The Spanish Falange de las Jons had placed some of its most notorious militants on its electoral lists for the Basque capitals, but these ballots will not finally be at the polls on May 28. The Electoral Board has declared the lists of this party in Bilbao, Donostia/San Sebastián and Vitoria-Gasteiz “not proclaimed”. Consequently, the far-right Carlos García Juliá, one of the perpetrators of the massacre of Atocha lawyers, will not be able to attend the elections in the Biscayan capital.
Neither can Martín Sáenz de Ynestrillas, candidate in San Sebastián; nor Norberto Pico Sanabria, head of the list in Vitoria-Gasteiz. The reason is that the respective electoral boards have detected multiple errors in the lists and the Falange has not solved them in time.
The main errors have to do with the presence of on these lists of names that had also been presented in other towns as candidates for the municipal elections. Sources from the Vitoria Electoral Board have explained to EFE that the far-right party had presented its candidacies, but decided to withdraw them when required to correct the irregularities.
In this way, García Juliá will not be able to be mayor of the Falange in Bilbao, as this party had announced. The one who was going to be the head of the list in the Biscayan capital participated in the Atocha attacks 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 Serafín Holgado; and the administrative Ángel Rodríguez Leal. It was one of the crimes that marked the Transition.
García Juliá 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. The convicted person 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.
García 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 Vitoria-Gasteiz, the list of the Spanish Falange of the JONS was headed by its national leader since 2011, Norberto Pico Sanabria.
In Donostia/San Sebastian the head of the list was Martin Saenz de Ynestrillas Perez, son of ETA-assassinated commander Ricardo Saenz de Ynestrillas Martinez and brother of Ricardo Saenz de Ynestrillas Perez, prosecuted for the 1989 murder of HB deputy Josu Muguruza.
