Mikel Zabalza Garate, also known as Mikel Zabaltza Garate, (Orbaizeta, – Intxaurrondo barracks, San Sebastián, November 26, 1985) was a Basque bus driver, and employee of the San Sebastian Municipal Trolley Service. In 1985, he appeared dead in the river Bidasoa. After 35 years of inaction by the Spanish tribunals, it was concluded that Zabalza died as result of torture inflicted on him by Civil Guard operatives at the headquarters of Intxaurrondo in San Sebastián.
Detention and murder
On the night of November 26, 1985, agents of the Information Service of the Spanish Guardia Civil detained Zabalza in the Altza neighborhood of San Sebastían, where he lived. The operation took place as part of an antiterrorist operation after ETA committed a fatal attack against two officers of the Spanish Army and a Guardia Civil agent. During that operation, Zabalza's partner, Idoia Ajerdi (Idoia Aierbe), his cousin Manuel Vizcay (Manolo Bizkai) and the student Ion Arretxe were also detained. They later declared they had been tortured during 8 days of detention in the barracks, but these cases did not succeed in the courts.
In Orbaizeta, two of Zabalza's brothers, Patxi and Aitor, were also detained and then released after 10 days. A few days later, Zabalza's mother, noticing that all of the detainees had been released except for her son, went to the barracks to ask about his situation and the civil guard at the door responded that if she had lost a son, she should go to the "lost and found". Years later, in 2016, this cynical response became the name of a report about the case.
A few days later, the authorities responsible for Zabalza's police custody announced that he had escaped by jumping into the river Bidasoa at the point where it passes through the town of Endarlatsa, in the municipality of Lesaka, when he was being driven to identify an ETA hideout, which was never found. On December 15, twenty days after his detention, his handcuffed body appeared, in the channel of the stretch of the Bidasoa where he allegedly disappeared. It was precisely in this place where people had looked for him daily and where the Red Cross had halted the search the day before.
According to the newspaper El Mundo (2004), some witnesses said that the young Basque man had been subjected to an intense interrogation and his death was caused by the "bathtub" method of torture, in which the detainee is submerged in a bathtub full of water, making it almost impossible for him to breathe, in an attempt to get a statement from him.
With respect to his alleged activity within ETA, both the Basque armed organization as well as the Spanish Minister of the Interior, Jose Barrionuevo, denied he had ever been a member or collaborator.
Trial
The Guardia Civil agents responsible for his custody (lieutenants Gonzalo Pérez García and Arturo Espejo Valero, and the guard Fernando Castañeda Valls) were prosecuted during the first phase of the investigation. Nevertheless, in 1988, the Guipúscoa Local Court closed the case due to lack of evidence. Pérez García was later promoted to colonel. In 1985, the journalist José Macca, at Diario 16, published the confession of the former Guardia Civil agent Vicente Soria asserting that he had seen Zabalza's corpse in an elevator in the Intxaurrondo barracks.
After several journalistic investigations that indicated that the actual cause of his death was torture, the case was reopened. This time, in 2000, the smuggler Pedro Luis Miguéliz Dabadie («Txofo») testified in a trial in San Sebastián that the former Guardia Civil Enrique Dorado Villalobos had told him that Zabaltza had died in the barracks during the detention, after torture inflicted by himself and the also former agent Felipe Bayo Leal, both of whom were convicted first in the Lasa and Zabala case. Regardless, the judge decided that there still wasn't enough evidence to convict them, and closed the case. In addition, a recording came to light between the former colonel Juan Alberto Perote and the captain Pedro Gómez Nieto, in which they say: