—Can you hear me well, José Ignacio?
– My name is not José Ignacio.
—You’re not José Ignacio Fernández?
-NO.
—All the data we have tells us it’s you.
– Ask the person who told you…
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On the phone, José Ignacio Fernández Guaza denies three times that he is who he is. He categorically refuses to be among the right-wing extremists who fired the two close-range shots on January 23, 1977 that took the life of 19-year-old Granada student Arturo Ruiz García. The crime occurred in the heart of Madrid during a demonstration for amnesty for political prisoners, on the eve of the massacre of the Atocha labor lawyers. At the time, Spain was facing a bloody week of high political tension in which right-wing extremist militias tried to undermine democracy.
The escape of the main murder defendant abroad to avoid trial, prison and certain punishment, as well as his connections with the state security forces and authorities, cast the shadow of a mystery that has lasted for 46 years.
At the editorial team’s insistence, the man who refused to identify himself as Arturo Ruiz’s murderer on the phone agreed to meet with EL PAÍS ten minutes after the call.
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The meeting takes place at the doorstep of the Ingeniero Maschwitz train station, a quiet residential community of 15,000 middle-class residents and low-rise houses 45 kilometers from Buenos Aires.
A tall, stocky man with gray hair and a bushy white beard appears alone. He wears a long beige jacket with colorful shoulder pads, light linen pants and sneakers. He speaks to the two journalists slowly and with unusual calm. He is 76 years old. With a dry cry he asks that no one come near him.
-High! Take off your jacket and [sic] the return!
The man makes sure that the people he is talking to are not armed, approaches and takes two portraits with his cell phone. He grabs his guests tightly by the arms and leads them to a stone bench in an adjacent park.
After pointing out that he always carries a weapon with him and that a unit made up of four civilian collaborators and a police patrol discreetly monitors the meeting, he begins the confession. His story lasts two and a half hours, without episodes of regret, and reveals the life on the margins of a refugee with good connections to the armies, secret services and the Spanish authorities before the death throes of the Franco regime.
—I’m surprised you found me. There is something in my security that has failed. It is impossible for them to locate me because I have no connection to Spain. Someone spoke. How did you find me?
No regret
Without hesitation, Fernández Guaza recognizes and looks him in the eye that he is the man who shot Arturo Ruiz at that demonstration in January 1977 in which the fascist troops burst out shouting “Long live Christ the King!”
—[Ruiz] He threw a stone at me. I grabbed the gun and shot him in the heart. Of a bad mood. […] Buses? You are talking to a person who has never regretted anything.
The young student’s death only led to the conviction of Jorge Cesarsky, a Triple A-affiliated Argentine who was sentenced to six years in prison for terrorism and illegal possession of weapons, and served only one year in prison.
Fernández Guaza was never on the bench. He disappeared from Spain after the crime and has enjoyed impunity for more than four decades. The Spanish penal code, unlike France or Italy, prohibits judgment in absentia. The case summary, prepared in 2000 when his whereabouts were unknown, contains several witness statements pointing to the fugitive.
– If Cesarsky hadn’t left [tras el crimen] According to the secret services, they never discovered me. The police assumed that the perpetrator was Leocadio Jiménez Caravaca [célebre ultra de la Transición española procesado por la matanza de los abogados laboralistas de Atocha].
Ignacio José Fernández Guaza, in his home in Ingeniero Maschwitz (Buenos Aires), in October.ENRIQUE GARCIA MEDINA
Twilight The cell phone rings on the bench in the quiet Ingeniero Maschwitz Park. It is the first of four calls made by the killer’s collaborators, the four civilians who walk around silently like automatons, to check whether their target is safe. Or, what is the same, that no one traveled the more than 10,000 kilometers between Madrid and Buenos Aires to take revenge. The seventy-year-old reassures his companions.
—I don’t know how the conversation will end. Things are going well so far…
The escape
Fernández Guaza confesses that he fled Spain in 1977. He traveled from Irun (Gipuzkoa) to Paris in his Seat 124 and remained hidden in the French capital for a year in a small apartment on Linné Street, District 5, near Saint-Michel Boulevard. He left Madrid after some journalists asked about him at his wife’s work on Paseo de la Castellana.
—The Guardia Civil asked me to leave Spain. […]. I chose Paris because I had friends there from CRS. [fuerza de la Policía Nacional Francesa]. They were people who belonged to the services [de inteligencia]. All over the world, police fix things from behind.
From the French city he flew to Buenos Aires on the recommendation of his mother. He initially lived in the Argentine capital. And later in the discreet community of Ingeniero Maschwitz, where he purchased a house, which he registered in the name of one of his three children, and where he lived with his wife until his recent death.
