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LATE deputy president of Spain Alfredo Pérez-Rubalcaba has been awarded the highest distinctions within the National Police and Guardia Civil – two forces he was leader of for five years.
Interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska and defence minister Margarita Robles presented these awards to Rubalcaba's widow, Pilar Goya, in recognition of her husband's ground-breaking work between April 2006 and July 2011, when he was in Marlaska's rôle.
Minister under the then socialist (PSOE) president of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Rubalcaba (pictured above) – who died within hours of British comedian Freddie Starr - is credited with the dissolution of Basque-based terrorist organisation ETA, which had been active since the early 1970s and whose last major attack was the blast at Madrid airport Terminal 4 car park, killing two people, on December 30, 2006.
ETA had carried out a couple of smaller bombings since then, in summer 2009, one of which targeted a police car in Palmanova, Mallorca.
Constant, ongoing police swoops, investigations and arrests fuelled by Rubalcaba as interior minister led to ETA cells being busted one after the other at breakneck speed – so fast that the organisation did not have time to pull itself together or re-band in between them.
Major Commando leaders, such as Mikel Garikoitz Aspiazu, or 'Txeroki', Aitzol Iriondo, Judan Martitegi, Ibon Gogeascoetxa, and Mikel Carrera, found themselves in custody in quick succession between 2008 and 2010.
Substantially weakened, the last remaining ETA members realised the organisation was no longer viable, announced a permanent ceasefire in the autumn of 2011, and within the next two years had handed in all its weapons and officially declared its closure.
October 20 is the anniversary of ETA's final statement, when it said it would no longer be involved in any armed activity, and the Basque regional government says it 'thinks of' Rubalcaba on this day every year.
Rubalcaba was also Zapatero's second-in-command, and became PSOE leader from just before the November 2011 general elections – which the party lost, to its direct rival, the right-wing PP – after Zapatero decided not to run as president again and stepped down.
But after poor results in the European Parliamentary elections in May 2014, Rubalcaba took personal responsibility and resigned, putting Pedro Sánchez at the helm.
Sánchez has now been president of Spain since June 2018 – for the first 18 months, following a no-confidence vote against the PP and its head and national leader Mariano Rajoy, and then elected after the country went to the polls in November 2019.
Margarita Robles said Rubalcaba was 'not just your average politician', but 'a Statesman' who 'loved his party, but put the State and Spain before it'.
Marlaska said Rubalcaba's legacy was 'indelible' and that as a minister he was 'unrivalled'.
Pilar Goya took her husband's posthumous Gold Medal for Police Merit, for his major part in the breakdown of ETA and his overwhelming support for national security forces in cracking crime, and the Great Cross of the Order of Merit of the Guardia Civil, for the same reasons, and also for his having spearheaded a maximum level of witness and victim protection and victim redress during the ETA swoops.
Rubalcaba's wife said 'Alfredo would have been deeply grateful and proud' to receive the two honours, the highest possible in either force, and that he 'always felt a great deal of respect, admiration and affection' for both.
Aged just 67, Alfredo Pérez-Rubalcaba was rushed to the Puerta de Hierro Hospital in the Madrid-region commuter town of Majadahonda, where he lived, on the evening of May 8, 2019.
He had suffered a massive stroke and underwent emergency surgery to disperse a blood clot on his brain, but his condition grew worse and he passed away on the afternoon of May 10.
Earlier that morning, the veteran presenter of UK TV talent show Opportunity Knocks, Freddie Starr, had died at his home villa in Mijas (Málaga province) aged 76, from a suspected heart attack, meaning that for Spain and especially its British expats, the comedian's name and that of Rubalcaba will always be linked.
Rubalcaba is one of three high-profile ministers of Zapatero's government who have died in the past five years – defence minister José Antonio Alonso lost his battle with lung cancer on February 2, 2017, and on April 9 that year, his successor Carme Chacón, Spain's first-ever female to take on the rôle, passed away suddenly aged 46 through complications linked to a congenital heart condition she had been diagnosed with at 10 years old.
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