On April 26, Netflix premiered The Asunta Case on its platform, a series based on the crime that ended the life of the 12-year-old girl Asunta Basterra Porto. The murder occurred in 2013 in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, however, the success of the fiction has made the crime once again a topical topic and makes hundreds of headlines in national and international media.
At first, the girl’s parents reported her disappearance, but when the authorities found the body and collected some evidence they became the main suspects in the crime.
After two years of preventive detention, in 2015, the former couple was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the murder of their daughter. Porto spent seven years locked up, but in November 2020 she couldn’t take it anymore and took her own life in her cell. For her part, Basterra remains behind bars.
The fiction starring Candela Peña, María León, Tristán Ulloa and Javier Gutiérrez, among others, has placed crime on the front line of the media. On the other hand, the series does not tell everything that happened nor does it include one hundred percent of the details that occurred around the case.
As expected, the project has generated criticism from some social media users, who have expressed their discomfort at seeing how an audiovisual company profits from a terrible crime in which a minor died: ”No way of respect for the victim”, ”The series is completely unnecessary, bad taste and morbid”, ”What was the need to do this?”, etc.
As we have mentioned, there are elements that were taken into account for the trial and that, for different reasons, do not appear in the series. The TikTok account ‘Cinespoiler’ has rescued from oblivion a controversial poem that the girl wrote in Galician about her mother.
”My mother is greedy, but she is not precious. She is short, but not nice. She sings terribly, she cooks with salt. She eats worse, she drinks better. She has little flexibility, but a lot of age. She doesn’t know how to talk, but she can scold. She knows how to scream, but not rave,’ the girl wrote before being murdered. It should be noted that the almost teenager also had a blog on the Internet in which she talked about spirits, ghosts and all kinds of paranormal phenomena in Santiago de Compostela.
