A book recounting how a Spanish man killed his two small children, from the murderer’s point of view, has triggered a fierce debate about the limits of freedom of speech and a bookshop boycott.
In 2011, José Bretón killed his six-year-old daughter and two-year-old son in the southern city of Córdoba by drugging them, before burning their bodies. The elaborately planned murders were a reprisal against his wife, Ruth, who had told him she wanted a divorce.
The author Luisgé Martín has written an account of the murders, El odio (or The hatred), based on phone conversations with and letters from Bretón, who is serving a 25-year jail sentence.
The book’s publication has been the subject of a legal wrangle after Ruth Ortiz filed a legal complaint alleging that El odio, which includes details of her life, violated the honour, right to privacy and image of her and the deceased children. In the complaint, which was filed in Córdoba but passed on to a court in Barcelona, where the publisher of the book, Anagrama, is based, Ms Ortiz’s lawyer said that media coverage of El odio had caused her “enormous pain and psychological damage”.
In an open letter published by Spanish media, Ms Ortiz herself warned that the book threatened to “re-victimise” those already hurt by the murderer.
Last week, the public prosecutor in Barcelona called for the book’s publication, scheduled for Wednesday, to be temporarily suspended, for the legal case to be resolved.
However, on Monday, the judge handling the case ruled that the publication should not be halted, because the arguments of the writer and publisher had not been heard and that the only textual evidence presented against the book had been articles published in the media which, while referring to it, did not contain excerpts.
“We must not forget that we would be restricting the fundamental right to freedom of speech [if publication were suspended]”, the judge said, while acknowledging “the circumstances that surround this incident and the special protection the victims deserve”.
The book, which includes Bretón’s first public confession of the crimes, reconstructs the murders and attempts to understand them from his perspective.
“I started writing El odio because I was incapable of understanding how someone could kill their own children,” said Martín, who has written several books of non-fiction and fiction and was formerly a speech writer for Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez.
He said: “El odio does not give José Bretón a voice, it takes it away, it denies his explanation of events, it pits him against his own contradictions. The book, in my humble opinion, shows the maze of disgrace and vileness in which a murderer lurks.”
However, many disagree. Although it was due to be published on Wednesday, the book has still not gone on sale and a number of bookshops have said they will not stock it on ethical grounds.
“Publishing this book is immoral because of the excessive harm it inflicts on the mother,” María Álvarez, owner of the PicaPica bookshop in the north-western province of Ourense, told El Mundo newspaper.
Spain’s political parties have mainly trodden carefully around the issue, wary of being seen to advocate censorship. The clearest exception has been the far-right Vox, whose spokeswoman Pepa Millán said her party was “in favour of those who commit these atrocious crimes rotting in jail” and “not having the privilege of seeing sunlight nor of publishing any kind of book”.
In a review for El Confidencial, Juan Soto Ivars took a different view. Criticising the author and publisher for failing to warn Ruth Ortiz about the book, he nonetheless described El odio as “a valuable and hypnotic work of literature, a journey into the vulgar heart of darkness”.
