The Chess Players....Peones Negros

The activist wing of the conspiracy theorists, the Peones Negros (Black Pawns) are those who live the analogy with a game of chess to the full. For them everything is about the battle with the “white” side, their contributions on blogs are filled with references to the “game” and how to achieve checkmate against the other side. Who are the whites? Well, anyone who doesn’t support the conspiracy theories can be included. So of course we have the current Spanish government, a substantial section of the police force, some members of the judiciary, the Grupo Prisa (owners of El País newspaper and with heavy television and radio interests), ABC newspaper, the “softer” sections of the Partido Popular (PP), ETA, any regional nationalist parties, and probably people like me as well. It’s a long list of enemies by any standards.

A sect like organisation, from their ranks emerge the more imaginative and bizarre suggestions about how the Spanish government and ETA combined to use the bombings to defeat the government of the PP. Perhaps the pick of the wild bunch is the suggestion that those who died in the explosion in Leganés were actually killed earlier by the “real” perpetrators, and their frozen bodies were then placed in the Leganés apartment which was subsequently blown up to simulate a suicide. The leader of the sect is Luis del Pino, who seems to have dedicated his life to the development of the conspiracy theories, and the place where the black pawns congregate to admire the latest revelations from their leader is Del Pino’s blog on the far right wing web site Libertad Digital. The foot soldiers of the conspiracy theories and a very appropriately named organisation; because there will undoubtedly come a time when their usefulness reaches an end and they will be sacrificed and invited to leave the “game”.