Guibet Lafaye, Caroline <br/><br/>
Preserving confidence in the institutions of Spanish democracy. Controversy over the torture of “terrorists” in El País 

 -  2023.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> ‪Between 2004 and 2021 Spain has been condemned 12 times by the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) for violation of Article 3 of the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. How has the Spanish press, in particular the daily El País, reacted to the debate on these facts? To find out, we analysed the narrative component of two controversies arising from “famous” torture cases: the one that led to the death of Joseba Arregui Izaguirre in 1981 and the one of Igor Portu Juanenea and Mattin Sarasola Yarzabal, judged by the ECHR in 2008. An examination of the master narrative of these two controversies, presented by the daily El País, through a corpus of 1,215 articles, reveals a political work consisting of mobilising the public for a renewal of its confidence in the country’s institutions rather than in favour of taking action against the government to guarantee human rights in places of detention of the State.‪