The Ortega Lara case, 532 days in a dungeon: interview with Dr. José Cabrera

A citizen was held in a dungeon for 532 days. We interviewed psychiatrist José Cabrera.

The kidnapping of José Antonio Ortega Lara (1958, Montuenga, Spain) by the terrorist group ETA shocked an entire country.

Ortega Lara worked humbly as a prison officer. He was kidnapped in January 1996 by a commando of the terrorist organization ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna).Euskadi Ta Askatasuna). His captors surprised him near his car, in the garage of his own home, when he was about to go to his place of work. At that moment, two individuals, at gunpoint, forced him into a kind of sarcophagus located in the trunk of a van. In complete darkness, he was taken to a hiding place from which he would not come out for a long time.

Forced to remain in a hole for 532 interminable days.

Shortly thereafter, the terrorist group announced the kidnapping in the state media. It asked, in exchange for Ortega's release, that the organization's prisoners be brought closer to the prisons of the Basque Country. Basque Country. As expected, this demand was ignored by the Ministry of the Interior, then headed by Jaime Mayor Oreja.

The Spanish State did not agree to the terrorists' demands, so Ortega Lara was held indefinitely in an underground hole built in an abandoned industrial building in the Gipuzkoa town of Mondragón. Locked in that dark cage, Ortega Lara remained living, without the possibility of leaving for a single moment, in a cell in which he could hardly move, with terrible humidity, without any contact with the outside world and with the constant threat that the terrorists would decide to execute him. Despite the fact that all circumstances seemed to work against a desperate and increasingly emaciated Ortega Lara, the police managed to tighten the siege on the perpetrators of his kidnapping and captivity, to the point where the captors confessed the location of the hideout where Ortega Lara was being held. He was released in July 1997, a year and a half after the day he was kidnapped.

Documentary on the Ortega Lara case

If you want to know all the details of the case and the experiences lived by José Antonio Ortega Lara, don't miss this documentary made by TeleMadrid.

Interview with Dr. José Cabrera Forneiro, Forensic Psychiatrist

One of the people who knows this case best is Dr. José Cabrera Forneiro, a renowned forensic psychiatrist and a regular in the media in our country.

We wanted to share a conversation with him about the case of José Antonio Ortega Lara, not only because of the social impact it caused, but also because of everything related to the mental health of an individual who had to endure, literally, hell in life. Dr. Cabrera is one of the people who best knows what happened and what the kidnapped man had to live through, and he does not conceal the torrent of emotions that we all suffer when recalling this gruesome event in the history of Spain.

Bertrand Regader: Good morning, Dr. Cabrera. It is an honor to be able to share this space with you in order to analyze the case of the kidnapping of Ortega Lara. Twenty years have passed since José Antonio Ortega Lara was kidnapped and held by ETA. How did Spanish society experience those moments? What are your personal feelings when you recall this murky episode?

Dr. José CabreraSpanish society puts up with everything, especially when the news is in the media and "far from us". That episode was lived as one more addition to the cloud of attacks, threats and extortions of the moment, we could say that it was almost lived in a state of anesthesia, and it was more the energy of the Security Forces and the media than the social fabric.

My personal feeling was one of disgust towards the merciless kidnappers who were fighting for an unjust cause by beating a simple civil servant.

We are talking about a person who was held against his will in an uninhabitable cell, with no possibility of leaving and knowing that, most probably, ETA was going to assassinate him one day or another. How does a human being face an existence with these terrible conditions and what psychological characteristics helped Ortega Lara to endure such a long time?

Throughout history, human beings have endured the most terrible tortures, punishments, revenge and situations, voluntarily or involuntarily, only the survival instinct has to be applied and a meaning has to be found in order to stay alive.

In the case of Mr. Ortega Lara, three conditioning factors came together to help him: he was a believer, he had a family he loved and wanted to see again, and he was a methodical man with a great inner life, these three were the pivots of his survival.

In an interview granted to TeleMadrid, Ortega Lara confessed to having planned his suicide through various mechanisms, although he never pressed the button. Is it normal for this to happen in cases of prolonged kidnappings?

Suicide is always considered in the face of a final situation of hopelessness in which the suffering can no longer be endured and there is no way out. It is a defense mechanism against sensory and affective deprivation, that is to say "this is as far as I have come".

However, experience tells us that those people who have endured an inhuman captivity almost never commit suicide, and yet after some time these same people, now in freedom, have put an end to their lives, as in the case of Primo Levi, for example. Primo Levi.

After a long ordeal, the police found Ortega Lara's whereabouts and were able to free him. According to Ortega Lara himself, when the civil guard who went to rescue him entered the hideout, the hostage believed that this individual was in fact a disguised terrorist who was going to execute him, in a kind of macabre staging. Why do you think he reacted in this way?

In a state of silence and absence of external referents, only the captive's own ideation intervenes, creating in a compensatory way a life around the few contacts he has with his captors.

In this situation, Mr. Ortega Lara, who was constantly waiting for death, could not understand that suddenly a person in a Guardia Civil uniform appeared to free him, it simply did not fit in his head, and he simply believed that the end had come.

When he was released, Ortega Lara had lost more than 20 kilos, in addition to having his vocal cords and his sense of sight atrophied. We all have in our minds the image of Ortega, emaciated and bearded, walking with the help of his relatives shortly after the rescue. But I suppose that the psychological after-effects were even more terrible and long-lasting.

The physical prostration of captivity usually goes back with the passage of time, it is a matter of using again the muscles, the voice, the sight, the senses... but the psychological impact is another thing.

The feeling of impunity of their captors, the feeling of injustice towards their person, the emptiness of loneliness, the distance from their loved ones, the incomprehension of the facts and the permanent threat of death, modify the personality for life, turning the future into something completely new and different from what is expected of a normal life, and with that and the memories one must continue to live, it is as simple as that.

There is much talk about the moral and psychological fortitude of José Antonio Ortega Lara, and no wonder. What are the mental strengths that an individual must develop to return to normality after living such a calamitous situation?

The first thing is to understand what happened, i.e. to accept that it was a criminal action of a terrorist group that caught him by chance, in order to avoid blame, which is not uncommon in these cases. Secondly, to gradually recover from the physical after-effects, little by little and far away from the hustle and bustle. Thirdly, to abandon oneself in the arms of the people who love you and are the key to your endurance, to enjoy their company, simple conversations, to recount what they have gone through and what captivity has deprived you of.

And finally, let yourself be advised by a medical and/or psychiatric professional to follow a gentle treatment to recompose the alert-sleep cycles and the discouragement generated by the suffering.

Ortega Lara also said that during his captivity he talked to himself, imagined that his wife was with him and pronounced sentences aloud addressed to her. Do you think this is useful in such situations?

Yes, it is definitely very useful to create an imaginary figure to talk to, to accompany us, to keep us hopeful and to mitigate the physical loneliness.

The normal thing is to recreate the person of the closest family, and sometimes not just one but several, to establish complete and dense conversations that fill the endless day and say goodbye to them at bedtime.

I don't want to end the interview without asking him about the other side of the coin. The kidnappers, the terrorists. It only occurs to me to think that holding a person for so long, a simple civil servant without political responsibilities and with a family... can only be explained by the most inhuman fanaticism. Ortega often refers to Bolinaga, the head of the operation, as a poor wretch, a wretch.

They will allow me not to utter a single word about these subjects who stain the concept of human dignity, not a word, may they serve their sentences in solitude and oblivion, it is more than what they offered to their victims.