Puerto Hurraco massacre

On the evening of 26 August 1990, brothers Emilio and Antonio Izquierdo walked into Carrera, the main street of Puerto Hurraco — a village in Extremadura, Spain, with 130 year-round residents that grew to about 200 each summer — armed with 12-gauge shotguns, and opened fire on neighbors gathered outside their homes and a local bar. In about fifteen minutes the brothers shot 21 people, killing nine and wounding twelve, before fleeing the village.

The attack grew out of a long-running feud between the Izquierdo and Cabanillas families that some accounts trace to the 19th century and a 1929 stabbing over a rejected relationship. Tensions in this generation escalated after Amadeo Cabanillas drove a plough onto Izquierdo-owned land in 1963. A widely repeated account holds that Amadeo also rejected a marriage proposal from Luciana Izquierdo — though a neighbor dismissed that story as a baseless rumor and said the enmity was rooted solely in land disputes — and that her brother Jerónimo Izquierdo took the rejection as a family insult, fatally stabbing Amadeo Cabanillas on 22 January 1967; Jerónimo was convicted and served 14 years in prison for the killing. The siblings' mother, Isabel Izquierdo, died in a house fire at the family home on 18 October 1984; investigators ruled the fire accidental, but her children blamed the Cabanillas family. In 1986 Jerónimo attacked Antonio Cabanillas with a knife — Cabanillas survived — and Jerónimo was interned in a psychiatric hospital on 8 August 1986, where he died nine days later.

On the day of the massacre, the brothers told their sisters they were going hunting, then hid in a village alley before opening fire on Carrera street, according to Emilio's later account to psychiatrists. Victims included two of Antonio Cabanillas's daughters, Encarnación (13) and Antonia (14); Manuel Cabanillas, shot after confronting the gunmen; 60-year-old Araceli Murillo, killed while trying to help the wounded girls; Antonia Murillo and Reinaldo Benítez, shot while trying to flee the village by car; José Penco, killed after returning to the village to help other victims; and Andrés Ojeda and Isabel Carrillo — the father and grandmother of six-year-old Guillermo Ojeda, who was shot in the head and survived after a coma — both of whom died at a hospital in Badajoz.

Civil Guard officers launched a manhunt that grew to as many as two hundred officers, along with dogs, vehicles, and a helicopter. Officer Blas Molina located and arrested Antonio Izquierdo the following morning; Emilio Izquierdo was found about an hour later. Neither brother resisted arrest.

Prosecutors also accused sisters Luciana and Ángela Izquierdo of instigating the killings, but a provincial court dismissed the charges against them in 1992, and they were committed to a psychiatric hospital in Merida instead. At trial in Badajoz in 1994, a court rejected an insanity defense and convicted Emilio and Antonio Izquierdo, sentencing each to 342 years in prison and ordering each to pay 300 million pesetas in compensation to victims.

All four siblings have since died: Luciana in January 2005, Ángela later that year, Emilio in December 2006 of cardiac-related causes, and Antonio by suicide in prison in April 2010, on the day he had been scheduled for release before application of the 2006 Parot doctrine delayed it by five years.