The Ortega Lara case, in the eyes of psychiatrist José Cabrera

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

Ortega Lara humbly worked as a prison official. He was kidnapped in January 1996 by a commando from the terrorist organization ETA (Basque Country Ta Askatasuna). The captors surprised him near his car, in the garage of his own house, when he was preparing 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 stay in a hole for 532 endless days

Shortly after, the terrorist group announced responsibility for the kidnapping in the state media. In exchange for Ortega's release, he asked that the organization's prisoners be brought to the jails of the Basque Country. A demand that, as might be expected, was ignored by the Ministry of the Interior, then headed by Jaime Mayor Ear.

The Spanish State did not agree to the terrorists' claims, for which reason Ortega Lara was detained indefinitely in an underground hole built in an abandoned industrial warehouse in the Gipuzkoan town of Mondragon. Locked in that dark cage, Ortega Lara remained living, without the possibility of leaving for a single moment, in a hole in which he barely could move, with terrible humidity, without any contact with the outside and with the constant threat that the terrorists would decide execute him. Despite the fact that all the circumstances seemed to work against a desperate and increasingly emaciated Ortega Lara, the police managed to narrow the siege on the authors of the kidnapping and captivity of him, to the point where the captors confessed the location of the hiding place where Ortega Lara he remained. He was released in July 1997, a year and a half to 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, do not miss this documentary made by TeleMadrid.

Interview with doctor José Cabrera Forneiro, forensic psychiatrist

One of the people who knows this case best is Dr. Jose Cabrera Forneiro, renowned forensic psychiatrist and 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 that caused but also for everything related to the mental health of an individual who had to endure, literally, hell in life. Doctor Cabrera is one of the people who best knows what happened and what the kidnapped person had to live through, and he does not hides the torrent of emotions that we all suffer when remembering 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 Ortega Lara kidnapping case. Twenty years have passed since José Antonio Ortega Lara was kidnapped and held by ETA. How did Spanish society experience those moments? What are his personal feelings when he recalls this cloudy episode?

Dr. Jose Cabrera: Spanish society puts up with everything, especially when the news is in the media and “far from us”. That episode was experienced as one more addition to the cloud of attacks, threats and extortions of the moment, we would say that it was almost experienced as in state of anesthesia, and it was more the energy that the Security Forces and Bodies and the media invested than the tissue social.

My personal feeling was disgust towards some merciless kidnappers who were fighting for an unfair cause, beating a simple official.

We are talking about a person who was held against his will in an uninhabitable cellar, with no chance of leaving and knowing that ETA was most likely going to murder 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 so long?

The human being throughout history has endured the most terrible tortures, punishments, revenge and situations, voluntarily or involuntarily, you just have to apply the survival instinct and find a meaning to continue with life.

In the case of Mr. Ortega Lara, three conditions came together that helped him: he was a believer, he had a family to that he wanted 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 with TeleMadrid, Ortega Lara confessed to having planned his suicide through various mechanisms, although he never actually pushed that button. Is it normal for this to happen in cases of prolonged kidnappings?

He suicide It always arises before a final situation of hopelessness in which the suffering cannot be endured any longer and the exit does not exist. It is a defense mechanism against sensory and affective deprivation, that is, “I have come this far”.

However, experience tells us that those people who have endured an inhuman captivity almost never execute a suicide, and yet after time these same people are already released if they have put an end to their lives, for example the case of Cousin Levi.

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

In a state of silence and absence of external referents, only the ideation of the captive who creates 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 how suddenly a person in a Civil Guard uniform to free him, he simply couldn't get it in his head, and he simply believed that the time had come. final.

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

The physical prostration of captivity tends to go back over time, it is a matter of using the muscles, the voice, the sight, the senses... but the psychological impact is something else.

The sensation of impunity of his captors, the feeling of injustice towards his person, the emptiness of loneliness, the remoteness of the theirs, the misunderstanding of the facts and the threat of permanent death, change 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 you have to continue living, just like that. simple.

Much is said about the moral and psychological integrity of José Antonio Ortega Lara, and it is not for less. What are the mental strengths that an individual must develop to return to normality after experiencing such a calamitous situation?

The first thing is to understand what has happened, that is to say: accept that it was a criminal action by a group terrorist who caught him by chance, in order to avoid blaming that is not uncommon in these cases. The second thing is to gradually recover from the physical consequences, little by little and away from the hustle and bustle. The third, abandon yourself in the arms of the people who love you and are the key to your resistance, enjoy their mere company, simple conversations, recounting what happened to them and that captivity deprived him

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

Ortega Lara also said that during her captivity he spoke to himself, he imagined that her wife was with him and he spoke sentences out loud directed at 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 our 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 the time of sleep.

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 that retaining a person for so long, a simple functionary without political responsibilities and with a family... can only be explained by the most inhuman fanaticism. Ortega usually refers to Bolinaga, the head of the operation, as a poor wretch, a wretch.

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