• FERNANDO LÁZARO

    @lazaroelmundo

    Madrid

Saturday, February 13, 2021 - 20:30

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  • Courts.

    All about the 'Lasa-Zabala case'

  • Sentence.

    The Court sentences Galindo and Elgorriaga to 71 years in prison

The former general of the Civil Guard

Enrique Rodríguez Galindo

(Granada, 1939 - Madrid, 2021) has died in Madrid at the age of 81 after falling ill with Covid-19.

A fundamental piece in the fight against ETA in the 80s and 90s as head of the

Intxaurrondo

(San Sebastián)

barracks

, he became one of the main public figures in the

dirty war

against ETA and the highest ranking officer to be convicted: 75 years in prison for the kidnapping and murder of José Antonio Lasa and José Ignacio Zabala.

For 12 years he was in charge of the destinies of a small

city

in Guipúzcoa, a small Fort Apache in which 1,500 civil guards resided, within an armed compound.

He was the most awarded military man in the history of Spain for his fight against the terrorist organization.

He boasted of having dismantled commandos left and right, and had an essential role in the arrest of the ETA leadership in Bidart in March 1992, which in the long run would mean the decline and subsequent end of the band.

Rodríguez Galindo landed in Intxaurrondo in 1980 and a few years later he became the youngest officer in charge of ETA's number one objective barracks, in the hardest moments of his terrorist actions.

Already in the 1980s his methods began to be questioned, both from outside and from within the Security Forces, when several of his henchmen were convicted of mistreatment.

Condemnations that the Government, chaired by

Felipe González

and with

José Barrionuevo

in the Ministry of the Interior, pardoned on many occasions.

The head of Intxaurrondo always had the solid support of those responsible for the Interior, both in the Barrionuevo stage (1982-1988) and in that of

José Luis Corcuera

(1988-1993).

Especially close was his relationship with the all-powerful Secretary of State for Security,

Rafael Vera

.

The Government recognized Galindo as one of the most important men in the fight against ETA, responsible for the dismantling of a hundred terrorist commandos and the arrest of 800 people linked to the gang.

Like Galindo, Barrionuevo and Vera would be condemned by the GAL, in their case for the kidnapping of Segundo Marey.

Suspicions about the methods used by Galindo finally exploded on March 21, 1995. That day, EL MUNDO woke up with a historical title on the cover that revealed the harshest reality of the

dirty war

against ETA: "Lasa's corpses appear and Zabala after being tortured and buried in quicklime ".

Two skeletons found in 1985 in the Alicante town of

Busot

were identified as the remains of

José Antonio Lasa

and

José Ignacio Zabala

, alleged ETA members kidnapped by the GAL in 1983 and who have been missing since then.

The front page headline was accompanied by shocking photographs of the remains which, as was recorded in the police report, showed that Lasa and Zabala "were tortured mercilessly and for a long time to extract information from them."

Their fingernails and toenails had been pulled out and they suffered numerous injuries, then they were beaten to death and shot to the back of the neck, and buried in this town of Alicante in quicklime to make the evidence disappear.

The alleged perpetrators were agents of the Civil Guard from the Intxaurrondo barracks.

Cover of EL MUNDO from March 21, 1995.

The impact of this finding was immediate.

On the one hand, the police action against ETA was called into question by the methods used and a long judicial investigation was initiated that suffered great political pressure not to advance.

On the

other hand, the

war dirty

, and in particular the case of Lasa and Zabala, was used by ETA and the left

abertzale

to justify terrorism, recruit new members and reinforce the message that the Spanish State remained practices Franco.

Today, with ETA already disappeared, the story that Basque nationalism tries to impose is that in the Basque Country there were two "violence", terrorist and police, and that both are at the same level.

Galindo declared at the trial, swearing by God and by his honor, that "he had never" ordered "neither the kidnapping, nor the torture, nor the murder" of Lasa and Zabala.

But the evidence was stronger than his word.

On April 26, 2000, the National High Court sentenced him to 71 years in prison for the kidnapping and murder of the two alleged terrorists, a penalty that was later elevated by the Supreme Court to

75 years in prison

.

He was acquitted of the crimes of belonging to an armed gang, injuries and torture.

Along with him, the former civil governor of Guipúzcoa

Julen Elgorriaga

(71 years in prison), Lieutenant Colonel

Ángel Vaquero

(69 years old) and agents

Enrique Dorado

and

Felipe Bayo

(67 years and eight months)

were sentenced

.

Galindo, Vera and Barrionuevo.Á.

CASAÑA / J. MARTÍNEZ

Strong conviction

The shadows of illegal actions by Galindo and the reduced circle of civil guards who were under his command were dense on other murders of ETA members that were attributed to the state sewers, but the perpetrators have never been identified.

That small group of civil guards, the

Pata Negra

de Galindo, were always on the list of suspects.

Despite the forcefulness of the sentence, Galindo always had strong political support and the sympathy of a part of society.

The tensions that arose with the arrival at the Secretary of State for the Interior of

Margarita Robles

, current Minister of Defense and in favor of the Security Forces moving away from the

dirty war

and investigating all the events of the 1980s and early 1990s. While she was pushing that line, Galindo was promoted to general.

The former commander of Intxaurrondo tried to get out of prison as soon as he entered it.

There were requests for clemency that were denied by the Government, then chaired by

José María Aznar

, and repeated attempts to access the third grade.

In 2004 he was released from prison several times to be treated for a cardiovascular ailment, and in September of that year he was allowed to serve his sentence at home.

In 2005 he entered the third degree and in 2013 he was finally released.

Indeed, he only served 4 years in prison.

By then he was a 74-year-old former officer with dedicated health, but Galindo lived long enough to see the cessation of ETA's armed activity (2011) and its final dissolution (2018).

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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