Ricardo Arques Álvarez (Santoña, Cantabria), the journalist who discovered the GAL (Anti-terrorist Liberation Groups) case, the terrorist organization that in the eighties murdered 27 ETA members in the south of France in the shadow of the State, has left silence at 64 years old. Without making noise, faithful to his style, without organizing the final farewell to him that only he and a few family members knew he could achieve. His only instruction has been to hand over some telephone numbers to friends and colleagues to communicate his latest trip. A journey into the unknown from the room at the Marqués de Valdecilla University Hospital in Santander where he had been admitted for several days due to a recent illness that only his family knew about.
Ricardo has left with all the secrets he treasured during his most brilliant and risky professional stage. That of a young and lonely newspaper reporter Deia that in the leaden years, when ETA murdered a hundred people a year, he had to travel from Bilbao to Madrid to find the support of a national newspaper like Diary 16 where to publish his investigations into a shadowy terrorist group made up of police commanders who liquidated ETA members on the other side of the border. Police officers that he crossed paths with on the streets of Bilbao, guys who during the Felipe González governments paid large amounts of money from the funds reserved by the Ministry of the Interior for each victim. Some payments that the mercenaries received in the moonlight in the arcades of the Kursaal casino in San Sebastián (Guipúzcoa).
The shy and reserved journalist who took refuge in his silences and fled from the noise did not reveal the identity of “Deep Throat”, the source who provided him in August 1987 with the location at the height of Biriatou (France), a stone’s throw from Irún, from the cell where the passports of the gunmen that the police stationed in Bilbao, José Amedo and Michel Domínguez, hired to attack the ETA terrorists were hidden. In his house in Santoña, in front of Berria beach, Ricardo kept a file that he did not like to display and the two bullets with which they threatened him when he began to publish the first information. A treasure of information that those of us who worked as a couple with him for years did not know. The journalistic investigation into the GAL caused a serious political crisis in the socialist government and a sentence of 117 years in prison for Amedo and Domínguez.
In 1997, after his time in the Research teams of Diary 16 and The world, Arques directed the newspaper The Day of Valladolid, a project that belonged to Grupo PRISA (publisher of EL PAÍS), and subsequently began a long professional adventure in America that fulfilled his curiosity and interest in a continent that fascinated him and where he spent the best years of his life. First stop of three years piloting the Express From Guayaquil in Ecuador. Second, a long journey in the PRISA Group media. For five years, he directed its subsidiaries in Bolivia (three newspapers —Reason, The New Day and Extra- and the ATB television network). Before arriving in Mexico, he was director of Radio Continental in Argentina for two years. Later, he served as director of the radio station chain W Radio in Mexico.
Ricardo retired from the profession a few years ago. In silence, without any display or farewell. He did not miss his years of research on the GAL and confessed his disenchantment with journalism. He took refuge in Santoña, his town, where this lone wolf, loyal, generous and good, went out every day to play sports with his bike and his canoe. At dusk, a can of anchovies on the bar Berto House and retreat home. He needed to see the sea every morning and, above all, fulfill an outstanding debt that he had contracted with Pituca, her mother, during her long American period: to return one day and live with her. Debt that she fulfilled until the last day.
The investigative reporter left peacefully this Thursday, accompanied by his wife, Khatia Brañez Ugartetxe, his mother and his sister María Jesús. He leaves behind a legion of friends and admirers of his kindness, elegance and sobriety. Have a good trip, Willowy.
#Ricardo #Arques #lone #wolf #discovered #GAL #case #dies