The Netflix premiere of The Asunta Case has recovered from media oblivion one of the most chilling crimes in the history of our country. In 2013, Rosario Porto and her ex-husband, Basque journalist Alfonso Basterra, murdered her daughter, Asunta Basterra, and tried to make authorities believe that they had absolutely nothing to do with the case.
The parents reported the disappearance of the girl and, after a few hours of investigation, the Police found Asunta’s lifeless body on the margins of a forest road, near a family country house that the family had on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela.
The reconstruction of the events offered by Porto (as well as Basterra) did not convince the professionals in charge of the investigation, which is why they arrested both. After a difficult phase of investigation, the couple faced a trial and, after two years of preventive detention, in 2015, they were sentenced to 18 years in prison for having killed their daughter.
A few years ago, Carmen, an inmate who was in A Lama prison (Pontevedra) with the Galician lawyer, spoke about her in a La Vanguardia podcast and expressed that she was a woman with two faces: ”For one On the one hand she was super good, super kind, affectionate… and on the other hand she had tremendous evil, she manipulated officials, she manipulated inmates… She tried to harm the inmates, always within her responsibility.”
During her stay in the Pontevedra prison (one of the three in which she was), Porto denounced several prisoners for sexually harassing her and for giving her humiliating treatment. However, Carmen assured in the aforementioned podcast episode that it was Porto that had a “tendency toward exhibitionism.”
”She has even hurt colleagues from other modules, accusing them of harassing her and that they were saying humiliating things to her when she herself was the one who was shaking her butt in front of them, undressing in front of the window on the bed, putting on a bra or even without a bra to change out of her pajamas when she knew that module 1 and 2 of that prison could see her through the window and then she complained about it. What she did seems truly barbaric to me,’ said Carmen.
After two failed attempts to take her own life, Porto committed suicide in November 2020. On the other hand, her ex-husband, Alfonso Basterra, is still serving the prison sentence imposed on him in 2015.
Throughout these last few years, Asunta’s parents have maintained their version of events and have defined themselves as ”innocent” of the terrible crime that ended the life of the girl of Chinese origin. Porto died defending her ‘truth’ until the end.
