The Constitutional Court has rejected the request of the family of a victim of the Transition to reopen the investigation into his death in a police charge in Madrid in 1976. The full court of guarantees, as elDiario.es has learned, has inadmissible the appeal of Ángel Almazán’s relatives against the filing of the judicial case regarding his death. Almazán, a resident of Vallecas who was 18 years old at the time, died under the blows of riot police in a demonstration in 1976 during the Transition and the plenary session has inadmissible his appeal, applying the same arguments as those used to reject similar petitions of those retaliated by the Franco dictatorship. .
Ángel Almazán died in December 1976. The young man from Madrid had attended a demonstration called by the Spanish Labor Party to protest in Santa Engracia against the Political Reform Referendum. The memorial groups highlight that he was taken to a doctor by the riot police themselves who had beaten him, but stating in the police report that “he had hit himself with a lamppost.” He died a few days later in the La Paz Hospital.
As has happened with dozens of criminal cases related to the dictatorship, the judges refused to investigate Almazán’s death when his family went to court demanding criminal responsibility. His brother’s complaint even identified by name and surname several police officers who fired smoke canisters and rubber bullets at Almazán and then immobilized and beat him. The autopsy determined that he died from a skull fracture.
In the case of Almazán, the courts already analyzed a first complaint from his parents that same year 1976, but that case was archived by a military court. Already in 2009, the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero recognized his right to “reparation and personal recognition” based on the Historical Memory Law. It was his brother Javier who returned to court in 2021 requesting the opening of an effective investigation. The Madrid court that took up the case ordered the file, recognizing that his death was a crime but there are “no reasons to attribute the perpetration of the crime to any specific person.”
His brother took Ángel Almazán’s case to the Constitutional Court with the help of lawyers Ángeles López and Nieves Sanz, denouncing, among other things, that his right to effective judicial protection had been violated by not opening a case despite having no doubts. about the existence of a crime: “This trust in Justice and its work of social pacification is frustrated. This trust in Justice and its work of social pacification is frustrated,” the appeal stated, among many other arguments.
The plenary session of the Constitutional Court, as elDiario.es has learned, has today analyzed the appeal of Almazán’s family and has issued an order that inadmisses their allegations, definitively closing the door on the investigation that his brother demanded. These same sources explain that the criterion applied is the same one that has served the Constitutional Court in recent months to reject criminal investigations into the crimes of Franco’s regime.
From the case of Ventura to that of Almazán
The same plenary session of the Constitutional Court decided last May that this type of claims from victims of police brutality or the Franco regime during the dictatorship could not prosper. The magistrates, with several votes against, inadmissible Francisco Ventura’s appeal against the decision of the courts of the Valencian Community not to reopen the investigation into the torture and repression he suffered in Valencia in 1967. The inadmissibility meant that the case was not It was not even resolved by a ruling on the merits of the matter.
This is a doctrine that the Constitutional Court had already deployed in several cases in recent years, even with the new Democratic Memory Law in force, highlighting the case of Gerardo Iglesias, founder of Izquierda Unida who denounced a police officer for torture during the Francoism. The case of Francisco Ventura ended in the rejection of the Constitutional Court with similar arguments: the new law does not “replace” the criteria of the judges and that the obstacles remain the same: the passage of time and the 1977 amnesty.
In the case of Ángel Almazán, a young Vallecano who died under police beatings already during the Transition in 1976 in the streets of Madrid during a demonstration, the plenary session refers to that order from the Ventura case to reproduce his arguments and his refusal. Several dissenting magistrates maintain the opinion already expressed then in their dissenting opinions: that these cases deserve, at least, to be admitted for processing to receive a ruling on the merits of the matter from the Constitutional Court.
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