De Prada in ABC: «Hang them, then dismember»

De Prada and his column on the DANA: Opinion, literary license, or crime?

Can a columnist call for the hanging of the government in a national newspaper and remain unpunished? Juan Manuel de Prada wrote this in his column for ABC, a daily belonging to the Vocento group. Within hours, the conversation about the floods in the Valencia region shifted to uncomfortable ground: his own text. The possibility that a prosecutor might act ex officio circulated in the debate. The question is whether it was an opinion, a literary license, or a crime.

The text attacks the Executive for its management of the catastrophe and dedicates a string of insults to those in power, which need not be reproduced here. What matters is at the end: a paragraph where the author writes that if Spaniards did not have horchata in their veins, one would have to «hang them and then dismember them». The subject is the rulers. The verb is in the conditional mood.

The conditional as shield and target

That verbal form sustains much of the controversy. Those who defend the columnist cling to it: there is no call to action, only rhetorical venting, and the entire article —they insist— is an exercise in incendiary style, not an instruction manual. Those demanding accountability respond that the verbal mood does not erase the content, and that having dead and missing people on the table does not turn incitement into literature.

Here appears the first real fracture. Some read the paragraph as a metaphor for collective indignation; others, as a threshold crossed. From that point on, the issue was no longer meteorological.

1957, 1982 and 2024: The data used in the column

To deny that the catastrophe was unpredictable, the article draws on historical archives. In the cold drop (gota fría) of 1982, which burst the Tous dam and left forty dead, up to a thousand liters per square meter fell in Cortes de Pallàs, double what fell on this occasion. The event of 1957 took eighty lives, although reliable precipitation records from that time do not exist: rain gauges of the era had a maximum capacity of two hundred liters per square meter.

The conclusion drawn is simple: the Levante has always suffered the same phenomenon —maritime polar air with easterly wind— and giving it a new name does not change it. From there, it jumps to management. With orange alerts already active on Monday, he argues, classes should have been suspended, rescue personnel mobilized, and roads closed. This was not done, and the water caught drivers and residents in ramblas and streets already flooded.

He also criticizes the President of the Government for suggesting that the population ignored civil protection instructions. In his view, when the alerts reached mobile phones, many people were already being swept away.

The legal debate: Is there hate speech against politicians?

One participant reproduces the statute and argues that there is not: the law punishes provocation to hatred or violence against groups or persons based on race, religion, ethnicity, sensual orientation, gender identity, ideology, illness, or disability, and a government, a party, or a president do not fit into that list. Outside of that, according to the same reasoning, such a text would only be prosecutable as incivil provocation or apology, and the conditional moves it away from both types.

This is the reasoning that circulates in more detail in the thread and explains why, at the close of the debate, no ex officio action was recorded. It does not miccionan the author emerges unscathed: some assume that his signature in the daily paper may be in question.

The reaction: Demands for accountability and an uncomfortable comparison

The column became the center of the day. In the thread, demands are made for the management of ABC and Vocento to give explanations, and some claim that a journalist from El País compared De Prada to the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, implicitly attributing to him a request for imprisonment. There is no record in the debate material of any correction or removal of the text by the newspaper.

There another front opens. Some see proof of protection in the fact that no one has moved; and others, at the other extreme, assume that his signature in ABC may be considered terminated. Both readings coexist without resolution.

What is at stake for the author

On the table is his continuity with the daily’s signature. In the air hangs whether the episode marks a before and after in what a publication allows its most incendiary pen to publish.

The underlying conversation is different. If the medium removes the text, it admits it went too far. If it keeps it, it assumes the fruta cost. And if it does nothing, it lets the calendar resolve the matter, which is how almost all such issues have been resolved.

Cold drop, DANA, and the climate narrative

The other axis of the text is terminological. The author argues that what the Government and Brussels call climate change is the traditional cold drop (gota fría), and cites Ursula von der Leyen —«the dramatic reality of climate change»— as proof of the official narrative. For him, that narrative serves to distribute blame among the population and justify new impositions.

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At the close of this debate, the column remained the center of discussion, and no ex officio action was recorded. If it was a metaphor, it worked as a metaphor. If it was a threat, it still waits for someone, in some office, to decide if the conditional is a shield or an excuse.