Victorino Ruiz de Azúa, the accuracy of journalism

Victorino Ruiz de Azúa has died in Madrid after years of fighting cancer.

With him dies an enormous journalist, characterized by rigor and accuracy in all forms of exercising this profession.

Much of his career was spent at EL PAÍS (for more than 30 years), where he made a very important contribution to forging the prestige of this newspaper and where he himself became a fundamental reference.

Born in Burgos 69 years ago, the son of a soldier, Ruiz de Azúa began his profession at

, a weekly newspaper of the Basque left.

Later he went through

and

, in San Sebastián, before becoming a correspondent for EL PAÍS, head of the Madrid section, delegate in Euskadi, political chronicler and, in the last years of his active life, head closing.

In this position, he was responsible for the newspaper getting out on the street in a timely manner: he was a kind of gatekeeper who, thanks to his mastery, prevented incomplete, erroneous, absurd or misleading information or comments from reaching the reader. spelling mistakes.

Victorino was accuracy personified.

Jealous of his intimacy, and with an apparently difficult character -only apparently-, he was a good person, highly educated, affable and with a touch of sarcasm that some found difficult to understand.

There were editors who said that he was sullen, grumpy and grumpy, when the truth is that they were the ones who did not know him.

His professional performance was always backed by irrefutable reasoning and arguments.

All of us in the newsroom learned from Victorino, who often used examples to prevent the publication of bland or absurd titles or information.

I remember that he used to bring up an insane headline from a Basque newspaper that said: “The audience, standing up, applauded until they were hoarse”.

Or that other one that announced with great fanfare a truism: "Today, Palm Sunday, Holy Week begins."

It was impossible to be by his side and not learn from him, love him and admire him.

An anti-Franco militant, he was arrested in his youth as a university student in Seville.

Later he knew the prison after being tortured in Navarra accused of being related to terrorism, something inconceivable in a man like him.

He was always a fighter for just causes and workers' rights, critical of the powerful, even those closest to him.

In his professional credit there is information as relevant as the discovery of a supposed client network of the PNV that facilitated the entry into the Ertzaintza of its members or sympathizers.

A great connoisseur of complex Basque politics, he perfectly covered the entire process that culminated in the so-called Pact of Ajuria Enea and was an exceptional witness to the hardest years of ETA terrorism and also to the so-called dirty war of the GAL and other small groups linked to the sewers of the State.

Journalism lived intensely.

Like his wife, also a journalist, Inmaculada Ezkiaga, who died four years ago and with whom he had two children, Jon Ander and Bittor.

The profession is left without another reference.