User:Fer1997/Enrique Ruano

Enrique Ruano Casanova (Madrid; 7 July 1947-Ib.; 20 de enero de 1969) was a Spanish Law student and activist, killed under the custody of the Political-Social Brigade, the secret police of the Francoist regime. His death created a wave of political turmoil that led to widespread protests and their subsequent political repression by means of the declaration of a state of emergency.

Biography
Enrique Ruano Casanova, a Law student at the Complutense University of Madrid and a member of the Popular Liberation Front (FELIPE), an anti-Francoist opposition group, was killed on 20 January 1969, thrown from the window of a seventh-floor apartment at 60 General Mola Street (now 68 Príncipe de Vergara Street) in Madrid by agents of the Brigada Político Social (BPS), the regime's secret police, who had arrested him three days before the events took place. He was under the custody of BPS inspectors Francisco Luis Colino Hernández, Jesús Simón Cristóbal and Celso Galván Abascal.

1969 was a year of political turmoil in Spain, in continuation of the worldwide 1968 protests. A wave of workers' and students' strikes in the days after the assassination of Ruano led to the institution of a state of emergency with restrictions to political rights and stricter censorship of the press that lasted for three months.

According to official sources, Enrique Ruano was arrested on 17 January 1969 for distributing pro-union propaganda on the street, and put under custody in a police station. He was taken to his apartment three days later in order to conduct a search for other materials. It was in that moment when, according to the official account of the events, Ruano jumped off the window of his flat, located on the building's seventh floor. "The corpse is lying on the floor, its arms shrugged and the legs bent towards the body; a poodle of blood is located on the right side of its head… [The victim] wore white underwear, a navy blue sweater, grey trousers, green socks and a brown pair of shoes." The death of Ruano was widely considered as an assassination by the anti-Francoist opposition, and a series of protests took place to denounce it. They were supported by other intellectuals in this position, which gained credibility as the contradictions of the police statements became more evident.

The events were officially presented as a case of suicide, with Ruano starting to run and jumping off the window during the police search. The secret police fabricated a diary that associated the student with suicidal thoughts. Manuel Jiménez Quílez, Director-General of the Press in the Ministry of Information and Tourism, under the authority of Manuel Fraga Iribarne, ordered ABC, a conservative newspaper with connections to the Monarchist faction of the regime, to prepare a news report, written by journalist Alfredo Semprún, to legitimise the government's account of Ruano's death. Fraga himself threatened his family with retaliation if they continued protesting Enrique's death, including a warning about the safety of one of his sisters. Fraga denounced the Ruano campaign as part of a wider attempt to declare him a persona non grata in academic circles.

By the time Ruano's family managed to reopen the investigation on Enrique's death in 1996, those accused of assassinating him were acquitted as the body had been manipulated, with the clavicle, suspected to lodge the bullet that killed Ruano, being removed. New evidence obtained during the proceedings also revealed that most of the diary entries published were based on fragments of a confidential letter Ruano sent to his psychiatrist, Carlos Castilla del Pino, with all greetings omitted. Castilla del Pino himself considered this fabrication 'dastardly', and his testimony cast doubt on the suicide hypothesis. Other re-evaluations of forensic evidence deemed the lesions incompatible with a freefall.

Aftermath
Ruano's death did not have a significant impact on the anti-Francoist movement, with most of the protests being concentrated in university groups. The case was promptly closed and attempts to reopen it failed until the Supreme Court ruled in favour of doing so upon the request of the student's family in 1994. Those suspected of killing Ruano weren't prosecuted until 1996, 27 years after the death took place. By that point, and although there were testimonies of press manipulation in the proceedings, most evidence was tampered to the point that a successful prosecution was not viable, and the agents were acquitted. In spite of this, the Court ruled that Ruano had not been properly treated in police custody, although this was inconsequential to the fate of the accused, who were rewarded for their conduct by the Francoist regime a month after the death of the student.

According to tradeunionist José Luis Úriz's account of police repression in the book Peleando a la contra, the police made jokes about the death of Ruano during interrogatories and torture sessions. He claims that Inspector Antonio González Pacheco, known as Billy el niño, bragged about his ability to justify the deaths of prisoners by throwing them off the window of police stations, as had been the case with Ruano.

The death of Ruano, a student of the Colegio del Pilar, led to the politicisation of one of his classmates, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, who would become a known Socialist politician in various Spanish governments after the end of the Francoist dictatorship.