Irene and Diego’s Working Relationship

Irene and Diego’s Working Relationship is a political and business alliance built around an ambitious biomass-energy project in San Esteban. Irene lends the project the authority of her mayoral office, while Diego works to expand the Andrada family’s timber business and secure outside investment. Their shared goal is repeatedly framed as a promise of clean energy, employment, and local progress, but the alliance becomes vulnerable when a change to the plant agreement raises environmental concerns and leaves Irene exposed to public blame.

Origins and Shared Ambition

When Bea returns to the village, Irene describes the town’s defining dispute as biomass. A pellet factory has been installed beside the Andrada sawmill, and a much larger plant is being built nearby to generate electricity. Irene supports both the operation and its expansion through the municipal government. She explains that the larger project depends on combining privately owned woodland, using public forests, and establishing short-rotation plantations harvested every three years. In her account, this would create a major new industry rather than leave the region dependent on traditional sectors such as anchovy fishing and tourism.

Irene argues that the proposed plant could provide electricity for 50,000 people and help replace fossil fuels with a local energy source. She maintains that trees and energy production can coexist, and that using forest residues can give neglected woodland a new purpose. The scale is visible when Bea later visits the sawmill with Débora: the existing pellet factory is dwarfed by the enormous plant under construction, while logs and heaps of timber fill the surrounding yard. Débora sees the factory as a threat to the forests; Bea initially adopts Irene’s explanation that the operation uses residue and can help clear woodland. The dispute therefore reaches beyond the two collaborators: the same material landscape supports competing claims about useful resources, forest loss, and who should decide how the woods are managed.

Irene identifies Diego as a capable member of the Andrada family and says they are working side by side to make the electricity plant a reality. The project needs investors from outside the region, and Diego is trying to secure them. Irene’s support is emphatic, but she insists that it is based on the project rather than personal friendship or sympathy for him. That distinction underscores the alliance’s public character: she treats the plant as a development objective for the village, while Diego is responsible for advancing the business behind it.

Disputed Costs and Public Scrutiny

The alliance operates amid opposition over the use of the forests. During the dispute at the family’s chestnut grove, a man consulting a forest map says the sawmill owns the timber across the surrounding hectares and that it will be divided between the biomass factory and lumber production. He says the timber was purchased from its owners, with the right to extract it included in the purchase. To Bea’s family, however, the logging is taking place on their property without their permission. The confrontation makes the project’s abstract language of forest management concrete: ownership, timber sales, and extraction rights become immediate grounds for conflict.

The political pressure on Irene intensifies when a newspaper article, shown to Bea by Pacheco, alleges that Irene threatened two landowners with expropriation if they would not agree to sell their trees to the factory. Pacheco says that Irene’s former husband is supplying him with information. The account is presented as an allegation in the article, not as a finding established in the scene, but it gives the opposition material with which to challenge Irene’s conduct and the legitimacy of the project.

A television interview sharpens the conflict by putting the plant’s environmental and economic claims under sustained examination. The presenter questions the emissions from burning biomass, the fossil-fuel use required to transport forest material by truck, the disposal of combustion waste, the plant’s carbon dioxide output, and the amount of woodland needed to supply it. She also challenges the projected employment and financial viability by citing other plants and the scale of public subsidies they require. Irene has answers, but the presenter’s accumulation of figures leaves her struggling to defend the project convincingly. The public debate shifts from whether biomass is green in principle to what this particular plant will emit, consume, and deliver.

The Agreement and the Breach of Trust

The most damaging revelation concerns a revised agreement with Emerge. On air, the presenter says the selected offer was four percent below the initial proposal and links that saving to cheaper boiler and filter equipment. According to the document she displays on her iPad, the altered specifications would increase pollutant emissions by 20 percent. Irene calls the claim false, then finds herself confronted with a copy of the agreement whose contents she did not know. The presenter accuses the plant of putting profit ahead of the health of its neighbors and Irene’s government of promoting the project as its political banner.

Later, Bea challenges Irene over Diego’s role in the change. Irene clarifies that Diego had sent her the agreement, including the proposed reduction, but she had not found time to review it. He could have explained the change to her in person instead of sending it discreetly; he had said he would do so, but the interview intervened before that conversation happened. Irene therefore rejects the idea that Diego wholly concealed the agreement from her, while acknowledging that his manner of handling it was inadequate. The distinction complicates the public account of betrayal: the document was on Irene’s desk, yet the amendment reached public attention before she had understood or discussed it.

Irene says she would still have supported the lower-cost arrangement if it were necessary to secure Emerge’s investment. She accepts that the emissions would be higher, but says they remained within European limits and that the boiler, safety measures, and controls could be upgraded later. She calls the change a lesser evil rather than an ideal solution. Bea points out that residents feel Diego deceived Irene and that Irene, in turn, deceived the public. Irene maintains that she did neither, describing Diego as realistic but mistaken in his methods and herself as unprepared for the interview. Her willingness to accept the compromise shows how strongly she prioritizes getting the plant financed; it also exposes the tension between the promise of future improvements and the immediate environmental concerns raised about the cheaper equipment.

Political Consequences and Lasting Significance

The interview and the surrounding anger help create the conditions for a no-confidence motion against Irene. She believes the opposition has the votes to remove her, but refuses to resign simply to avoid being voted out. She says she wants to face the motion rather than leave through the back door. When the vote takes place, five councillors from her own party side with the opposition, and Irene loses the mayoralty by a substantial majority. The political defeat is hers, but the controversy has also made the project’s costs and the collaborators’ communication failures inseparable in the public mind.

Irene later tells Bea that Diego’s action was not the betrayal Bea had assumed, since Irene had received the document and might have continued to support the revised terms. This does not erase his responsibility: he should have discussed the proposed change with her directly, and Irene acknowledges that she was caught unprepared. Diego, for his part, later says that another member of Bea’s family trusting him after the way he treated Irene reflects well on the family. He accepts that he acted badly, deserved to lose everything, and should never have dragged Irene into the consequences. His admission preserves the difference between shared purpose and shared responsibility: the project was theirs to advance, but the costs of his decision fell heavily on Irene’s political standing.

The relationship’s significance lies in that unresolved balance. Irene’s public defense of the plant depends on a partnership with a private business whose decisions she cannot fully control; Diego’s pursuit of investment depends on her political support and the credibility that comes with it. The alliance promises employment and energy independence, yet the forest dispute, the allegations about landowners, and the revised pollution controls make its environmental and political liabilities visible. Irene’s support is genuine and sustained, but when the project’s terms change without a timely explanation, collaboration turns into exposure: she must answer publicly for a decision she had not yet examined.