Urda: 69 dead, and the European money meant for rail safety under scrutiny

According to Le Monde, the European Public Prosecutor's Office has opened an investigation into "a possible fraud affecting European funds intended for the renovation and improvement of safety, signalling and communication systems" on the Madrid-Seville line, where the Urda rail disaster took place, in Spain. The disaster killed 69 people. Let us first think of them and of their families.

What we do not yet know weighs heavily. The dispatch does not say who is targeted, what sums are involved, or what exact link might exist between these alleged frauds and the accident. An open investigation is not an established guilt, and nothing justifies claiming, at this stage, that diverted money caused anything at all. The causes of the accident, for their part, are first a matter for the investigators.

There remains the question of structure, which we pose with full clarity: in our reading, who pays for rail safety, and who profits from it? A European renovation fund is public money meant to become signalling, communications and vigilance. Between the Brussels counter and the ballast, there are tenders, chains of subcontractors, and margins at every floor. Each intermediary takes its cut, and safety, for its part, has never appeared on the quarterly balance sheet.

This is where an old concept proves useful. Profit arises from what is extracted from labour without being paid for; a work site subcontracted in cascade offers a rail version of this, where time, staffing and oversight are compressed to free up margin. This is not a matter of wicked bosses, it is a mechanism. And when the state withdraws from the direct upkeep of its infrastructure to hand it to the private sector, it does not eliminate the expense: it turns it into income for others, then is surprised that vigilance is expensive.

We will be told that the state, here, is investigating, and that Europe is too. Good. But the state is not a neutral arbiter: it manages the common affairs of those who own, and its limits, as the Marxists say, are bound up with the need to let accumulation continue. We investigate willingly after the coffins; we check less often before them, because checking is a cost, and cost is a word reserved for wages.

Railway workers, maintenance agents and signalling technicians know better than anyone what safety instructions are worth under budgetary pressure. Their word, their unions, their right to refuse a dubious work site: these are counterweights far more effective than a prosecutor who arrives after the fact. The Republic loves to proclaim that safety is a right; it would still need to fund the means for it, and to be able to follow the money all the way to the rail.

We will follow the investigation. For now, one certainty: 69 people are dead, and the question of where the money meant for their safety went deserves a public answer.