The terrible murder of the 12-year-old girl Asunta Basterra Porto at the hands of her parents in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, has returned to the news 11 years later due to the premiere on Netflix of a fiction about the crime: The Asunta case.
The streaming platform has published a miniseries about the case, making it known worldwide how Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra tried to manipulate the authorities by reporting the disappearance of their daughter until they were arrested for presenting inconsistencies in their stories, among other things.
Just a few hours after notifying police officers of her disappearance, the little girl’s lifeless body appeared on the slope of a forest road located a few kilometers from a family country house. Incriminating evidence towards the parents was found on said property, which is why they were formally accused and sent to jail.
After two years of preventive detention, in 2015, Basterra and Porto were sentenced to 18 years in prison. Currently, the Basque journalist is still serving his sentence in the Teixeiro prison, A Coruña. For his part, Porto could not withstand the pressure and committed suicide in his cell in November 2020. It should be noted that he never admitted to the crime and that he took his own life while ensuring that he was innocent.
Over the last few days, thanks to the social exposure that the series starring Candela Peña and Tristán Ulloa has given to the case, different people from the family’s environment have come out to talk about the convicts. Some former prison companions are also participating in television programs and interviews.
Yesterday, during the broadcast of the TardeAR program, a couple (Manuel and Carmen) who shared prison with Alfonso Basterra and Rosario Porto told viewers what they were like in their routine in prison.
Regarding Basterra, Manuel explained that he was a very reserved man and that he had a clear emotional dependence on Porto, as he expressed that the crime for which he had entered prison was very frowned upon among the inmates and that, for this reason, he was not related with almost no one.
Regarding Asunta’s mother, the woman explained that, when she arrived at the prison, she became a target of attacks by the rest of the inmates, who threatened to physically attack her and made her afraid.
However, Carmen assured in the Telecinco program presented by Ana Rosa Quintana that when she met Porto she found a woman who was “manipulative to the extreme”, “egocentric” and “capricious”: “I wanted to to always be the center of attention, if it wasn’t done the way she wanted or she tried to harm her in some way or she would leave crying.”
