Rodolfo Ares dies, leading PSE-EE leader in the last two decades
- Rodolfo Ares dies after a long illness. Participation in negotiations between the PSE-EE, the PNV and Batasuna 2005 and 2007. He was an Interior Minister of the Basque Government of Patxi López, and he was at the center of discussions, such as the complaint against lawyer Alfonso Zenon, who said that the Ertzaintza tortured (he was then acquitted and so collected by the report of the Basque Institute of Criminology). When in 2012 the Ertzaintza murdered Iñigo Cabacas during a pelotazo, among other things, he said witnesses were lying to justify the autonomic police.
He was born in Galicia in 1954, in Ourense, and very young man moved to Bilbao to live with his family.
In 2009, Patxi López was appointed Interior Minister of the Basque Government in his term of office. Shortly after taking office, he began a conflicting campaign against photographs of Basque political prisoners and prisoners, sending them from village to village to the Ertzaintza to eliminate them. Ares has been defined as the "hard core" of López's cabinets, a role that also played when the peace dialogues initiated by Jesús Egiguren and Arnaldo Otegi became political negotiations with the integrated PNV. The witnesses later told in the book by Loyola Hegiak of journalist Imanol Murua that Ares was the member of the PSE negotiating team in permanent contact with the Minister of the Interior, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, of the Spanish Government, informing about the conduct of the interviews.
Following the attack on Madrid airport, about to break the negotiations, Rodolfo Ares was in Geneva talking to the delegations of ETA and Batasuna, with international monitors.
"His great personal struggle was to end ETA and it was too early to reach agreements," said Andoni Unzalu in the Basque Country. In the legislature of Patxi López, Unzalu was responsible for communication of cabinets.
Peeled torture
When he took office in the Basque Government, he was asked in Parliament to record the Ertzaintza questionnaires to avoid risks of torture. He was against, stating that this was a practice that came from the time of Javier Balza of the PNV and that he did not consider "necessary".
When attorney Alfonso Zenon publicly stated that the Ertzaintza tortured, Rodolfo Ares was an internal government counselor and sued the lawyer for insults. Years later, the Bizkaia Court acquitted Zeno and soon after, in the report of the Basque Institute of Criminology for the Basque Government, it was found that the Ertzaintza had tortured many citizens.
Head of the Cabacas case
As the head of the Interior Department of the Government, one of the darkest events was the murder of Athletic Iñigo Cabacas follower. Counsellor Ares took over the management of the case, and soon justified the intervention of the Ertzaintza and stated that the witnesses’ testimonies were false. However, when the autopsy showed that Cabacas died during a pelotazo, Ares stated that the death of the young man could be negligent or an accident, but stressed that, in any case, the Ertzaintza's act could not be endangered by one excess or error.
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