He was 19 years old and on January 23, 1977, a member of the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey murdered him with two shots while he was participating in a demonstration for amnesty in Madrid. Arturo Ruiz is one of the almost 300 people who lost their lives during the Transition at the hands of far-rightists and the State Security Forces. It is known who killed him, José Ignacio Fernández Guaza. He could never be tried for having fled Spain and living for more than four decades under a false identity.
Fernández Guaza today lives in Argentina, from where he boasts of his exploits as a gunfighter. Now, Arturo’s brother, Miguel Ángel Ruiz, has requested the declassification of all information related to the judicial investigation that involved the murder. “We just want to know the truth,” he repeats like a mantra.
Arturo Ruiz García was born in Granada in 1957. When Guaza killed him, he was studying and working as a bricklayer. That cold January morning would only be the beginning of a tragic week. The next day would be the death of Mari Luz Nájera after the impact of a smoke canister launched by the Police to disperse a demonstration, precisely, asking for justice for Arturo. On the same night of January 24, the massacre of the Lawyers of Atocha took place.
“We want to know who paid this man to dedicate himself to shooting left-wing militants; who helped him escape, because we know it was thanks to the Civil Guard; who has protected him for so many years; where did those weapons purchased by the Spanish State come from? and above all we want to know what happened and why the State refuses to reopen the case,” explains Miguel Ángel, Arturo’s brother.
He will be the one to present a document to the Secretary of State for Security, in the Ministry of the Interior, to request the declassification of all the documentation in his possession regarding Arturo’s murder. “We ask for it in the exercise of the right to the truth that the Democratic Memory Law recognizes for the victims of Francoism and the transition,” he adds.
That is one of the main judicial obstacles they face, because beyond the fact that the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court have already rejected the reopening of the case, which they plan to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the crimes have prescribed and They are not considered crimes against humanity.
However, Miguel Ángel, who has taken over from his other brother Manuel Ruiz in the fight for Arturo’s memory, maintains the opposite: “We know that Guaza was linked to the State and had a strong relationship with the Security Forces and Corps. . These gunmen went where the agents could not go so easily, which was to murder kids. “This collusion with the State could amount to a crime against humanity.”
Guaza flees, the State forgets
That day Guaza was not alone. Next to him was Jorge Cesarsky, owner of the fired gun, linked to the General Directorate of Security and the philo-fascist group Fuerza Nueva. The judicial process carried out at the end of the 70s ended with a conviction against him for the crime of terrorism and illicit possession of weapons. He was 50 years old at the time and should have spent six years in prison, although he barely served a year in prison as he was a beneficiary of the Amnesty Law, the same one that Arturo Ruiz was demanding on the streets.
Guaza was 29 years old when he killed Arturo and, in this case, he was a member of the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey organization and his connection was with the Civil Guard, for whom he worked in information services, as he himself declared.
The steps that Guaza followed in his escape, it has been proven, they landed first in Euskadi. From there he called his partner to send money to a friend of his, a civil guard. He fled first to France, where traces of him were lost. “The collusion was such that during the trial this man’s ID did not even appear,” Miguel Ángel denounces. Also noteworthy is the discovery of a briefcase with 400 9-millimeter cartridges in Guaza’s house.
The relationship between the gunman and the State apparatus became even more evident when Guaza’s sister declared that “they performed functions that the Police could not do.” Furthermore, his partner also declared before the judge, in 1977, that Guaza worked for the State Security Forces and Corps.
The murderer does not repent
For Michelangelo, the bloodiest thing in history was yet to come. In November of last year, the newspaper The Country He found the location of the murderer, in Buenos Aires. Description , as reported in the chronicle.
He admitted being the murderer of Arturo Ruiz without a hint of regret. “That is why now we want the Spanish State to declassify the documentation, in order to know the truth,” Miguel Ángel reiterates again and again. In this sense, they also demand that the Spanish justice system collaborate with María Servini, the Argentine judge who investigates the crimes of the Franco regime and the Transition and who has requested various information from the Spanish State on two occasions. “The response has been zero from Spain,” denounces Arturo’s brother.
From his point of view, and now Miguel Ángel speaks as a member of the Collective of Forgetfulness of the Transition (COT), “there is no interest in the political establishment to address this issue.” He also remembers how José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Felipe González signed the letter of support to former Francoist minister Rodolfo Martín Villa, Minister of the Interior and head of the forces of public order in January 1977, when he testified before Judge Servini.
A model Transition with almost 300 murders
Arturo’s brother claims his right to know the truth, as established by the Democratic Memory Law. “I want this case to serve to open the door to all the others, even though we still don’t know many of them,” he emphasizes. The COT spokesperson, Javier Almazán, estimates that 280 people were murdered from 1973 to 1983 at the hands of far-rightists and police forces. “The problem is that there is no official record, so we take care of documenting them as we can,” he introduces.
Almazán came to the COT because he was the brother of Ángel, who lost his life at the age of 18 after five days trying to recover from the brutal beating that several police officers gave him when he was demonstrating for abstention in the referendum on the Law for Political Reform. “We want the story of the exemplary Transition sealed in the embrace between Suárez and Carrillo to change. Here we were risking rupture or reform, and many people died in the streets demanding freedom,” he comments.
The spokesperson for the group denounces that the murder of Arturo Ruiz is not included within the rights granted to the victims and their families by the Democratic Memory Law: “They say that the case is statute-barred, even that the crime had no political connotation. That is denying that water is wet. “Evidently, Guaza not only acted that day, and he did so with the help of the State.” Miguel Ángel, Arturo’s brother, says: “There are many people here who want us to forget, but we are never going to do it. I won’t do it while I’m alive. “We just want to know the truth, even if it is very uncomfortable for some, but it is our right.”
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