Rosario Porto couldn't take it anymore

Two married couples were dining at a round table in a chalet in Teo (A Coruña) when the couple from the neighboring house, the Porto-Basterra, joined in with their daughter Asunta.

She was Rosario Porto, an expert lawyer in International Law for a wealthy family and a socially hyperactive woman;

he, Alfonso Basterra, a lower-profile man, journalist (formerly at

, then on his own).

The girl sat with them at the table and the mother took the opportunity to announce that she was studying German.

The language was added to the classes of English, French, Chinese, ballet, violin and piano.

"He loves German," Porto said at the table.

The girl, very serious, replied: "Don't use me as an alibi, the one who loves that I study German is you."

The diners, according to one of them tells this newspaper, smiled in surprise;

It is common for parents to project themselves on their children but not for children to make it known in such an adult, cutting and public way ("I kept repeating to myself: due to the lack of a project, don't make your daughter your life project", I would say , already from prison, to EL PAÍS).

“Asunta”, says a person whose daughter shared a class with her, “she was a very intelligent girl who was very happy while her grandparents lived, and very unhappy afterwards”.

Asunta was not only the daughter of Rosario Porto, the first Chinese girl adopted in Santiago de Compostela: she was also her showcase, one more, of a mother who cultivated social life, appearance, forms and relationships with a sick obsession.

The only daughter of a professor and professor of Art History, Socorro Ortega, and of a well-known Compostela lawyer, Francisco Porto, Charo, as she was known, modeled her life coinciding with family wishes: she studied Law, like her father, expanded studies in foreign universities, she received the title of honorary consul of France that her father left her, she frequently accompanied them to their subscription to the Royal Philharmonic of Galicia and, on one occasion, she went with her husband and with them to the New Year's Concert in Vienna.

He finally had a daughter, giving Socorro Ortega and Francisco Porto the greatest joy and demand of their life: a granddaughter.

Did he do everything at ease, because he wanted and enjoyed it, or was he conditioned by parental wishes?

Be that as it may, after the deaths of his mother and father seven months apart and in a fulminant way (one heart attack, another stroke), Porto closed his father's law firm where they both worked and left the law school, divorced Alfonso Basterra and started a relationship with a married man (in his statement to the Civil Guard, the man lied about the nature of that relationship until a corporal snapped at him: “So you weren't going to bed? Ask God that we do not find a speck of your DNA in the house because you eat the murder,

”, As Cruz Morcillo recounts in his book

.

Porto continued to enjoy the Real Filharmonía season ticket until one day she phoned a friend: "They call me to see if I want to renew my father's season ticket, what should I do?"

This friend told her that if she wanted to continue enjoying classical music, she should do so;

Yes No No.

“He did not renew it.

My impression was always that there were things, like that, that interested him because of a certain social position, and as soon as that position ceased to interest him, and his parents were no longer living, he acted according to what he wanted ”, says the friend.

There was never a known motive for the murder of Asunta Basterra, nor a confession of her murderers, but Rosario Porto's environment and some sources of the investigation agree that one of the reasons that best fit the facts, although equally absurd, is that in Rosario Porto's new life, Asunta didn't fit.

From the looks of it, in a drastic way.

The last stretch of Porto's life in freedom was marked by an illness, depression, accentuated by lupus, for which she was admitted to hospital.

Sentimental swings affected him;

the documentary that Bambú made on the Asunta case ('What the truth hides') recorded a fact.

On July 4, 2013 Rosario and her lover broke off the relationship;

That night Rosario would place, days later and downplaying the importance it deserved, the assault of a hooded stranger at her house to try only to kill her daughter (the girl told

a friend of hers

on

, and took a photo of herself with a mark on his neck; Porto, who said he had surprised the intruder, did not consider it necessary to report the assassination attempt; otherwise, no one forced the portal or the front door).

In the documentary, Alfonso Basterra announced his suicide in 2017: “I have decided how and where (…) My sentence is not to have protected her when I should have (…) When she leaves, I will meet her: my girl needs me and I need her ”.

That same year, Rosario Porto, who had already tried to kill herself twice, told journalist Silvia R. Pontevedra from EL PAÍS: "I have to stay alive to find who did it."

He committed suicide on Wednesday in Brieva prison (Ávila) by tying the belt of his robe around his neck and tying it to a bar (what was a prisoner doing who had tried to commit suicide twice with a belt?).

After learning of the death of his ex-wife, Basterra expressed the deep loneliness in which he remained.

Neither of them recognized a crime in which their participation was proven, more active (executor of the facts) in the case of Rosario Porto.

In addition to denying that the girl left her apartment in Santiago on the day Teo's murder took place (the cameras showed that she went to Teo with the girl in the car), as well as other contradictions and lies, the investigators recall how, When she was not a suspect but only the victim's mother, she came with them to Teo's house and, upon entering, ran upstairs saying she had to go to the bathroom (an agent followed her and found her trying to cover a trash can in the one with the same orange rope with which the 12-year-old girl, who died of suffocation, was tied).

Asunta's ashes were collected by an old friend of the family who left them in the apartment on Calle Doctor Teixeiro in Santiago where the girl lived, the same one in which Asunta began receiving crushed lorazepam pills for her breakfast for weeks before his death.

Rosario Porto, who inherited an important real estate heritage after the death of her parents, was renovating one of her apartments, says the writer and producer of Bamboo, Ramón Campos.

A new home in which he had ordered a room to be soundproofed so Asunta could play the piano.

He planned his death while still planning his life.