Facade of the headquarters of the National Court, in Madrid, in a file image. PABLO MONGE
Six years ago, Ángel Gonzalo G. J. went into the house of his 13-year-old granddaughter, taking advantage of the fact that the girl's parents were working at that time of the morning. The stepfather managed to enter the house through the yard, and walked to the teenager's bedroom, where she slept. He didn't care. Once there, he began touching her legs until he woke up. It was then that he placed a machete on the bed and raped the girl, as the National Court has now considered proven, which has sentenced the aggressor, who impregnated the child, to 15 years in prison. The girl, who he said he would rape her again if she told her parents, didn't say anything to anyone until she miscarried months later.
The court, based in Madrid, has just issued a sentence against this Spaniard of Ecuadorian origin, who is also punished with 10 years of probation after his release from prison and the obligation to compensate the young woman with 100,000 euros for the physical and psychological damage. The attack occurred between August and September 2017 in the city of Machala (Ecuador) – investigators have not been able to determine the exact date, but the minor was diagnosed with a pregnancy of 13 weeks and five days when attending her after the abortion, according to medical reports.
The case has been tried in Spain because, after the rape was revealed, Ángel Gonzalo G. J. left his native country and "took refuge" in the Peninsula, where he was arrested in 2019 after receiving an extradition request from the Ecuadorian authorities. Benefiting from his dual nationality, the National Court refused in 2020 to hand him over because he is Spanish, but agreed to prosecute him here after a complaint from the Spanish Prosecutor's Office. This court has jurisdiction over crimes committed by Spaniards abroad.
Now, after the oral hearing against him just a month ago, the court does not believe the excuses of the already convicted, born in 1969, who was free at the time of the trial.
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His version is "scarcely credible," says the ruling, signed by magistrates Fermín Javier Echarri, Carmen Paloma González and Juan Francisco Martel. The man, a resident of Pamplona (Navarra), denied the aggression and explained that he had been a de facto partner for 18 years of the paternal grandmother of the little girl, who died in 2016 of cancer and with whom he had two children. He said he was living and working in Spain when he learned of his wife's illness. So he returned to Ecuador before she died. "But I didn't have any kind of relationship with the child, neither close nor not close. I just knew her because she lived nearby. But I never touched her," he said at the hearing, where he said he had never gone to that house "while the girl was alone." And he stressed that the accusations responded to a revenge for a "problem of inheritance".
A thesis that the court dismisses, which does not appreciate "spurious motives that weaken the credibility" of the victim and his family. Moreover, the magistrates put on the table a whole battery of evidence against the accused: in addition to the testimony of the child, they have the statements of the parents and the doctor who attended the girl after the abortion, to whom the young woman related the abuse. According to the doctor, when the girl arrived at the clinic in the middle of the night after bleeding profusely at home, she observed that she had suffered an "incomplete abortion" (she found an "umbilical cord in the vagina") and told her mother that the child had been 13 weeks pregnant. At that time, the victim explained that she had been raped by the "grandmother's husband" — whom they "treated like a grandfather," according to the father.
The mother informed that same day to the Prosecutor's Office of Gender Violence of Machala, which promoted a criminal case that ended up truncated by the departure of the aggressor from the country. During the trial held in Spain, the mother said that the defendant offered them money to withdraw the complaint "before fleeing". A DNA analysis was incorporated into the case that indicates 99.9% that Ángel Gonzalo G. J. is the father of a fetus that expelled the girl at home, when she began to bleed before taking her to the doctor. The defense tried to knock down this evidence at the hearing. But the judges validated it and added that, even if they had not taken it into account, there is sufficient evidence to "prove" their "participation" in the rape.
There are also several forensic reports that point out that, in addition to the "physical ailments derived from abortion", the girl suffered "others of a psychic nature", such as discomfort, sadness, insecurity, lack of concentration, anxiety, sleep problems, reduced appetite and nocturnal enuresis (urinary incontinence). The judgment of the High Court can be appealed.
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