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The terror attacks in Madrid have done more than put Europe on warning and shake up Spain’s politics. Because of deep historical and emotional ties to Madrid, the entire Spanish-speaking world now feels directly implicated in the 21st century dilemma of how to respond to terrorism. Struggling to make sense of the deadly bombing that struck the traditional heart of Hispanic culture, Spanish-language media on both sides of the Atlantic adopted their own typographical shorthand for the catastrophic event: 11-M. 

The abbreviation, like 9/11, refers to a date, March 11, when bombs ripped through several morning rush-hour commuter trains in Madrid. But 11-M also encompasses the aftermath: the millions-strong peace protests that followed, and general elections three days later that brought a new government to Spain and reconfigured the worldwide war on terror. 

The full meaning of 11-M is being debated far beyond Madrid. Latin American media, and U.S.-based media catering to the country’s over 40 million Hispanic residents have already adopted 11-M as a new symbol for terrorism. 

In a report headlined simply “11-M,” published in the Acapulco, Mexico, daily newspaper Sur, Arturo Martínez Núñez wrote that 11-M appropriately conveys the gravity of the attacks, for the letter “M” also begins the Spanish words for death, “muerte,” and evil, “mal.” 

Many Spanish-speakers responded to the attack as their first direct taste of terror. Editorials on 11-M often referred to Spain as “la Madre Patria,” the Motherland, and referenced even more immediate bonds than just language and timeworn colonial connections. Blood ties, the product of immigration, also bind Latin America to Madrid. It’s not uncommon for Latin American families to have relatives living both in Spain and the United States. 

Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, Honduras and El Salvador were among the many countries mourning their emigrants killed in the bombings—evidence that Madrid’s working-class neighborhoods are teeming with New World migrants as well as North Africans. 

In a letter titled “The Open Veins of Spain,” published March 15 by Miami Spanish-language daily El Nuevo Herald, María José Garmendí wrote: “The Spain that bleeds today is a Spain that belongs to everyone. It is the Spain that has opened itself to receive all its kin from Latin America (as well as) its Arab ancestors...” 

Much in the way “post-9/11” symbolizes a world changed after the Sept. 11 attacks, 11-M in some quarters is beginning to represent a different way of responding to terrorism, one that stresses peace over bellicosity and calibrated responses instead of an all-consuming world war against a shadowy foe. 

The Spanish electorate, says commentator Luis Bruschtein in the March 16 Buenos Aires daily Página 12, has pointed in a new direction by electing a dovish leader to head their government just days after the deadly bombings. The voters’ decision was “so admirable,” Bruschtein writes, “because they voted against war when the most primitive impulse would have been to seek revenge.” In this way, Spaniards “have discredited the supposed liberating and religious morality of the attackers and have put them in their place as common criminals.” 

In Mexico City daily El Universal, opinion writer Alberto Aziz Nassif put the same idea this way: “To put out a fire one does not continue to toss gasoline on it.” 

This 11-M inspired wave of solidarity toward Spain’s new alignment is partly motivated by what Argentina’s interior minister described as the “ideological affinity” that Spain’s new leader, a socialist, shares with many Latin American governments. 

Immediately after his election victory, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero announced he would stand firm against terror but would pull Spanish forces out of Iraq, barring U.N. intervention. His announcement almost immediately repaired a rift over Iraq that has complicated Iberian-Latin American relations for over a year.  

With few exceptions, the region’s governments, including key players like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, share Zapatero’s belief that the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq was wrong and a misguided strategy for stifling terror. 

Even former staunch U.S. allies were suddenly reconsidering their terror war tack in the wake of 11-M. Honduras, which sent hundreds of troops to Iraq, announced a pullout too, despite the Central American nation’s desperate need to stay on Washington’s good side for aid and immigration favors. Guatemala and El Salvador are also now reconsidering their troop commitments. Meanwhile, bombings and attacks are again flaring up in Iraq, near the one-year anniversary of the Iraq war’s start. 

“Winds of change” are blowing across the Atlantic, according to a March 16 editorial in New York Spanish-language daily El Diario/La Prensa. It’s not yet clear how U.S. Hispanics, for whom both 9/11 and 11-M resonate strongly, will react. Polls have shown them to be more disapproving of the Iraq war than the general population. Spain’s new political configuration, and the fact that the Bush administration is more isolated than ever internationally suggest that U.S. Hispanics may begin to object more strongly to President Bush’s anti-terror policies. 11-M and its effect on U.S. politics is, at the least, an important new variable in this year’s election. 

Marcelo Ballve is an editor at Pacific News Service.