Bea and Débora Urge Pacheco Not to Publish a False Report on the Tree-Land Conflict

Bea and Débora Urge Pacheco Not to Publish a False Report on the Tree-Land Conflict is a confrontation over who gets to define a contested protest: the people who took part in it, or a journalist ready to turn it into a weapon against the San Esteban Biomass Plant. Bea and Débora do not ask Pacheco to support the project or abandon his opposition. They challenge him to report the treehouse conflict accurately, even when a distorted version could serve their own political cause.

Background and Stakes

Pacheco tells Bea that his next article will be explosive and that she will be one of its central figures. He claims to know what happened with the chestnut trees, the family’s treehouse, and the arrests by Spain’s Civil Guard. His proposed account presents Bea’s family as having been detained for trying to prevent the plant’s workers from destroying their home. He frames the incident as an outrageous attack and compares it to an eviction, giving a complicated dispute the clarity and force of a story about a family losing its home.

Bea immediately contests that framing. She says the incident was not as Pacheco describes it and asks him not to exaggerate. The crucial fact, which the threatened report elides, is that the trees no longer belonged to the family. Pacheco says he has sources inside Spain’s Civil Guard and photographs of Bea’s siblings being arrested. He invites Bea to give her version, but his possession of images and inside information makes clear that the story is already taking shape without her account.

The threat lands amid pressure on several fronts. Bea worries that events will again rebound on her after she has already complicated matters. She is working for Diego, whose business could be devastated if Emerge withdrew from the project. A damaging story about the confrontation might therefore do more than embarrass her: it could further endanger Diego’s position. Bea wants to leave his life without causing additional harm, and the possibility that the proposed article might contribute to his financial ruin sharpens her urgency.

The Visit to Bar Caribe

Rather than let Jacobo approach his colleague and risk making the attempt look like an effort to silence him, Bea proposes that she and Débora handle the matter themselves. Débora joins her, despite being among those who oppose the plant. Their choice matters: they do not conceal her political position or ask her to perform agreement with Irene. They go to Bar Caribe and lay out the events in a lengthy, detailed conversation, bringing the sale contracts for the trees as documentary evidence that the family no longer owned them.

The contracts give the discussion a concrete basis. Bea and Débora are not asking Pacheco to take their word for the family’s innocence; they show him the documents that contradict the most damaging premise of the proposed account. Their case does not require denying that Bea’s siblings were arrested or that the family tried to intervene. Instead, it distinguishes those facts from the claim that the plant’s workers were destroying a home that still stood on the family’s land.

Débora’s participation is especially significant because her opposition to the plant remains intact. She tells Pacheco, in substance, that she will continue helping the campaign against the project, but not through lies or by exploiting an account that is not wholly true. The sisters’ shared intervention thus crosses the political division within the family: disagreement with the plant does not make every accusation against its supporters acceptable.

Accuracy Against Political Advantage

Bea presses Pacheco on the inconsistency between his criticism of Irene’s allegedly underhanded methods and his own willingness to publish a story he now knows is false. She does not tell him to stop reporting on the project. Instead, she urges him to investigate properly: he can publish what he chooses, but should first speak to the people involved and establish facts strong enough to serve his cause. The distinction is between opposing the plant and manufacturing evidence for that opposition.

Pacheco acknowledges the appeal the treehouse story has for his campaign. He had imagined it as a symbol of resistance to predatory capitalism and as the spark his side needed. Bea counters that a false story cannot serve as a reliable spark. The exchange exposes the political usefulness of a dramatic image: arrests, a threatened home, and a small treehouse could condense a broad dispute into a compelling emblem. Yet the image becomes vulnerable precisely because its factual basis does not hold. The sisters’ answer is not to dismiss political advocacy, but to insist that its claims withstand scrutiny.

Aftermath and Significance

The meeting ends without Bea knowing whether Pacheco will accept their argument. In the following days, she opens the newspaper anxiously, expecting to find the story. It does not appear. That apparent success is limited, however: Pacheco continues publishing attacks on Irene’s handling of the San Esteban Biomass Plant. His articles allege, among other things, that she threatened expropriation, falsified environmental reports, bought support, and persuaded agronomists to endorse the project. They argue that its benefits would accrue chiefly to the Andrada family and Irene’s political career, and suggest that Irene hopes to use it as a route to parliament.

The reporting is persuasive enough that Bea begins to doubt the project herself. Irene tells her that the articles are biased and manipulated, in part through information supplied by Román. Bea manages to believe Irene, but belief does not undo the effect of the coverage: the town grows more divided, and an approaching demonstration promises to be massive. The unprinted treehouse story therefore does not end the press conflict; it marks a boundary Bea and Débora establish around one false account while the larger campaign against Irene continues.

The episode also complicates the family’s political alignments. Débora can oppose the plant and still reject a misleading report; Bea can protect Diego from a story that might threaten Emerge’s involvement without endorsing Pacheco’s methods or treating the project as beyond criticism. Their intervention turns a private fear of exposure into a public demand for evidentiary care. In a dispute where trees, a treehouse, arrests, and political accusations have become symbols, the sale contracts insist on the material detail that rhetoric would otherwise obscure.