The National Court will not investigate the perpetrator of one of the most emblematic attacks of the Spanish Transition: the death in January 1977 in Madrid of the 19-year-old student Arturo Ruiz at the hands of the ultra gunman José Ignacio Fernández Guaza.
This Friday the court denied the last attempt by the victim's family to reopen the investigations, under the argument of the statute of limitations for the crime, after EL PAÍS located the murderer last November in Buenos Aires.
Fernández Guaza acknowledged in an interview having killed the young man during a demonstration in favor of political prisoners called in the heart of the Spanish capital in which the fascists broke out shouting "Long live Christ the King!"
Section 1 of the Criminal Chamber of the National Court expressed its refusal to reopen the investigations in a resolution that does not allow appeal and whose rapporteur is Judge Carolina Ruis Alarcó.
An incident of annulment of proceedings presented by the family of Arturo Ruiz that has been rejected by this judicial body.
The initiative sought to reactivate the investigations and arrest the criminal.
The stoppage in Spain contrasts with the effervescence of the investigations in Argentina.
The judge of this country María Romilda Servini ordered, after the publication of the report, the search and capture of the fugitive, who resides in the middle-class Buenos Aires municipality of Ingeniero Maschwitz, with 15,000 inhabitants.
And she requested information from Spain about the measures that were adopted during the Transition to combat ultra groups that were maneuvering to short-circuit democracy.
In his last attempt to keep alive the case against Fernández Guaza, which was archived in 2000 by the National Court due to the statute of limitations of the crime as the fugitive's whereabouts were unknown (the Criminal Chamber now considers that the statute of limitations agreed upon before are final) , the relatives of Arturo Ruiz brought to the court his domicile in Argentina discovered by this newspaper and the video of the news in which the ultra, who was never tried and has lived 46 years with impunity thanks to a false identity, recognized the crime to journalists.
“They refuse to prosecute a crime and judge the far-right terrorist who confessed to the murder of Arturo Ruiz,” the family members criticized.
Likewise, the application of the Democratic Memory Law was appealed to reopen the proceedings, a rule to which the judge of the Criminal Chamber of the National Court José Ricardo de Prada referred in separate opinions in 2023.
The relatives also demanded that the crime of terrorism not prescribe and recalled that the co-author of the crime of Arturo Ruiz, Jorge Cesarsky, an Argentinean linked to the shadowy Triple A, was sentenced to six years in prison for this crime, although he only served one year in prison. the jail.
In the document inadmissible by the National Court, the family, represented by Miguel Ángel Ruiz, the victim's brother, stated: “The murder [of Arturo Ruiz] was not an isolated event and must be explained with the events that made up the Black Week of Madrid and in an international context.”
Miguel Ángel Ruiz thus refers to the leaden days that marked the tragic week of the Transition when, in January 1977, the murder of Arturo Ruiz coincided with the massacre of the labor lawyers of Atocha - where four lawyers and a worker died. a Madrid law firm linked to Comisiones Obreras—with the death due to the impact of a smoke canister of the student María Luz Nájera in a protest demonstration for the death of Ruiz.
After the setback of the National Court, the family will present an appeal for protection before the Constitutional Court, as confirmed by Miguel Ángel Ruiz.
“The criminals of all these events were supported by the State,” says the relative, who estimates that 318 were killed between 1976 and 1983 at the hands of police and parapolice forces and insists on exploring the path of crimes against humanity to avoid prescription of the causes.
Fernández Guaza, who is now 76 years old, fled Spain after the crime to avoid a certain sentence and has lived in the shadows as an invisible man under the protective mantle of a false identity.
After being located by this newspaper, he assured that the Security Forces and Corps of Spain in the 70s provided him with his fictitious name.
And that the favorable treatment was due to the fact that he was part of the dirty war against ETA.
His, he said, was a commando of 15 civilians who killed terrorists in the south of France in the mid-1970s.
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