His one-story chalet with a garden and a simple annex for guests goes unnoticed. It is located on a dirt, quiet, tree-lined road. Its tinted windows attract attention and give you a discreet view of what’s happening outside. Minutes before he received the call from the EL PAÍS journalists, Fernández Guaza observed them standing motionless from the street, glued to a glass, without responding to their gestures to go out and talk. An old German Shepherd and three small poodles alerted him to the visit. The Ultra rarely leaves his hiding place. And if he does, he always goes shopping in his SUV.
In order to evade international search and arrest warrants that have been in force for decades and have now expired, the refugee planned a life with a false identity. An existence of fraud that has lasted 46 years. The Ultra omits its fictitious name. And he assures that the documentation of who he is today was created by the “Spanish security services” after the death of Arturo Ruiz. The fake passport allowed him to move freely throughout Latin America but had to remain under the radar of authorities. And he did it like a fish in water, especially during the Argentine dictatorship of Jorge Videla (1976-1981) and the autocratic President of Paraguay Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989).
As evidence of his close ties to power, the septuagenarian boasts of his family’s relationship with the Franco movement and his contacts with officials such as Antonio González Pacheco and Billy el Niño, the police officer accused of torture by dozens of the dictatorship’s reprisals died in 2020.
—My father, a soldier and Falangist, was a close friend of [Luis] White Carrero [el presidente del Gobierno durante la dictadura que fue asesinado por ETA en 1973].
By securely passing on a false passport, this man, who claims to have undergone military training, managed to evade justice. Arturo Ruiz’s family’s attempts to clear up the matter in Spain proved unsuccessful. Weeks ago, the National Court, with two votes in favor and one against, refused to reopen the case on the grounds that the law on historical memory could not be applied, which required an investigation into the Franco regime. The judges argue that although the case was prosecuted for terrorism and illegal possession of weapons, it has not been proven that the death was due to the Franco dictatorship. Recent investigations into locating the Ultra resulted in police unsuccessfully speaking to the bouncer and neighbors of his last known address in Madrid. The judge then refused to tap his relatives’ phones.
José Ignacio Fernández Guaza, in Ingeniero Maschwitz (Buenos Aires), in October. ENRIQUE GARCIA MEDINA
Fernández Guaza claims that the protective cover that allowed him to live comfortably in Buenos Aires was thanks to the Spanish authorities in the late 1970s.
—I had contact with people [de los servicios de información] from Spain. They knew he was in Argentina under a false name. […] I was part of the structure.
He goes on to say that in 1979, a year after landing in that South American country, he received a visit from Spanish officials with whom he had worked before leaving Madrid.
– They were people from the government’s executive committee. They asked me if I planned to continue working and I told them, “No, it’s over.” We ate at the Sheraton Hotel in Buenos Aires. I told them not to rely on me anymore.
Appointment at Interpol
The shooter recalls that during his escape he held a meeting with agents from Interpol, the organization that locates refugees and brings together police from 194 countries. The event, he says, took place more than three decades ago in Paraguay, a country that served as a refuge for international fascists during Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship and was home to Spanish refugees like Emilio Hellín, who was sentenced to 43 years in prison for murder in 1982 was convicted in Madrid. to the left-wing student Yolanda González.
—Interpol discovered me at the border with Paraguay while my search and arrest warrant was still in effect. I explained myself and reached an agreement. “You are not who you say you are,” they declared. […]. They also told me: “You know you are on alert. We have to chat. If anything happens to you, let me know if there is a problem.”
The refugee recalls that he had ties to the totalitarian Paraguayan government through his ambassador to Spain in the 1970s, Elpidio Acevedo, and that he had a direct line to the assistant to a counterintelligence chief. In the capital Asunción in the late 1970s, he met with the notary and founder of Fuerza Nueva, Blas Piñar, the only right-wing extremist leader to hold a seat in the House of Representatives during the transition. Fernández Guaza had been Piñar’s bodyguard in Spain during his years at the top.
Arturo Ruiz, in an undated photo.
Atocha and Montejurra massacres
The refugee admits that he was involved in the major episodes of far-right black conspiracies after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. He took part, as a companion of Sixto Enrique de Borbón Parma, together with international fascists, in the 1976 Carlist pilgrimage in Montejurra (Estella, Navarre), where two people were shot. And he maintained contacts with Italian neo-fascists such as the late Stefano Delle Chiaie, head of the Avanguardia Nazionale, leader of an international linked to attacks in Spain and who was protected in Chile by Augusto Pinochet (1974-1990).
