Javier Castro-Villacanas (58 years old), a lawyer and journalist who regularly collaborates with El ESPAÑOL, passed away this Friday (Three Kings Day) after a serious and sudden illness. He was legal adviser and member of the Communications Office of the Complutense University of Madrid where he spent his career as a civil servant.
However, journalism and political analysis were the true passions of Javier Castro-Villacañas, known for his presence in the media. Thus, and as a contributor to EL ESPAÑOL, He made numerous collaborations about the Monarchy and the Royal House. During the Covid, and after being infected, he was a direct witness of everything that happened in those hard moments.
being a teenager, Javier was impressed by the events of the Transition and for the perception that these events produced in his family. Javier’s family represented well the paradoxes of the Civil War. The son of Antonio Castro-Villacañas, a journalist and lawyer who held various positions in the Franco regime and nephew of writers and Falange militants, he was also the grandson of Republican Colonel José Pérez Martínez, General Miaja’s right-hand man in the defense of Madrid.
The family constellation of these political affections would mark Javier’s personality. In some way, Javier’s life has been a life dedicated to seeking explanations for these feelings. From there would be born his need to analyze and communicate what he thought about power and history through journalism. His republican grandfather, exiled and retaliated against, and his father, a man of the regime critical of power, will be two models for him to integrate.
In the early 1980s, Javier began to write and frequent Joseantonian literary circles. Fidelity to those imaginaries would last until his last breath, but the impossibility and anachronism involved in carrying out those ideas, plus the problems that caused him as a young man, opened him up to other possibilities.
In the mid-1980s, he became interested in university politics as a student representative and He was a member of various associations at the UCM Law Schoolwhere he would meet Gustavo Villapalos, who would be Rector of the Complutense University, with whose team he collaborated for years.
His meeting in 1994 with the thinker and lawyer Antonio García-Trevijano would make Castro-Villacañas passionate about the ideas of the constitutional republic and democracy. This allowed him to make another reading of the Transition, providing him with analytical tools and rationalizing his emotional vision of the 1978 regime.
In those years, Javier collaborated with Trevijano, first by organizing the presentation of the The Republic speech and then expanding these ideas with great success by colleges of residence in half of Spain through the calls Republic Nights. Despite the influence of these ideas critical of the political regime of 1978 among teachers, judges, trade unionists, students, and left-wing politicians, Trevijano was unable to generate a political movement with minimal influence after the arrival of Aznar’s Popular Party to power. .
It was then that Javier Castro’s vocation as a writer and journalist could be realized. Once the political impulse was diverted (a blind alley in such a critical personality) he collaborated in the founding of the magazine Generación XXI and he began to write regularly and do his first interviews in various media and to prepare his first books.
At the same time, Javier was trained in intellectual circles with the political scientist Dalmacio Negro, Professor Neira and other colleagues. He taught as an associate professor of Constitutional Law at the Camilo José Cela University. It was Javier who personally denounced the doctors of the Community of Madrid for medical negligence in the Neira case and who put a face in the media to the tragedy of Jesús Neira, who was attacked for defending a woman victim of gender violence.
If we had to summarize the ideas of Javier Castro-Villacañas we would say that for Javier the Regime of 78 represents an oligarchic system of parties without true separation of powers nor popular representative mandate, and therefore a source of unlimited corruption.
For Javier, our Constitution will inevitably lead to national disintegration, given the price to pay for the support to be able to govern with nationalisms. The regime, in his analysis, will mean the impoverishment of the middle and popular classes, deprived of any form of control over power and the political oligarchy that is in fact in the hands of economic and personal interests alien to the majority.
The role of the monarchy has also been a constant in his analysis: Javier considered the regime as a pact between the crown and the political elite, Definitely harmful to the Nation. The Bourbon monarchy embodied for Javier the decadence of Spain and was co-responsible for its problems. All in all, Javier was tolerant and a lover of constitutional personal and civil liberties, he did not support reactionary political thinking or racism.
But Javier’s personality went far beyond his ideas. Vitalist, cheerful, friendly man; his expansive and curious character made him friends with his political opponents at the same time as a skilful commentator and researcher of the present. Journalism was a way of life for Javier, which also allowed him to meet people of all ideas and enjoy his company and knowledge. There has not been a conspiracy circle against the Regime in the last 30 years in which Javier Castro-Villacañas was not present, in one way or another.
As a writer, he is the author of a biography on the figure of José María Gil-Robles, but his most beloved and worked book was undoubtedly The failure of the monarchy. In The looting of the middle classes collected his analysis and facts about the economy at the service of the oligarchies. In recent months he was preparing a book on Felipe VI and his reign. Javier was currently Secretary General of the Madrid Association of Radio and Television Journalists and collaborated as a political analyst on various radio and television programs. His critical interventions or his research on power were surely the answers he had sought since he was a teenager.
In the last month he has struggled with a devastating illness and ended up facing death with temperance, faith and dignity, surrounded by his family and close friends. He was married to his beloved Alejandra León and leaves three children: Antonio, Marta and Gabriela.
Javier Castro-Villacañas will be in room 2 of the peace funeral home in Tres Cantos today. Tomorrow at 12 will be the burial in that same place. Rest in peace.
*** Javier Esteban, journalist and personal friend of the deceased.
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