El País

On October 16th, 2025, two men were pulled from a sinking semi-submersible vessel.

Andrés Fernando Tufiño Chila of Ecuador had previously been convicted of cocaine distribution, but his sister told El País that he'd been working as a fisherman before the US struck the vessel he was on.

Jonathan Obando, the second survivor who's from Colombia, had no criminal history and no cartel links, according to El País.

Even though Trump promised to prosecute them, they were eventually let go without being formally charged by either the US or their home countries.

Obviously, this begs the question, if these people are really, quote-unquote, "narco-terrorists," why have they been able to go free? As El País notes, Trump's strategy is paradoxical.

The Trump admin has enough justification to kill them extrajudicially, but not to charge these men in a court of law? Question mark? All possible evidence that could link these men to alleged drug trafficking, if there ever was any in the first place, goes up in literal smoke the moment that these boats are hit, El País noted.

It's likely that a court case would expose much of the legal scaffolding that upholds the thin legal justification that the Trump administration is using for these strikes, as well as put on display that many of these people might really just be fishermen forced into participating in the drug trade as a lookout or a guide or something like that because they had no other opportunities.

A note on survivors.

Okay, we'll take the church bells.

If we were looking at the front pages, maybe heading south, if we're looking at La Vanguardia, looking at the ABC, if we're looking at the El Pais, what's dominating headlines or maybe at least sort of peeking out from the pages, maybe a curiosity on the Iberian Peninsula this morning?

Well, the big breaking story actually is the protests that have gripped the capital for the last, I guess, the last two weeks.

But there have been different protests.

Families tried to block openings with makeshift solutions using boards or bricks, but it was never enough.

It's hard to dig up more information on what really happened here from English news sources, but Spanish-language newspaper El País does answer some questions.

The girl's mother, Kimberly Caminiti, was able to move into the tower in 2007 after circumventing El Nino's gatekeeping of who could live in the building.

One of her exes was part of the Invisores and had invited her into his 13th floor apartment.

But, uh, but I knew that if I was hired by this company, that I was gonna be working for the best of the best, the cream of the crop, you know, a groundbreaking organization.

So then I continued to walk up the stairs a little more and, well, there, there's another sign there and it says, uh, I think it was from El Mundo, El País, ABC, I don't, I don't know.

And there was another, um, newspaper clipping, and this one said, uh, "La radio en inglés veinticuatro horas.

Emprendedor Richard Vaughan" And I'm like, "Who is this guy? I need to meet him" [laughs] You know, right there, it really sparked my curiosity because before that, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but before that, I had only seen traditional English academies or traditional anything academies, right? It was, okay, you go there, you take classes, you go home, right? But here, I noticed that there was a whole system.

Más bien estas elecciones legislativas, y pongo las comillas de elecciones, es más un síntoma de los cambios que se estaban produciendo dentro de Rusia y dónde, hacia dónde está evolucionando la guerra, cómo Putin está militarizando ese parlamento ruso.

De hecho, había un dato, leía en un artículo de El País que decía que cuarenta y nueve veteranos de Ucrania van a entrar en la Cámara Baja.

Es más como se está inclinando-

Es un 10 % de la Cámara Baja, ¿no? Ya son veteranos de Ucrania, es mucha gente militar.

It's 47th on the BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest British novels.

It's 29th on El Pais' 2008 list of favorite books of 100 Spanish authors.

Number 20 on the Telegraph's 2009 list of 100 novels everyone should read.

19th on the Guardian's 2026 list of the 100 best novels of all time in English.