One autumn day in 1983, a tall, well-dressed man with an elegant car showed up in Matienzo, a small Cantabrian mountain town in the municipality of Ruesga. He wanted to rent a remote cabin and someone told him about Lolo ‘el de Roncillo’. They closed the agreement at 12,000 pesetas at the time (the equivalent of about 72 euros) for one month.
A few weeks later, one December night, the doorbell rang in a house in Hendaye. The door was opened by its owners, Segundo Marey, an office furniture salesman who was 51 years old at the time, and his wife, Marta. Three men sprayed them with tear spray, beat them, and dragged Marey to a car where they muffled his voice with a strip of tape and put a hood over his head.
The Peugeot 504 took off at full speed. It happened in a few seconds. It was eight in the afternoon and everything in the neighborhood was dark and silent. On the sidewalk – in addition to deep confusion – were left the glasses and slippers that that Basque-French citizen lost while struggling with his captors.
It was the most terrible trip of his life, plunged into an abyss of uncertainty and fear, guessing about what was happening. Never, not even in his most twisted assumptions, would he have guessed the truth. He was the protagonist of the GAL’s first action. Those who had knocked on his door were two French mercenaries hired by those who, in theory, were the ‘good guys’: the police officers José Amedo and Michel Domínguez, who had crossed to the dark side to wage dirty war against ETA with reserved funds from the State. Spanish.
It was a few minutes before ten at night when the vehicle arrived at the Navarrese border of Dantxarinea, but only the driver was inside. The other two kidnappers had gotten off earlier and walked across a nearby unguarded bridge, with Segundo Marey, who had to make the crossing in socks.
There, already in the Spanish zone, they waited for the time to close the border post. When the civil guards left, the kidnappers approached the barrier where two national police officers were on guard. With complete naturalness, the French showed a paper with a name, Pepe, and a telephone number written on it.
At one in the morning Amedo arrived. He covered Marey with a blanket and wrapped his own sweater around her feet. The phone at the border post rang. It was the civil governor of Bizkaia, Julián San Cristóbal, who called to confirm the identity of the kidnapped person. “He says his name is Segundo Marey,” Amedo confirmed.
Since half past nine at night at the Bilbao police station they already suspected that they had the wrong person. Now they were certain that they had just kidnapped an anonymous citizen, thinking that he was the ETA leader Mikel Lujua. The initial plan was to pressure the French authorities by executing him if they did not release three police officers linked to the GAL who had been detained by the gendarmes.
Then a chain of calls followed. The governor telephoned the chief of Police of Pamplona, who in turn called the Government delegate, Luis Roldán, who immediately contacted the general director of Security of the Ministry of the Interior, Rafael Vera, who informed Minister José Barrionuevo. They made the decision to go ahead with the kidnapping. Then the barrier opened and, in the darkness of the night, a car headed towards the Matienzo mountains along lonely roads. Halfway there, two police officers joined them.
Everyone was asleep when they arrived at the hideout. That early morning of December 5, the cold at the top of Fuente Las Varas penetrated the bones and made them shiver. But the road was too dark and they had to wait for dawn to be able to reach that cabin covered in weeds and with the half-sunken roof.
In reality it was a stable for cattle on which there was a small house with a room, a charcoal stove and a hayloft. No water, no electricity, no bathroom. They only had a bunk, which Marey shared with her kidnappers during the ten days that the confinement lasted. There was hardly any furniture, except for a closet that they made firewood to try to keep warm.
Second Marey spent his days sitting on a stone stool, first, with a hood on his head, and then with two pieces of cotton glued over his eyes with tape, which were only partially lifted to feed him, although he barely managed to eat anything.
He was scared to death, believing that they were going to kill him, he was very cold – he continued wearing the pants and shirt in which they took him from the house – although he kept the blanket that Amedo gave him in Navarra and he had wounds on his feet. They had, however, provided him with some sneakers and two pairs of socks.
