Pacheco

Pacheco is a journalist whose reporting becomes an instrument in two overlapping conflicts: his personal feud with Bea and the political battle over Irene’s biomass project. He turns local disputes into public narratives, drawing on sources with their own grievances and helping carry village controversies beyond the people directly involved.

Identity and Approach

Pacheco enters the story as a reporter who seeks Bea’s account of an encounter with the Guardia Civil. When he approaches her outside Ingrid’s studio, he wears the same slogan T-shirt she has seen him in before. His manner is direct: he asks for her version, then immediately challenges her denial by revealing that he has published an article about the incident.

His reporting is not presented as detached from personal conflict. Bea understands that Pacheco has it in for her, and later identifies him as the source behind a larger scandalous account of her family. His role therefore combines the public authority of a journalist with an evident appetite for stories that can damage people he opposes.

The Article About Irene

Pacheco’s article also targets Irene’s position as mayor. It alleges that she threatened two landowners with expropriation unless they agreed to sell their trees to the biomass plant. He shows the article to Bea and presents it as a challenge Irene will have difficulty surviving. He also tells Bea that Irene’s ex-husband, Román, is supplying him with information, making the report part of a personal and political campaign rather than an isolated news item.

The allegations strike at the contested meaning of the project. Its supporters describe the plant as a source of clean energy, employment, and a market for otherwise unusable forest wood; its critics see environmental damage and political compromise. Pacheco’s article shifts attention from those competing claims to the alleged pressure used to secure timber for the plant. The dispute is no longer only about whether biomass is beneficial, but about how the project was advanced and who may have been coerced along the way.

A Grudge Becomes a Public Scandal

Later, when Bea’s family discovers that its private affairs have appeared in a national newspaper, she identifies Pacheco as the person who had been seeking a platform for information against them. The revelation confirms that the earlier encounter was not simply a routine request for comment: Pacheco had been building a public account from material that could expose and embarrass the family.

The reporting also feeds into a broader media assault on Irene. During a televised interview, a presenter presses Irene with questions about biomass combustion, transport emissions, waste, forest requirements, subsidies, and the gap between promised and actual jobs. The interview then turns to political dealings around the plant. Pacheco is not identified as the interviewer, but his earlier article and Román’s disclosures belong to the same widening contest over how the project and Irene’s conduct are represented to the public.

Narrative Role

Pacheco’s importance lies in the way information changes hands and changes meaning. Román supplies material against his ex-wife; Pacheco selects and publishes allegations; Bea and her family then face the consequences of stories made public without their control. In the biomass dispute, the project’s advocates and opponents compete to define what counts as progress, environmental harm, or political misconduct. Pacheco’s articles give those conflicts a sharper public edge, while his apparent personal hostility makes the boundary between reporting and retaliation uncertain.