One of the perpetrators of the massacre of labor lawyers from Atocha, which left five murdered and four injured, will be head of the list of the Spanish Falange of the JONS in Bilbao. Carlos GarcÃa Juliá, sentenced to 193 years and who, despite having fled from justice, barely turned 14, is running as a candidate for mayor in the Biscayan capital, where this formation achieved 41 votes four years ago.
GarcÃa Juliá participated in the attacks in Atocha when he was only 22 years old and was one of the ultra-rightists who assassinated, on January 24, 1977, the labor lawyers Enrique Valdelvira Ibáñez, Luis Javier Benavides Orgaz and Francisco Javier Sauquillo; Law student SerafÃn Holgado; and the administrative Ãngel RodrÃguez Leal. It was one of the crimes that marked the Transition
The head of the list of the Falange in Bilbao was one of the four convicted in 1980 for the crimes and, in fact, he and José Fernández Cerra received the highest sentences: 193 years in prison. GarcÃa Juliá only served 14 years of the sentence that had been imposed on him. In 1991 he was paroled and shortly after obtained permission to travel to South America on a job offer and, although the permission was later revoked, he did not return to Spain.
GarcÃa Juliá had more than ten years of his sentence to serve, although for the next quarter century he lived as a fugitive from justice in Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina or the United States. He was finally found in Brazil, where he was sentenced to six years in prison for drug trafficking. On February 7, 2020, he was extradited to Spain to serve his remaining 3,855 days, which would have kept him in prison until 2030.
The court, however, applied several settlements for extraordinary redemption based on the time he had spent in prison in Brazil for other convictions. Nine months after his return to Spain he was released.
In addition to GarcÃa Juliá, the Falange has chosen to place well-known ultra-rightists as heads of the list in the Basque capitals. In Vitoria-Gasteiz, the list of the Spanish Falange of the JONS is headed by its national leader since 2011, Norberto Pico Sanabria.
In Donostia/San Sebastian the head of the list is Martin Saenz de Ynestrillas Perez, son of ETA-assassinated commander Ricardo Saenz de Ynestrillas Martinez and brother of Ricardo, prosecuted for the 1989 murder of HB deputy Josu Muguruza,