In those days more strangers arrived in Matienzo. The neighbors did not give it much importance and thought that they were mountaineers. Nobody suspected that they were the then civil governor of Bizkaia, Julián San Cristóbal, who appeared accompanied by the senior chief of the National Police in Bilbao, Francisco Álvarez, and the head of the Information Brigade, Miguel Planchuelo.
The initial plan went ahead. The governor of Bizkaia and the senior officers of the National Police wrote several statements that they read to the media by telephone. “Listen, I’m telling you about Segundo Marey’s kidnapping. He is kidnapped for his relations with ETA Militar, hiding terrorists and for participating in the collection of the revolutionary tax. Like this, all those involved will disappear,” was the first of them. Later it was reported that if the four Spanish agents were not released within 48 hours, Marey would be executed.
Two days later, those agents were released and Minister Barrionuevo agreed to release Marey. To do this, they contacted police officer Michel Domínguez, who arrived at Matienzo’s cabin early in the afternoon of December 13. He had been instructed to communicate in French with Marey and try to calm him down.
Amedo and the other police officers who were guarding the kidnapped man decided to wait until it got dark and around midnight they descended from the house to the road where they got into the two cars that were waiting for them. Marey could barely walk, his physical condition was very delicate, and he was covered with the only blanket he had, in which they made a hole to put it on like a poncho.
That cold winter night they left Matienzo without being seen by anyone and returned to take the same route that led them there. They headed to the Navarrese border of Dantxarinea. It had been ordered that there would be no police at the place where they were going to cross into France, walking across one of the many bridges near the border post. They crossed, dragging Marey, unable to walk on his own. They left him one kilometer from the border with a shirt, pants, socks and sneakers despite the low December temperatures.
The French Police found him there, alerted by a warning call, at two in the morning on December 14, 1983. In his pants pocket, Segundo Marey carried a note signed by the GAL. It was the first time that those acronyms were used to communicate that the ‘Anti-terrorist Liberation Groups’ would respond to terrorist murders, that they intended to put an end to ETA and that they would attack French interests because their Government “allowed impunity” to ETA members.
First steps of the GAL
Matienzo’s neighbors didn’t know anything until much later, when a journalist came to town and started asking questions. Then, Lolo ‘el de Roncillo’ knew that he had shaken José Amedo’s hand the day he rented the cabin to a stranger. The police officer knew the area because clandestine GAL meetings had been held in another nearby town, Colindres. Rafael Vera himself, general director of Security of the Government of Felipe González, had been present at some of these meetings.
The trial for what was called the ‘Marey case’ in 1998 convicted the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior at that time (Barrionuevo, Vera and Sancristóbal) and a dozen police officials for the “organization and financing of the kidnapping” of the Basque-French citizen. .
Marey never revealed details of his statement before Judge Baltasar Garzón, instructor of the process, but he did comment on the case in a short interview with Servimedia: “It is true that I do not want to die without knowing where I was kidnapped. I have to go back. Not for now because it’s winter and it’s cold and everything goes together. I guess it will be in summer with sun, blue sky, good day. “I want to see, I want to see, I want to see,” he expressed then.
In September 1999, when 16 years had passed since his release, he gathered the strength to return to the scene of the kidnapping. This time with his eyes open. It barely took him two hours to arrive from Hendaye to Matienzo with his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law. He left the car on the road and walked up to the top of Fuente las Varas. There, in the cabin, he remembered the cold and regretted having lost his sense of smell and palate, some of the consequences that confinement left him. He picked up some stones at the door that he took as a souvenir. He ate at the town restaurant and returned home.
Segundo Marey died in the summer of 2001 at the age of 69. He never shook off the cold or the fear that he experienced on the Matienzo mountain. He was never the same person again. Someone wrote that he was killed in 1983 and died in 2001. The cabin where everything happened is still standing and has been named after the first victim of the GAL.
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