Ana Orantes Ruiz was a 60-year-old Spanish woman who was beaten, tied to a chair, and burned alive by her ex-husband, José Parejo Avivar, on December 17, 1997. Her death, coming less than two weeks after she spoke publicly about decades of abuse, became a landmark case in Spain's response to domestic and gender violence, prompting new legal protections in the country's Criminal Code.
Parejo began abusing Orantes soon after they married, and the abuse intensified over the following four decades. At the time, Spain — like much of the rest of Europe — had no laws specifically protecting victims of domestic violence. Orantes went to the police dozens of times over the years and first tried to obtain a divorce in 1981, when divorce became legal in Spain, but was unsuccessful. A divorce was finally granted in 1996, though she was still forced to continue living in the same house as Parejo afterward.
On December 4, 1997, Orantes appeared on the Spanish television program De Tarde en Tarde and described the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that she and her children had suffered throughout the marriage. She said Parejo punished her whenever another man looked at her, isolated her from her family, forbade her from attending her siblings' weddings, inappropriately touched their young daughters, and subjected her to numerous near-fatal beatings.
Thirteen days after the broadcast, on December 17, 1997, Orantes was found dead. Parejo had beaten her, tied her to a chair, and burned her alive. She was the fifty-ninth identified victim of a domestic-abuse-related murder recorded in Spain that year. Her sons also said they had been abused by Parejo.
The killing, coming so soon after her televised testimony, provoked national outrage and rallies across Spain calling for stronger protection for domestic-violence victims. Spain's conservative government at the time described the case as an isolated event; in response, advocacy associations began systematically documenting the prevalence of domestic violence to challenge that characterization. In 2004, Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero introduced Spain's first laws specifically addressing domestic and gender violence. In the 2020s, the far-right Vox party pushed for the repeal of these laws, arguing they had no measurable effect on domestic violence and that punishment should not depend on the identity of the perpetrator.
Parejo was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison for Orantes's murder. He died seven years later, on November 17, 2004, of a heart attack at Hospital Ruiz de Alda in Granada while incarcerated.
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