ADIF: Spain's rail safety led by executives with no railway experience

ADIF's leadership under suspicion: communications staff in charge of safety

The safety of Spain's public rail infrastructure manager is in the hands of a journalist. That is the claim hanging over the case, and a former ADIF chief of staff put it in writing: with Óscar Puente's arrival at the Ministry of Transport, communications profiles moved into positions of responsibility, and internal meetings spoke of 'reddening' the agency. ADIF's safety chief, Salvador Almenar Antón, is singled out as an official with no railway background. And the debate is not only about who signs off, but what was signed off before.

Four written warnings. The most painful accusation is not the cronyism, it is the ignored warning. The version circulating is that there were up to four written communications flagging what was coming. Four. In writing. If that holds up, the problem is not an unfortunate appointment: it is a system that decided not to listen to those who knew. According to the Guardia Civil (Spain's civil guard police force), the track broke the day before and the system failed to raise the alert due to a configuration problem.

Family cronyism as a metaphor for the system

A director general who, upon arriving, hands jobs to his vvife and his brother. The specific case gets lost in the anecdote, but the anecdote is the point: if an official's first move is to place their own people, imagine what they do with contracts. The complaint extends to tailor-made positions —the Atlantic Corridor ones, the Mediterranean ones— that sound like invented posts created to place someone. Meritocracy, that word spoken often on the campaign trail and rarely in org charts, is laid bare.

Some go further and argue the problem is not ADIF but the party system itself: a mafia-like mechanism where everyone dethrones rivals only to install their own. The logical objection writes itself: if the PP returns, will it appoint technicians or its own pals? The honest answer is that nobody knows. And there is only one way to find out.

The real cost: slashed maintenance and a network in ruins

The economic argument is the least contested. When loyalists are appointed and contracts handed out, it is ultimately the user who pays for maintenance and services. The network, according to the most repeated description, is in a deplorable state after years of neglect, and rebuilding it would cost practically as much as starting from scratch. More than one full term in office. That is the price of running public assets as plunder.

The parallel with AENA is offered as a recipe: do at ADIF what was done at the airport operator. And the international comparison appears as an uncomfortable mirror: in Japan, the network is run by those with something to lose if things go wrong. Here, the one with something to lose is the passenger.

In this story, the accident is the straw that breaks the camel's back. And the question left hanging is no longer who gave whom a job, but how many more written warnings must arrive before someone actually reads them.