The fugitive murderer of the Atocha massacre, Carlos García Juliá, is running for municipal elections
The far-right Carlos García Juliá, one of the perpetrators of the massacre of the Atocha lawyers and a fugitive from justice for decades, has become a candidate for the municipal elections for the mayor of Bilbao, where he is running as the head of the list on the ballot of the Spanish Falange of the JONS (Faith of the JONS).
The massacre perpetrated by García Juliá and his two accomplices -José Fernández Cerrá and Francisco Albadalejo- during the night of January 24, 1977 resulted in the death of five labor lawyers and four wounded. The original objective of the attack was the communist leader, Joaquín Navarro, although they began to open fire indiscriminately. The one who years later would become mayoress of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, survived the attack by chance, since she exchanged her office with Juan Luís Benavides.
The event shocked the country and contributed to tense the political climate at a crucial moment, when Spain was trying to leave behind the Franco dictatorship and move towards democracy.
Born in 1954, García Juliá was barely 22 years old at the time and he was a young far-right militant who worked as a delivery boy.. A figure who to this day continues to be the subject of debates among criminologists and historians speculate about whether he was a fanatical fascist murderer or a young man manipulated by Francoist embers who saw themselves threatened by the democratic transition process..
Today, at 68 years of age, he has decided to remain faithful to his fascist ideology by leading the Falangist candidacy for Bilbao, a constituency in which it is virtually impossible for him to be elected since this party obtained 41 votes in the last elections in which he stood..
The trial against García Juliá and his accomplices took place in 1980. He was sentenced to 193 years in prison for five murders and four attempted murders.. In 1991, after serving only 14 years of his sentence, he took advantage of a prison permit to flee to Latin America, where he evaded the action of Spanish justice for decades..
In 2018 he was located and arrested in Brazil, which extradited him to Spain in 2020 to serve the remainder of his sentence. According to the original calculations, he still had 10 years of imprisonment left. However, months later he was released.
“They [the victims] will be the ones who have to forgive me” because “I already asked for forgiveness a long time ago,” said the murderer and candidate for mayor of Bilbao.