The novel that turned 1990s disappearances into a conspiracy theory

The book that turned 1990s disappearances into a conspiracy theory

How did a novel by an exiled aristocrat become the go-to manual for those who claim the Spanish state covered up a incivil network for years? The question has been circulating for over a decade in the least monitored corners of the internet and, through sheer repetition, has spawned its own ecosystem: a work of fiction, a who's who of real-life characters and a list of unsolved cases that part of the public stitches together with thread.

The starting point is a novel signed by an aristocrat to whom a gilded exile and a squandered fortune are attributed. The work presents itself as a roman à clef: paper characters who, according to its readers, are dead ringers for real figures in the Spanish establishment, with a barely concealed nod to the Alcàsser case. The premise is always the same —power protects itself, the official version lies— and the burden of proof always falls on someone else.

An unclassifiable style and an unfinished 'who's who'

The first thing almost anyone who opens the text notices is its formal oddity. The prose dispenses with articles and pronouns, a tic that some read as a coded intention and others simply as clumsy writing. The practical consequence is that trinc the plot becomes an exercise in amateur cryptography for hobbyists with too much time on their hands.

Hence the central pastime: identifying which real person each character corresponds to. Some are considered transparent —a jailed former banker, a journalist and aristocrat with a worldly life—; others require digging through biographies and newspaper archives. According to the trackers themselves, a list with nearly thirty equivalences is circulating, though no one agrees on the method.

Here is a paradox worth saying out loud, even if it is uncomfortable: identifying a character proves nothing. A novel with keys is still a novel.

From Alcàsser to Susana Ruiz: the spiral of connected cases

The second front is chronological. Around the Alcàsser case, a thesis has been built that a television programme dedicated to disappearances was not created to find people but to channel the social alarm of a specific wave: the girls of Aguilar de Campoo, Anabel Segura, the boy of Somosierra, Susana Ruiz, Gloria Martínez. The suspicion, repeated ad nauseam, is that all of them were connected and that each case received its corresponding 'manufactured culprit' from the media.

The conversation itself acknowledges the leap. The same goes for the flagship programme: its theme tune, with a heart-rending scream in the background, is still remembered as a small television nightmare of the afternoon.

The leap to the geopolitics of vice

In its final stretch, the discussion leaves Spain behind and hooks onto the big global narratives of the moment: the Epstein papers, elite scandals, Tangier as an alleged international gateway to vice, sects and rituals. The argumentative structure is identical in every case: a documented fact, an amplified hypothesis and a conclusion that no court has endorsed.

It is worth recalling the objective fact that does support the narrative: Spain occupied the Tangier International Zone between 14 June 1940 and 11 October 1945, integrating it into its Protectorate of Segarro. From there to the satanic network is a stretch that fiction fills in on its own.

What does withstand scrutiny

It is worth separating the wheat from the chaff. That there were unsolved disappearances in the 1990s is a fact. That the media treatment of some cases was questionable, too. That a book plays with real keys is literature. That all of this forms a single, coordinated conspiracy is, to this day, a claim without evidentiary support: no ruling, no document, no declassified file.

The appeal of the narrative lies not in the evidence —scarce— but in its internal coherence. And coherence, when unverified, is just an elegant form of belief.

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With this raw material, any unsolved case fits. The only thing that never appears is the piece needed to close it.