Pacheco’s Reporting Controversy over the Biomass Power Project turns a local dispute over energy and forests into a contest over who can define the facts. Pacheco’s claims about Irene and the family’s protest threaten to turn real political tensions into a misleading story; Bea and Débora challenge him with documents and an appeal to journalistic accuracy. Later, a televised interview reveals that the project’s pollution specifications had been changed without Irene’s knowledge, giving the controversy a substantiated environmental dimension even as the reporting around it remains politically charged.

The project and its competing claims

The reporting controversy grows out of an already divided San Esteban. Irene supports the biomass plant through the municipal government, presenting it as clean, inexpensive energy that could create employment and make use of otherwise unwanted wood. The larger proposed facility would generate electricity for 50,000 people. Its plans also require the coordination of private forests, use of public woodland, and short-rotation plantations harvested every three years. For Irene, the project represents progress and the prospect of energy independence; opponents fear that it will consume the forests on which the region depends.

The physical scale of the development makes that disagreement difficult to keep abstract. When Bea visits the Andrada Family Sawmill with Débora, she sees the existing biomass factory towering beside the sawmill and an even larger plant under construction. Logs and heaps of wood chips fill the surrounding yard, where an enormous shredder processes timber. Bea, who loves wood and takes pleasure in recognizing different kinds, experiences the sawmill as an attraction; Débora sees the factory as a threat to the forests. Their opposed reactions reflect the argument that later appears in print: whether the project gives discarded woodland material a new use or encourages the depletion of the woods.

Pacheco’s allegations and Bea’s response

After Román threatens to act against his former wife, Irene, Pacheco approaches Bea outside Ingrid’s studio and points to a report in El Diario Montañés. It alleges that Irene threatened two landowners with expropriation if they would not agree to sell their trees to the biomass factory. Pacheco says Román, Irene’s former husband, is supplying him with information. He then warns Bea that another article will be more explosive and that she will be one of its central figures.

The promised story concerns the family’s attempt to stop work at the chestnut grove, where a treehouse stood. Pacheco says that the family was detained after trying to prevent the factory’s workers from destroying the structure, and presents the use of the Spanish National Guard as evidence of the project’s callousness. He further suggests Irene tried to suppress the episode to protect her interests. Bea objects that he is distorting what happened, but Pacheco insists that the story is unstoppable and rejects the idea that Irene could buy his silence.

The published report brings the conflict into Bea’s family home. Irene gathers the family, including a Spanish National Guard officer, after Pacheco’s first article appears. The published piece discusses the alleged expropriation threat; the more damaging account of the chestnut-grove confrontation, complete with photographs and purported sources in the Spanish National Guard, is still anticipated. Irene angrily asks how the information escaped. Jacobo had told her the officers involved would not speak, while León’s opposition to Jacobo’s presence and their refusal to speak to each other make clear that the family is also dealing with an unresolved personal conflict. The political crisis and the family tension occupy the same room, though no one has time to investigate the latter.

The attempt to correct the record

Bea and Débora go to Bar Caribe to speak with Pacheco directly. Their discussion is long and detailed, and they bring the timber purchase contracts to show that the trees involved were no longer theirs. Débora remains opposed to the proposed electrical plant, but she objects to using a story that is not fully true to advance that cause. Bea makes the same distinction: opposing the project is a legitimate position, but knowingly publishing a false account would reproduce the very kind of underhanded conduct Pacheco attributes to Irene.

Bea urges Pacheco to investigate the matter fully and publish only what the facts support. She warns that the treehouse might make a potent symbol against corporate power, but a symbol built on a false account would not hold. Pacheco says he will consider their case. Bea and Débora leave without knowing his decision, and Bea opens the newspaper anxiously over the following days. The threatened article about the treehouse does not appear. Pacheco nevertheless continues publishing criticism of Irene’s project, alleging falsified environmental reports, purchased support, and pressure on agricultural engineers to approve the plant. His articles argue that the project chiefly benefits the Andrada family and Irene’s political career, and suggest she hopes to use it as a route to national office.

The writing is persuasive enough that Bea begins to doubt the project herself. Irene tells her the coverage is biased and manipulated, in part by information from Román. Bea comes to believe her sister, but the articles continue to affect the village: its divisions become sharper, and a large demonstration is expected. Débora still makes a protest banner opposing the plant, showing that the sisters’ successful intervention against a misleading story does not reconcile their positions on the project. Bea’s insistence on accuracy is not the same as support for Irene’s policy.

The televised interview and a new revelation

The controversy takes another turn when a television presenter, having first approached Irene through flattery, attacks her on camera. In an interview for a program titled La verdad de la energía verde, the presenter questions whether biomass power is clean when forest material must be transported by trucks burning fossil fuels, what remains after combustion, how much carbon dioxide the process emits, and how many thousands of hectares of woodland a plant of this scale needs. She also cites other plants that closed, the heavy subsidies required to keep some operating, and employment figures that fell far short of promises. Irene has answers, but the presenter overwhelms them with data and questions that shift the discussion from the technology to the political bargains behind the project.

The decisive disclosure is not simply an environmental objection. The presenter says the chosen offer was four percent below the initial one and that the reduction affected pollution controls: a cheaper boiler and filters would increase contaminant emissions by twenty percent. Irene calls the claim false, but the presenter shows her a copy of the revised agreement on an iPad. Irene had not known that those parameters had been changed. The revelation exposes a gap between the project Irene has defended and the terms actually recorded in the agreement, while the presenter frames the plant as pursuing profit at the expense of local residents’ health. Irene loses her composure and is left struggling to respond.

Public consequences and narrative significance

As the controversy moves toward a mass demonstration, its competing accounts converge in public. Bea, already followed by press and television cameras because of her private life, sees the presenter reporting from the demonstration. She links the present crisis to the chain of events that began with her relationship with Víctor, and imagines the consequences for Irene’s mayoralty and Diego’s fortune. Rather than disappear into a bar or doorway, Bea decides to call out Rebeca Ramos. The episode ends on that act of recognition and confrontation, not on a resolution of the project’s future.

The reporting dispute distinguishes between allegations that Bea and Débora can rebut with contracts and a later change to pollution specifications supported by a document shown on camera. It also shows how political alliances and private sources shape the framing of public events: Pacheco’s reporting is connected to Román’s campaign against Irene, while the television interview’s challenge focuses on the plant’s emissions and the political means used to advance it. In San Esteban, the promised benefits of employment and electricity and the possible costs to woodland and residents’ health remain entangled. The controversy’s force comes from that unresolved conflict—and from the fact that a misleading story and a damaging documented revelation can coexist in the same public debate.