He was 19 years old and on January 23, 1977, a member of the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey murdered him with two bullets while he was participating in an amnesty demonstration in Madrid. Arturo Ruiz is among nearly 300 people who lost their lives during the transition at the hands of the far-right and state security forces. We know who killed him, José Ignacio Fernández Guaza. He can never be tried for fleeing Spain and living for more than four decades under a false identity.
Fernández Guaza now lives in Argentina, where he boasts of his shooting exploits. Today, Arturo’s brother, Miguel Ángel Ruiz, requested the declassification of all information related to the judicial investigation into the assassination. “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 mason. That cold January morning would be just the beginning of a tragic week. The next day would be the death of Mari Luz Nájera after the impact of a smoke bomb thrown by the police to disperse a demonstration, precisely, demanding justice for Arturo. On the same night of January 24, the massacre of the Atocha Lawyers took place.
“We want to know who paid this man to focus on shooting left-wing activists; who helped him escape, because we know it was thanks to the Civil Guard; who protected him for so many years; where do these 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, at the Ministry of the Interior, to request the declassification of all documents in his possession regarding the assassination of Arturo. “We ask this 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.
This is one of the main legal 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 man in Strasbourg, the crimes have prescribed and are not considered crimes against humanity.
However, Miguel Ángel, who succeeded his other brother Manuel Ruiz in the fight for Arturo’s memory, states the opposite: “We know that Guaza was linked to the State and maintained strong relationships with the forces and corps of security. These gunmen went where officers couldn’t go so easily, which was to murder children. “This collusion with the state could constitute 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 weapon, linked to the General Directorate of Security and the philofascist group Fuerza Nueva. The legal process carried out at the end of the 1970s resulted in a conviction against him for the offense of terrorism and illegal possession of weapons. He was then 50 years old and should have spent six years in prison, even if he only served one year in prison because he benefited from the amnesty law, the same one that Arturo Ruiz demanded in 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 had ties to the Civil Guard, for which he worked in information services, as he ‘he himself declared.
The steps followed by Guaza in his escape, it is proven, landed first in Euskadi. From there, he called his partner to send money to a friend of his, a civil guard. He first fled to France, where his traces were lost. “The collusion was such that during the trial, this man’s identity card did not even appear,” denounces Miguel Ángel. Also note the discovery of a briefcase containing 400 9 millimeter cartridges in Guaza’s house.
The relationship between the shooter and the state apparatus became even more evident when Guaza’s sister said that “they performed functions that the police could not perform.” Furthermore, his partner also testified 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 last year, the newspaper The country He found the location of the murderer, in Buenos Aires. Description, as reported in the chronicle.
He admitted to being the murderer of Arturo Ruiz without the slightest trace of regret. “This is why we now want the Spanish state to declassify the documentation, in order to know the truth,” Miguel Ángel constantly repeats. In this sense, they also demand that Spanish justice collaborates with María Servini, the Argentine judge who is investigating the crimes of the Franco regime and the Transition and who has twice requested various information from the Spanish State. “Spain’s response was zero,” denounces Arturo’s brother.
From his point of view, and now Miguel Ángel speaks as a member of the Collective of Forgetting Transition (COT), “there is no interest on the part of 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 public order forces in January 1977, when of his testimony before Judge Servini.
A model Transition with nearly 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 if we don’t know many yet,” he emphasizes. COT spokesperson Javier Almazán estimates that 280 people were murdered between 1973 and 1983 by the far right and police forces. “The problem is that there is no official trace, so we take care of documenting them as best we can,” he introduces.
Almazán came to COT because he was the brother of Ángel, who lost his life at the age of 18 after five days of trying to recover from the brutal beatings inflicted on him by several police officers while he was protesting for his 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 risked rupture or reform, and many people died in the streets demanding freedom,” he comments.
The group’s spokesperson denounces that the assassination of Arturo Ruiz is not included in the rights granted to victims and their families by the law on democratic memory: “They say that the case is prescribed, even though the crime had no political connotation. . This is to deny that water is wet. “Obviously, Guaza not only acted that day, but he did so with the assistance of the state. » Miguel Ángel, Arturo’s brother, says: “There are many people here who want us to forget, but we will never succeed. I won’t do it in my lifetime. “We just want to know the truth, even if it is very uncomfortable for some, but it is our right. »
