Álvaro García Ortiz, Delgado's squire who investigated the 'Prestige'

The prosecutor Álvaro García Ortiz, in an image from 2017, in Santiago de Compostela.XOÁN REY (EFE)

If the opposition expects a drastic change in the State Attorney General's Office with the resignation, this Tuesday, of Dolores Delgado, the Government has no intention of fattening its hopes.

The Executive has chosen Álvaro García Ortiz to replace her, until now Delgado's

as head of the Technical Secretariat and who, during the two years in office, has served as one of her main defenders and mediators inside and outside the race.

the squire

is now in the front line of battle.

More information

Dolores Delgado resigns as state attorney general for health reasons

Belonging to the Progressive Union of Prosecutors (UPF), García Ortiz held the presidency and spokesperson for that group for years.

From UPF she denounced the increase in "fascist acts" or the tolerance of corruption that devastated Spain.

He also criticized the lack of prosecutors to combat this scourge: "If we look back and see that members of the Executive are involved in legal cases, we can ask ourselves what interest the Executive may have in a control instrument such as the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office being better equipped with the necessary material and human resources”, he stated in May 2018, after learning of the ruling in the

and before the motion of censure that evicted President Mariano Rajoy, of the PP, from La Moncloa was successful.

García Ortiz was born in Lumbrales (Salamanca) in 1967, but his life has always been closely linked to Galicia, where he worked until Delgado called him to take charge of the Technical Secretariat of the State Attorney General's Office.

By then he had already spent more than 20 years in the public ministry, which he joined in 1998. After a brief stint in Menorca, he ended up in Santiago de Compostela.

In 2004, he was named the community fire coordinator.

In 2007 he climbed another step and assumed the position of regional prosecutor, delegate for the environment, urban planning, land use planning and forest fires.

The name of Álvaro García Ortiz jumped to the national front line when he took on the

, about the oil tanker that sank off the coast of Galicia in 2002 and caused one of the biggest ecological disasters in the history of Spain.

trial is held

," he stated in an interview in EL PAÍS, when the final stretch of this oral hearing in 2013 was nearing. He described this investigation as a "huge and unfathomable cause" and criticized procedural law was not prepared for these complex cases.

In March 2018, he was the most voted in the elections to the Fiscal Council - the main advisory body of the State Attorney General -, which was considered a milestone due to the lower weight that progressive prosecutors have in the race.

He obtained almost 900 supports after touring the Spanish prosecutor's offices in an electoral campaign in which Delgado herself and her predecessor in the Attorney General's Office, María José Segarra, also participated as candidates.

Both were elected to occupy a place in the Fiscal Council, although with fewer votes than the new head of the Public Ministry.

The election of García as a substitute for Delgado is interpreted within the race as a support from the Government for the management that both have carried out at the head of the organization, where they were considered a tandem in which she controlled the handlebars, but in which he pedaled relentlessly in the same direction.

That affinity meant that García Ortiz did not come out completely unscathed from the criticism of Delgado's management that rained down, above all, from conservative areas of politics and the prosecution, although he has always striven to maintain a technical profile and disassociate himself from the more political decisions.

Under this premise, he defended his actions in the

by Ignacio Stampa, one of the two prosecutors who initiated the investigations into the retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and who was removed from Anticorruption after being himself investigated for allegedly leaking information to Podemos about the

a case (where the theft of a cell phone from a former assistant of Pablo Iglesias was investigated).

Stampa accused García Ortiz of delaying the investigation against him to harm him, an accusation that the head of the Technical Secretariat denied, although his explanations never convinced the Association of Prosecutors, which has publicly accused him of maneuvering against the former prosecutor in the

.

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