Madrid el 11 de marzo de 2004

the general aim of this work was to analyze the linguistic mechanisms employed by the most important politicians of spain in order to account for the activation of explosive artifacts in madrid on march 11th, 2004. this means that the corpus of analysis is constituted by the speeches (appendixed) of josé maría aznar, president of the spanish government at that moment, and the main figures that might succeed him: mariano rajoy, his political legatee, and josé luis rodríguez zapatero, the opposition candidate. in order to develop the analysis the model of critical discourse analysis proposed by chilton y sch？ffner (2000) was followed. the results indicate that the three speeches are quite similar. sometimes, even the same categories are found (oracular tone and positive presentation). the difference was basically restricted to the role of the political actors: president vs. candidate.