25 years without Ana Orantes, the sexist murder that shook Spain

Strongly and bravely, he denounced the beatings and humiliations he suffered during his stay. fate relationship. He did this while he was already free, on the conditions that accumulated grievances provided him. separation by court order, but the decision forced him to continue living with her. Despite being on different floors in the same house.

Canal Sur program left dozens of messages on the ‘De tarde en tarde’ answering machine. If he left, he would help other women and also protect himself. He got it. Before the red light went on, he told then-host Irma Soriano: chat program. “I report and nothing happens. Even when I say this publicly here… There will be a lot of people. He won’t dare do anything to me anymore.”

Thirteen days later, on December 17, her partner took her own life. Main Orantes He was burned alive in his home in Granada.after being brutally beaten. A heinous crime that left its mark on Spain’s before and after, arousing the social conscience, and putting a face, a name, hers, to the word ill-treatment, gender-based violence.

first hit

He started talking and started from the beginning. Ana and her ex-husband got married at the age of 19 while they were in a three-month relationship. “My father told me: That man is unsuitable. Let him go, I don’t like him for you,” she told me. The wedding has come, it is far from beautiful to ask for a hand, it announces the horror.

Sitting down and drinking a soda, he said: “Look, I told everyone that you’re already lost. If you want to come, you can come, if you don’t… But I I will voice that you are like that and that no other man can love you.”. Anna agreed to marry.

She lied, “I went home as a young girl (virgin). She lived with him at her mother-in-law’s house for three years and was forced to call them “Mom and Dad.” “The first night I thought: Where did I find myself?The step had already been taken, it couldn’t have done more (you have to look back 65 years).

She became a wife and servant. “My mother-in-law had a maid, but she fired her when I arrived.” From then on, Ana would take care of her. At home, on a ground floor, there was no place to hang clothes, so she was going to and from her mother’s real home. “First glove He came back with the laundry”. He had to walk and it was too far. It was too late for her husband.

“He ran away, I said I’m here when I came, he didn’t answer. He slapped me like the slap they gave to God.. I screamed because I thought I broke my face.” They were married for three months.

As the days passed, Ana begged him for forgiveness. “His father, who was defending me at the time, slapped him, for which I apologized.” He didn’t say anything. “He looked at me and spat.”

“You don’t know how to read”

His testimony is filled with suffering: “you are worthless”, “you do not know how to speak”. The physical and mental attacks he describes are not painless. “Then the beatings came. Grab my hair, hit the wall. I couldn’t speak because I couldn’t read or write, because I was worthless. I mean… forty years.”

His children were born, he had eleven children, three of whom would die. “He came in drunk and did not comply with the quarantine.” Alcohol, women and gambling were his model. “To come, he beat me up. Because that glass was like that, it didn’t have to be like that. If the chair was here, the chair wouldn’t need to be here…”.

His routine is always the same: work, drink, humiliate, hit. “It was to leave the workshop and go to the tavern. Come drunk, he’s lost,” said the woman.

“If I tell you, you will die”

His story occupied most of the program. The serious Irma Soriano gave way to advertising; After that, Orantes continued. after one of the breaks One of the harshest statements came. mom He described a near-death beating in which he revived him so that he could hit him again. She also described how one of her daughters – all of whom were victims of the man – jumped when her father “touched her thighs”. so that you don’t hit it later.

“One day I came from shopping and a neighbor told me: Your daughter is in the sanatorium, she drank a bottle of pills. I went out to see what happened. The doctor said to me: The girl had told him that she couldn’t tell me anything because she knew that her father had touched her and that her father had killed me. Then beatings”. She was not mistaken, Ana asked her husband for an explanation, they argued.He hit me. I told my daughter that if she did anything, I would complain. And I was going to put him in jail.”

children present in every blow, in every beating. One day the woman said she hit him in front of everyone because they didn’t believe it. The boy was returning from the doctor because he had a fever.

“While I was sitting and waiting to give him a shot, a lady came and said to me, ‘Mother, I saw your husband now shirtless, crazy, protruding.. “Oh, it’s killing me today,” I told him. ‘Woman, if you haven’t done anything,’ she replied…” At five o’clock in the evening, when she entered the house with all the children lined up in front of her, “she took the child from my lap. . He dropped the meds and stepped on them. He messed with me, beat me to death. That I didn’t go to the doctor, that I slept with all the men from Albaicín (Granada)“.

“Oh, not having danced”

Perhaps the most difficult scene Ana recounted was after a dance on the occasion of the Corpus Christi celebration. He went on his first vacation alone. According to some relatives, dancing all night with a woman “I’m old, I’m ugly, I can’t go”.

On the second day, he took Ana to the booth. “All his relatives were surprised he took me.” He sat her down as he danced with the woman he had been with the night before: “Stay there, I’ll dance.”

He stole a pass doble, and a cousin who saw him alone invited him to the dance. Anna refused. “Your cousin is killing me, no, no.” “He’s dancing with another woman,” he insisted. To calm her down, the cousin asked her husband’s permission to dance with her. Yes she said. They danced.

“The dance ends at six in the morning,” he explains, “and we started walking… He caught me. in an alley and he grabbed me over the wall with his fists clenched. All the punches were given to my temples. Most of them left me half dead. He gave me mouth to mouth. When I breathed again, he punched me again.” A neighbor who saw him stopped him: “But you are killing your wife! SIf you punch him again, I’ll go to the Civil Guard barracks.”

Canceled, crushed. isolated. Ana secretly saw her family. He was not allowed to talk to anyone. She even forbade her to be a godmother at the wedding of one of her sons. “you’re going out with a guy you don’t know (godfather), for your uncle to rub against you. You have no shame. I can’t be”.

Broadcast has expired. After the difficult, shocking story, Ana spoke and smiled, hoping for a new life.

society has failed

Fifteen days later, her ex-husband dragged her to the open veranda of the house where Cúllar Vega (Granada) lived in the municipality of Granada. He beat him almost unconsciously, tied him to a chair, poured gasoline on him and set him on fire. Then he fled, then he would surrender.

The next day, in the same program that the woman went to on the screen, Irma Soriano expressed herself as follows: “Ana Orantes came to visit us using her freedom. She was sitting next to us at this time. Ask for help. She had endured physical and mental violence for 40 years(…) She said she wanted to come and share her testimony. To tell. A life that ended yesterday at noon, society sank. . We failed the mother. She died yesterday. Her husband killed her.”