In the ultra circles he also met José de las Heras Hurtado, the mastermind of the right-wing extremist group Frente de la Juventud, a violent offshoot of Fuerza Nueva whose members committed murders, robberies and kidnappings and which this newspaper tracked down in Brazil in 2015 .
Regarding the Atocha massacre, in which five labor lawyers were murdered in Madrid by a fascist commando the day after the death of Arturo Ruiz, Fernández Guaza suspects that the fugitive of this conspiracy, Fernando Lerdo de Tejada, deceived justice after fleeing Spain using the same procedure: a false identity.
During his trip to Argentina, this blank-faced man never gave up his love of weapons. A hobby he discovered in Madrid in the 1970s when he was a member of a shooting club, and which he pursued in Buenos Aires, helping, as he says, police and military friends assemble and disassemble European-made pistols .
Cover of EL PAÍS from March 13, 1977, where the shooter can be seen behind Blas Piñar.
The refugee avoids explaining in detail what he has done professionally in recent years up to three times. He realizes that he has always been obsessed with safety and that he has an escape plan to avoid capture. In case the meeting with the journalists was a trap by the relatives of one of his victims, the right-wing extremist said goodbye to his family: “They say they are journalists, but maybe they are something else,” he warned them.
– I left everything arranged. There must be someone interested in killing me. Someone who thinks, “We’re not going to let that son of a bitch die in bed.” “He’s not going to die of a heart attack.” I always go armed. And if I break up, I’ll break up with everything and you won’t be able to find me anymore. I go out, get in the car, park it, take another car and disappear from the face of the earth.
It’s getting dark at the Ingeniero Maschwitz train station. Arturo Ruiz’s murderer walks toward his house under tall trees. His companions discreetly withdraw with him.
The fateful Sunday of the Ruiz family
JOAQUIN GIL / JOSÉ MARÍA IRUJO
Sunday, January 23, 1977, was a fateful day for the Ruiz family. As Patriarch Eduardo was eating in Gargantilla de Lozoya (Madrid), where he worked as a community secretary, he suddenly received the bitterest news of his life. The newscast began with the murder of one of his eight children, Arturo.
Arturo Ruiz died at the age of 19. The young man – a single, Afro-haired high school student who was restless at night and a lover of mountaineering and climbing – flirted with the left-wing Young Red Guard, the youth of the Spanish Workers’ Party (PTE). And although he didn’t belong to any party, he was out in the middle of Madrid that morning demonstrating for amnesty for political prisoners.
With the cry “Long live Christ the King!” a fascist mob rushed into the tumult. According to testimony in the summary, Ruiz confronted an oversized man, 6 feet tall, who was threatening a girl with a metal glove with spikes and a chain. “Take your weapon and kill me,” he encouraged the attacker with two stones in his hands. José Ignacio Fernández Guaza took a few steps back and snatched a small semi-automatic weapon that some protesters thought was a toy from his accomplice Jorge Cesarsky.
The gunman ran away, jumped over some planters and disappeared near Plaza de Callao. never heard from him again. Fernández Guaza’s partner at the time stated that the shooter left his home the day after the murder with a bag, a raincoat “and maybe a gun.”
Known in transitional ultra circles as Posturas or Frutero, the gunman who took Ruiz’s life made a living during his leadership years by managing nightclubs such as Mogambo in Madrid.
Cesarsky, the only person convicted in the case – six years in prison for terrorism and illegal possession of weapons, of which he served only one – had come to Spain in 1962 on the pretext of giving rugby lessons. There are no records of his teaching activities. “He maintains contacts with people associated with Peronism,” reads the summary of this former member of the fearsome Triple A, who boasted of ties to the Franco police to whom he sold health insurance. His agenda shows that he was in direct contact with the Paraguayan ambassadors of the dictator Alfredo Stroessner in Madrid and the leaders of the Fuerza Nueva.
Manuel Ruiz, the brother of the murdered man, feels abandoned. “No political party, whether right, left or center, was interested in us. We had to move forward. “We continue to insist that justice be done for my brother, who is considered a victim of terrorism,” the family member said.
Ruiz’s murder ushered in the Black Week of Transition. Seven days of lead like a powder keg about to blow up the arrival of democracy. Following the death of the young student, five labor lawyers associated with PCE and CC OO were shot at close range by a fascist commando in a law firm on Atocha Street in Madrid. The Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups (GRAPO), which held the President of the Council of State, Antonio María de Oriol y Urquijo, kidnapped on October 1st Lieutenant General Emilio Villaescusa, President of the Supreme Council of Military Justice. And during a protest demonstration over Ruiz’s murder, 20-year-old politics and sociology student Mari Luz Nájera died from the impact of a police smoke canister.
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