The president of Madrid shot by Franco whom the club ignores because he was republican

BarcelonaSpain is still full of mass graves with the bodies of Republican sympathizers. Alicante cemetery still has a very large one unexcavated. A cemetery that is like a time capsule to explain that era, in which the communist poet Miguel Hernández is buried near where the tomb of the leader of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, was. The two Spains, very close. The Francoists exhumed Primo de Rivera to send him in procession to a tomb in Madrid with all the honors. to send him in procession to a tomb in Madrid with all the honors. Tens of thousands of Republicans, on the other hand, remain in grave number 9 in Alicante. One of these people is Antonio Ortega, president of Real Madrid.

In the early morning of July 15, 1939, the president of the white club from 1937 to 1938 was shot along with other Republicans who had not managed to escape from Alicante, the last Republican stronghold. Ortega wrote a farewell letter in which he said he died peacefully because he was innocent. Officially, he was shot accused of the death of national soldiers, but in reality they did it because he had been a Republican and a communist. And for being a communist, Madrid wants nothing to do with it. Even today, he does not appear on the official list of presidents of the white club, which ignores him just days before the excavation of the grave where his remains are believed to be, thanks to a grant of 50,000 euros from the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory. His descendants, who mostly live in Mexico, anxiously await news.

Almost no one knew that Ortega had presided over Madrid until 2018, when Frederic Porta and Ramon Usall published a report in the magazine SàpiensJulián García Candau, historic Madrid sports journalist.

Sánchez Guerra, who would go into exile in France in 1939, returned to Spain in 1959. And once his wife died, he became ordained as a Dominican friar. Perhaps for this reason he is remembered on the official list of Madrid presidents. Ortega is not there. Neither is Juan José Vallejo, the man who led the committee created in 1936 by the Federació Cultural Esportiva Obrera, when this entity briefly controlled the club at the start of the war. "They ignore Ortega for being a communist, simply. They have never wanted to recognize him, despite the warnings they have received about Ortega's prominence. On the other hand, they have done so with Sánchez-Guerra, an official of the Republic, believing him redeemed by ending up as a Dominican friar. Madrid's directors excuse themselves by saying that no one elected Ortega. Bernabéu was not voted for either, and the contrast is absolute," Julián García Candau, a historic Madrid sports journalist, said in 2018 to Sàpiens Julián García Candau, a historic Madrid sports journalist.

But who was Antonio Ortega? He was a soldier born in Rabé de las Calzadas, Burgos, in 1888. He was stationed in the Basque Country, where the war caught up with him and he successfully led the defense of Irún for the national troops. Afterwards he would go to the Madrid front, leading the battalion Basque Anti-fascist Militias. Ortega, however, suffered a serious car accident in 1937 while supervising the front and, unable to be on the front lines, was appointed Director General of Security, a position he held precisely during the May events, when a conflict broke out in Barcelona that left hundreds dead among the anarchists and the POUM, a Trotskyist communist party, against the public order forces of the Generalitat de Catalunya, with the support of militiamen from the PSUC, the UGT, and Estat Català. Clashes that would be used by Soviet agents to pursue Stalin's enemies, such as the leader of the POUM, the Catalan Andreu Nin. Even today, historians debate Ortega's role in the disappearance of the Trotskyist politician, surely murdered on orders from the Soviets. According to Pedro Barruso, professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, speaking to the Efe agency, "Nin was murdered by the Soviet KGB, but they blamed Ortega, who was in Valencia at the time." Other historians like Hugh Thomas do accuse the soldier of having played a clear role in Nin's death, unjustly accused of working under the orders of the Nazis.

Dreaming of a great stadium

Be that as it may, the Nin case cost Ortega his post, for whom new positions were sought. He returned to commanding military battalions, but he was also given the presidency of Madrid. Ortega presided over the white club for a whole year, and organized friendlies and proposed that Madrid could play in the Mediterranean League, which was held in the Republican zone with Catalan and Valencian clubs. Clubs like Barça opposed it. He created tournaments, where sometimes his daughters performed the honour service, he advocated for a popular sport where money was not important and dreamed of a future he would not have. In an interview with the magazine Blanco y Negro, for example, he explained that he wanted to give Madrid the largest stadium in Spain. A project that Santiago Bernabéu, who was then at the front with the Nationalist troops, did bring to fruition. Ortega, in the Republican zone, would flee to Gandia, where his family already was, before the fall of Madrid. More than 15,000 people would arrive at the port of Alicante in March 1939, trusting that the rumour that many Republicans would be allowed to evacuate by sea was true. Among them, the Ortegas. But they were all captured once the Italian troops allied with Franco occupied the city on March 30.

Once arrested, he was accused of having shot 13 soldiers in San Sebastián at the beginning of the war in an irregular trial, as the names of the executed do not match those cited in the proceedings. Everyone knew that it was about finding a cause, by any means, to justify the execution. Not even the fact that Ortega had protected sympathizers of the Nationalist side from the persecution of anarchist militants in 1936 helped. When the Falangist Juan Tellería, composer of Cara al Sol, asked for Ortega to be pardoned because he had saved his life, he was ignored. Franco wanted him dead.

Ortega was shot along with ten other people. According to his son, he shouted: "Aim well, soldiers. Long live the Republic!"”, before being shot. Part of the family remained in Madrid and others went to Mexico, where his daughter Amàlia emigrated after falling in love with a Basque pelota player who had been offered to play there. The descendants, in fact, trust that thanks to DNA samples, the remains of the man who presided over a club that ignores him can be recognized. Their idea is that they rest in a family niche in Mexico next to his wife, Josefa. Far from Madrid and Chamartín.