The journalist Bonifacio de la Cuadra (Úbeda, 1940) died this Wednesday in Madrid at the age of 83 due to cancer. Boni, as everyone knew him, was for decades a benchmark for parliamentary journalism and, once the Transition was over, for judicial journalism.
De la Cuadra was part of the first newsroom of El País, of which he was a co-founder and where he spent most of his professional life. First as a parliamentary chronicler, then as a legal correspondent and, finally, as a columnist. He had previously gone through the Pyresa news agency and the Criba magazine. He was also in the newspaper Nivel the only day of the newspaper’s life -December 31, 1969-, to which the Franco regime did not allow a second day, considering it, in the words of Boni, “a nest of reds”. The journalist went from there to the Movement press, from where he was fired for going on strike, which at that time consisted of “10 minutes of silent work.”
The next stage was already that of El País, together with her colleague from dismissal due to strike Soledad Gallego-Díaz, who came to direct the newspaper in which yesterday she herself announced the death of Boni.
In November 1977 both signed a historical exclusive in the newspaper and in the magazine Cuadernos para el Diálogo, the draft of the first 39 articles of the Constitution. “The veil that covered the work of the presentation of the Congress of Deputies in charge of preparing the draft Constitution has been lifted,” the chronicle began, indicating that “the future Spanish Constitution will consecrate political pluralism, popular sovereignty and the parliamentary Monarchy ». His in-depth knowledge of the drafting phase of the text was used in the joint book Crónica secreta de la Constitución (Tecnos).
As a parliamentary chronicler, on 23-F he was covering the investiture of Calvo Sotelo. «A session so boring that when Tejero appeared I thought: ‘Man, something is finally happening’. That lasted 10 seconds, because I was very fearful,” the journalist acknowledged years later.
Its former director yesterday recalled another anecdote in the opposite direction: that with the journalists lying face down as the assailants ordered, Boni managed to take notes of what was happening. “You have to take notes. Later, with emotions, things begin to decorate. But if you write it all down, there it is », she explained later. The apparent courage ended as soon as they were offered the opportunity to leave the Congress, which she signed up for “without hesitation” and which helped her sign a few lines in the special edition that same night.
In 1984, with his departure -this not entirely voluntary- from the political area of ??the newspaper, he began his stage in court. It was with the exclusive that the Prosecutor’s Office had resolved to act against Jordi Pujol. Boni always believed that the speed in publishing it prevented that decision from being changed, as he suspected would have happened if he had been slow to uncover the news.
Not everything he published and not everything worked out for him. He often recalled what happened with the appointment as a member of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) of Pascual Estevill, who would end up convicted of corruption: «One night they told me in the newsroom that they were going to appoint him. I didn’t believe it, with the background he had. And I swallowed that news ».
Over the years, Boni became “a benchmark” for judicial information, as Agustín Yanel, president of the Federation of Journalists Unions, recalls. Yanel, himself a good connoisseur of judicial journalism, was one of the many reporters in that field who gave his condolences to the three daughters of the deceased on Wednesday.
De la Cuadra retired in 2005. There was a usual farewell to the newsroom, which gave him a billet with more than 300 exclusives and relevant news. Also another farewell already focused on the judicial, a dinner in the Japanese room of the Lhardy with diners like Cándido Conde-Pumpido, Margarita Robles or Manuela Carmena. A trial was recreated against him in which each one provided a legal basis. He ended up being sentenced “to 10 years of work for the benefit of the judicial community as a columnist.”
And as a columnist, he proposed on the 40th anniversary of the Constitution that the solution to the appointment of the CGPJ would go “through the popular election of the 12 judicial members”. He later recognized – and even without knowing the almost five years of blockade that then began – that the proposal was “a provocation”, after “so many errors and delusions” with the judiciary.
Bonifacio de la Cuadra, journalist, was born in Úbeda in 1940 and died in Madrid in 2023
