Perhaps they feared that, without a pistol in their hand, they were always bound to lose. Rosa Seijas, who sued over the fixed exam system, sees a cowed society that has accepted cronyism as inevitable. “Everyone complains, but nobody does anything,” she said. “They just say that this is the way things work. In fact, all they want is to find a way to get their own offspring a civil service job.” Carrasco’s architect friend, Jesús Ramos, says that the poisoned atmosphere in León reflected what he calls Spain’s “familist” society – where a weak welfare state provides no real safety net. “Here, your family looks after you,” he said. That makes cronyism inevitable, even virtuous. In this case, it primed a mother to kill.
The woman who pulled the trigger, however, acted out of revenge for her daughter, hurt pride and frustrated grandeur – not from moral or political indignation. After all, her daughter’s desire to land a job for life, funded by taxpayers, through rigged exams was a further example of corruption. An assassin who drives a Mercedes and wears Hugo Boss does not represent the jobless rage of Spain’s new poor. If anything, she represents a society where the corrupt distribution of public wealth is so widespread that some feel they have a right to demand their share – and, in this case, if they do not get it, a right to kill for it.
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