Daniel Campos: "We need to regulate what crimes can be prosecuted with police infiltrators."

MadridDaniel Campos (Madrid, 43 years old), journalist and between 2020 and 2023 director of communications at the Ministry of the Interior, reveals in Lavapiés Guerrilla (Peninsula, 2025) The infiltration of a national police officer (recently recruited) into the anti-globalization movement in Madrid, with its epicenter in the central neighborhood of Lavapiés. It's the early 2000s, and the leadership and dialectical skills of a young man with a ponytail: Pablo Iglesias, stand out.

Why does Alfonso/David [the undercover police officer] decide to tell his story?

— I wanted to somehow vindicate work that may have gone unnoticed. It's also a kind of therapy for police officers who have had such intense experiences.

Does it hurt the police to show it?

— The story takes you to moments and decisions in which I think the successes and failures of certain people become clear. Alfonso/David's actions, without romanticizing them, are incredibly courageous in a difficult world, and it's also evident that his superiors and those within the Ministry of the Interior took advantage of him.

Is it common for a minister or secretary of state to know an insider?

— Very concrete facts are coming to the top of the Interior Ministry. But in that case, it was a movement [anti-globalization] that was of great concern.

How many infiltrators can there be right now?

— I don't have the figure, but I know that Informació has many tools to anticipate violent acts that could put citizens at risk. The infiltrator is a rare elderly Because it involves higher training and development costs and poses a risk to their safety. The more common method is informant, which basically involves recruiting someone already within the organization under investigation, who is obviously not a police officer.

How should the figure of the infiltrator be regulated?

— It would be good to determine which crimes can be prosecuted under this law. I believe there is a social consensus that this work may be more legitimate against terrorist organizations than against other groups where the latent danger is not as obvious. It would also be necessary to regulate the limits on information and the rights of third parties, and to provide legal certainty for the agent himself.

Why are there no infiltrators in corrupt companies or administrations?

— The cases that have recently come to light, all within a certain ideological spectrum, create a certain bias in our minds because not all of them are known, right? I'd say the police have prior information from far-right groups. There's also a book by an infiltrator in the Ultras Sur [Real Madrid ultras]. Furthermore, we've learned of informants in the fields of economic and political corruption through the courts.

Does Alfonso/David experience it as a betrayal, years later, to meet Iglesias as vice president of the Spanish government?

— More than anger, wherever it may have reached, it's seeing him at events with the National Police and remembering all the things he had said about the force, everything he had plotted to combat it. It's more of a union and corporate rejection.

Does the National Police interpret the fact that they have finally complied with the system as a failure or a success?

— The National Police wanted to control a movement, and whether one of those people arrived 25 years later is irrelevant. But it's curious to think that it can be a success for someone identified in an anti-establishment environment to become vice president of the system. In fact, many of the demands of the anti-globalization movement have been formalized and are part of the 2030 Agenda.

The book confirms how infiltrators sometimes initiate riots against the police.

— I can refer to the case in the book. David's training is very superficial. He's largely self-taught and opens doors intuitively: at a certain point, it's true that to gain the group's trust, knowing there's going to be a fight, he goes first. But it's not a method he learned at the academy.

Conversations with commanders are reproduced, and criticism of the protest movements is heard. Does ideology influence the way people act?

— It's a prejudice to think that the police have one bias or another. At that time, the officers had a recent past that some perhaps hadn't fully overcome. But the National Police has evolved a great deal, and it's necessary to break with certain prejudices.