“Complicity and collaboration with ETA.” The PP deputy Luis Santamaría did not fall short in his accusations against Álvaro García Ortiz, who that hot morning of July 28, 2022 had gone to Congress to pass the mandatory exam before taking office as state attorney general. Conservative media were publishing that the until then number two in the Prosecutor’s Office had ordered that the murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco be declared time-barred. The prosecutor in the case at the National Court, Jesús Alonso, from the conservative Association of Prosecutors (AF), had already published a note denying having received “any type of guidelines.” But the great leaders of the Madrid right continued hammering. And Deputy Santamaría was there to distribute firewood: the new State Prosecutor was collaborating with ETA.
Several hoaxes of this caliber, encouraged by the right in its different avatars – judicial, political and media – They circulated that summer of 2022 to discredit García Ortiz before even promising the position. Since then, two years and almost three months have passed in which the highest representative of the Public Ministry has not enjoyed even a minute of respite until finishing prosecuted by the Supreme Court. The high court had previously dealt him two other rolls to stop his attempts to grant a position to his predecessor in office, Dolores Delgado. Whether due to these annulled decisions or new fabrications about never-proven conspiracies – with ETA or the Catalan independence movement as recurring arguments – the bombardment against the head of the prosecutors has been incessant. Another piece of the brutal political-media combat installed in Madrid.
García Ortiz’s original sin was his status as Delgado’s number two, who landed in the State Prosecutor’s Office in February 2020 with a highly questioned jump from the Ministry of Justice. Unlike her, her career showed an exclusively professional profile. He had been the most voted among his colleagues in all of Spain in elections to the Fiscal Council in 2018, despite running for the minority Progressive Union (UPF), of which he was president and where he became friends with Delgado before she called him to Madrid. Born in Lumbrales (Salamanca) 56 years ago, his career, which began in 1998, was spent mostly in Galicia as chief environmental prosecutor without being entangled in political controversies. It was rather the left that criticized him when in the trial for the disaster of the Prestige He declined to accuse any representative of the PP Government that had managed it.
Until in 2018 he opposed Alberto Núñez Feijóo. The then Galician president had attributed a terrible wave of forest fires to the action of “arsonary terrorism” that put the Xunta in trouble. García Ortiz always rejected theories about ghostly organizations dedicated to burning the mountain. He had already done so in 2007 to contradict excuses similar to Feijóo’s by a government of socialists and nationalists. The PP Xunta took it as case belli. Months later, she reported him to her superiors for supporting a strike by Justice officials.
Scandal over a 2019 panel of experts
The Feijóo team, already installed in Madrid, was able to settle accounts that summer of 2022 in which the Government chose García Ortiz to replace Delgado after her resignation for health reasons. The first reaction of the PP was to denounce with great scandal that the prosecutor had participated in December 2019 in what was described as an “electoral act” of the Galician PSOE. That event, held seven months before the regional elections, had consisted of a round table of independent experts on fires, within a conference organized by the PSdeG.
The prosecutor came on behalf of the UPF after asking permission from the State Prosecutor’s Office. PP leaders and related media turned it into a “socialist electoral rally.” Until ending up nourishing one of the central arguments of the eight conservative members of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) to question the impartiality of García Ortiz and impose, months later, a declaration denying endorsement of his appointment. As now with the Supreme Court investigation, it was the first time this had happened in democratic history. Until then, the CGPJ had limited itself to following the letter of the rule: simply validating that the candidate met the requirements of being a jurist of “recognized prestige” with 15 years of professional experience.
The campaign of that summer of 2022 slipped through a hive of hoaxes. In addition to the “collaboration with ETA,” the great star of Cope mornings, Carlos Herrera, in an astonishing distortion of reality, cried out to his audience (2.8 million listeners at the time): “This new prosecutor He is exactly as sectarian as Mrs. Delgado. He was the guy who, when the ship sank Prestigewanted to impure the entire PP (…). “This sounds like a horse’s head in Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s bed.” ABC dedicated almost its entire cover to revealing that García Ortiz had met secretly in a hotel in Madrid with an Andorran banker who accused the Government of Mariano Rajoy of blackmailing him to provide him with information against Catalan independentists. The two involved, who did not even know each other, flatly denied it. The newspaper refused to publish García Ortiz’s rectification, who took legal action. Two rulings, from a court and from the Madrid Court, have proven that the information was “absolutely false.” The newspaper has appealed and has still not published the rectification. Last Wednesday, ABC editorialized: “García Ortiz, not one more minute.”
The relationship with Delgado placed García Ortiz in the spotlight and is at the origin of the two major setbacks he has suffered during his mandate until the case of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s boyfriend. The Supreme Court annulled two attempts to promote his predecessor promoted by him, one to the Military Room and another to the Democratic Memory of the high court. In the first case, he accused him of having incurred “misuse of power.” According to the five Supreme Court judges who handed down the ruling unanimously, the State Attorney skipped the “criterion of merit” to promote Delgado. As a result of that ruling, the PP sued him for prevarication, but this time the Supreme Court filed it. The popular ones did manage to disapproved it in the Senate, as they have been doing with several ministers in use of their absolute majority in the Upper House. Another unprecedented milestone.
Fantastic newspaper stories about the prosecutor’s shady machinations they have never stopped. And with the PP singing the chorus. His compliance with the amnesty law raised the anger a few notches. They have accused him of ordering the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office to delay the complaint for the Kold caseor until after the general elections (the head of that branch of the Public Ministry, Alejandro Luzón, denied it: “It is totally false”); to impose on a Supreme Court prosecutor a report against accusing Carles Puigdemont of terrorism (the interested party, Álvaro Redondo, from the conservative AF, repeatedly denied it); of having maneuvered not to implicate the leader of EH Bildu, Arnaldo Otegi, in an ETA kidnapping (no such thing ever happened)… Always at the forefront, Federico Jiménez Losantos refers to him in his radio program and in his columns in The World as Alvarone.
Miguel Ángel Rodríguez’s campaign
And last spring, García Ortiz ran into Miguel Ángel Rodríguez. After publishing eldiario.es The tax fraud of Ayuso’s boyfriend, the Madrid president’s man for everything, launched one of her well-known poisoning campaigns. On the night of March 13, he sent several journalists a message in which he assured that the Prosecutor’s Office had offered an agreement to Ayuso’s partner, Alberto González Amador, if he admitted having committed two crimes, but that the agreement had been frustrated. by orders from above.” “Everything dirty,” he concluded. Shortly after, he disclosed it urbi et orbi on social network X. The World was quick to publish the alleged offer, including one of the emails between the Prosecutor’s Office and González Amador’s lawyer. Behind were Digital Freedom, Vozpópuli and The Debatewho assumed the thesis that everything had stopped “by orders from above.”
The reality was exactly the opposite: it was Ayuso’s boyfriend who admitted the crimes and requested the agreement. García Ortiz gave orders that this be made known to defend the actions of the Prosecutor’s Office. From then on, Ayuso and Rodríguez went after him. After the complaint against the prosecutor for revealing secrets, which has culminated in the case opened in the Supreme Court, Ayuso’s chief of staff left a threatening message on April 23 in X: “I have a feeling that the State Attorney General will end up in jail.” On the 7th, an anxious Rodríguez anticipated to announce the indictment of García Ortiz: “It’s going forward.” He and his boss were able to claim victory last Wednesday, with that same war cry: “Come on!”. And Rodríguez, emboldened, double the humbug: “If it is proven that the attorney general stopped the operation and refused the agreement, where is the hoax? “Banana Republic with B for Begoña”.
