A string of deaths, some violent, others natural, looms darkly over San Mamede de Alborés. A few meters from each other, in that small nucleus of the A Coruña municipality of Mazaricos (3,760 inhabitants), lived two of the protagonists of this black chronicle: Antonio Tuñas Vieites, a 72-year-old neighbor who disappeared on December 15, 2022, and the most famous criminal in the region, José Manuel Martínez Quintáns, 50 and in prison, whom everyone knows by the alias Pandolo. The names of both, along with some others, travel through the troubled recent history of a village that lives in suspense, awaiting the outcome, while the brush cutter clears the undergrowth from some land in another part of the municipality and the Civil Guard searches the landscape in search for bones and evidence.
A month ago, a teacher who was walking through the mountains discovered a human skull. Genetic samples confirmed at the end of November that it was Antonio's head. A few days after these results were known, in another very nearby area of bush that was mowed with the idea of finding the rest of the neighbor's skeleton, five plastic bags were found: in four of them a dismembered body was distributed; the fifth contained a blue tracksuit.
Antonio's family did not recognize those clothes. “He wasn't wearing a tracksuit,” says her sister Francisca, at her house in Alborés, still moved by the event that remains under summary secrecy. “It's one thing to kill and another to dismember,” a local baker sums up the distress felt by the residents of Mazaricos. Pending the DNA results, the Civil Guard believes that the body in the bags may correspond to another missing person from the province, Javier Iglesias Otero. A 50-year-old resident of Orro (Culleredo), he had met Pandolo in prison and lost track of him on May 5, 2022. There was blood in several rooms of his chalet and evidence of having cleaned his footprints. A bullet casing was also found in the home. The missing person was pending some trials, and according to investigators, it turns out that, on the date he was missing, Pandolo was on the street. Just the same thing that had happened when Antonio left home without saying where and never returned: Pandolo was on prison leave.
Between the days at the end of November when Tuñas' family learned that the skull belonged to their loved one and the date on which the remains of another man appeared in bags, Celia Cernadas, Antonio's ex-wife, died of natural death. was sick, and Pandolo's mother. Neighbors say that María Encarnación Quintáns, 75 years old—a woman who raised four children, separated from Pandolo's father since he was a child—“went out of her way” for her wayward descendant and that he felt “veneration” for his mother. Just one day before dying of a heart attack, the woman had made statements to the cameras that went to her house when the second human remains appeared: her mother defended the innocence of her offspring.
![End of the village of Gosolfre (Chacín, Mazaricos) from which begins the dirt road that the perpetrators of the dismemberments supposedly followed to hide the bodies.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/IvFjBwUzc8yvUBcLbsMOe0MmDsM=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/XCJLGH3MSBDTPJD4WM4F4FWG44.jpg)
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But the Crimes Against Persons Team of the Civil Guard of A Coruña, which has been investigating the two disappearances since last year – and was handling information that led it in September to search for the bodies in an old landfill near the leafy area where they now appeared – , has Pandolo in its sights as its first suspect. Martínez Quintáns, that resident of Alborés who has spent half of his life behind bars, has a criminal record that is difficult to summarize.
Since July he has been locked up in the Teixeiro prison in A Coruña for shooting a family and severely injuring a man in the abdomen during the assault – in May 2023 – of a house in the Ordes town hall, supposedly chosen at random to steal a car. when he was passing by on his bicycle in the wee hours of the morning. On this last occasion, the criminal, considered “very dangerous” by the civil guards who are pursuing his actions, had taken advantage of another permit to disappear. But Pandolo, arrested repeatedly in possession of firearms, radios and balaclavas, has been in and out of penitentiary institutions for almost three decades. In March 2007 he escaped from prison, spread panic with assaults across half of Galicia and it took months to hunt him down. Between vehicle thefts and beatings in businesses and homes, whether free or in a gang, in 2003 alone he was arrested several dozen times, although the longest sentence to date, 20 years of which he served 16, fell to him at the age of 33 for attempting to shooting dead a couple of civil guards during a chase in Sarria (Lugo).
“One from here who met him there for a while came saying that, in the Teixeiro prison, Pandolo is the king,” says a neighbor from Alborés. “When he is free, we are not calm,” laments a woman who goes in to buy half a meat empanada at the bakery on the main road that runs in a straight line across the map, dotted with meadows and cow farms, of Mazaricos. The macabre discoveries that altered the natural order of things in this municipality (with more Friesians than humans in many of its villages) took place at the end that borders the town hall of Serra de Outes. It was in a green area in Gosolfre (Chacín, Mazaricos), crossed by dirt roads that descend almost suddenly about 200 meters to the level of the river and lead to a waterfall. It is a bucolic place, but little frequented, where three streams converge to form the San Paio River. When you ask the older ones, almost all of them say that despite their many years, they have never, even when they were young, gotten there. The client who buys the empanada even starts with a legend that her grandmother already told her and that she came to say that in the mists of time, dying people were thrown into the riverbed “so that the current would carry them away.” In the Maroñas bakery there is a silence of disbelief.
The Civil Guard continues to search between Chacín and Outes for Antonio's body in the area where his head appeared “with signs of traumatic brain injury,” according to one of his cousins. The animals of that riverside forest and the action of the water itself, very strong this fall, were able to spread and drag away the bones of the missing neighbor. The victim lived in Alborés with the family of his son, Juan Tuñas, a bricklayer by trade, about seven kilometers from the place where the skull was found. A year before he disappeared, he had been seriously injured in the arm (with which he protected his face) due to a land boundary conflict: it was Pandolo's mother who stabbed him with a sickle.
According to Francisca Tuñas, the neighborhood clash took place when her brother was cutting some branches on the border between a farm owned by María Encarnación Quintáns and a smallholding recently acquired by him. “I tried to convince him not to buy that land, which was of no use to him because it had two sources in the middle, but he became infatuated,” laments the sister with a broken voice, “and now I wonder if what he did was wrong.” buy your own death.” That day of the attack, Antonio ended up in the Santiago hospital and, after the complaint and the trial, “Pandolo's mother was sentenced to pay 3,000 euros in compensation,” Francisca continues in detail. “A few days later, my brother-in-law disappeared,” adds her husband, Amador Castro.
![Civil Guard tracking area in Gosolfre.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/QrW_02mvRjtKJ_gpWyORvqagcY0=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/5KEZCQ4KABAFLBVXAX574YGTRI.jpg)
But, for now, the paths that lead to Pandolo are circumstantial. Antonio Tuñas' family believes that someone set a “trap” for him, and that he attended a meeting without notifying his relatives. On December 15 of last year he left home with his Nissan Almera dark green, and in the nearby area of Quintáns – in a territory where surnames are repeated, everyone knows each other and are distant cousins - a neighbor saw him get out of the car and go down, with his limp, the slope of a meadow, also near a river. “Where are you going out there, it doesn't lead anywhere?” the woman asked her husband, scaly. “Woman, go pee,” Antonio's relatives say that her husband settled. They were the last witnesses who claimed to identify the man who disappeared a year ago. The Almera was located about 50 kilometers away, in the municipality of Carballo, with cigarette butts inside even though the owner did not smoke. Not far from the place in Mazaricos where he was seen still alive, according to José Manuel Vieites, the victim's cousin, “his cell phone and the Red Cross emergency bracelet” that he was wearing due to his poor health “emitted the last sign.”
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