Police inspector Antonio Gonzalez Pacheco retired with honours for extraordinary service to his country. ‘We called him Billy the Kid. He had the habit of walking with a pistol in hand,’ remembers José María Galante. ‘He was a compulsive torturer.’
José Galante fell into Pacheco’s hands in 1971, when he was 22, for protesting against the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. He still finds it difficult to detail the beatings on genitals, kicking and waterboarding he suffered in a basement torture chamber in Madrid’s city centre. ‘Years later, I still wake up in a cold sweat at those memories,’ he says.
