This Monday the death of Jesús Quintero, a famous journalist who became very popular for his interviews and especially for the silences that said it all, was announced. As reported by his family, he died at the age of 82 at the Nuestra Señora de los Remedios residence in Ubrique (Cádiz), due to a respiratory condition for which he underwent surgery for heart disease in the summer at the Juan Ramón Jiménez Hospital in Huelva. , where he remained in the ICU.
All kinds of characters have passed through the interview table with Quintero, from Mila Jiménez and Julio Anguita through Jesús Gil and even a well-known person in Vitoria, El Cojo Manteca (Jon Manteca). The talk was broadcast in 1988 on the program ‘El perro verde’ on Spanish Television and Tele Doce (Uruguay). For twenty minutes, Quintero asks Manteca about his life experiences and the famous photo in which he breaks a sign at the ‘Banco de España’ metro stop in Madrid. Even The New York Times and the Herald Tribune talked about him.
Jon Manteca was born in Mondragón in 1967 and grew up in Sansomendi. When he was 16 years old, on January 26, 1983, an electric shock caused him to fall from a high tension tower on which he had climbed. Due to the injuries caused by the discharge and the fall, he lost a leg and suffered significant head damage, which since then would show a large scar that crossed from side to side.
Punk and homeless vagabond, on January 23, 1987, he was just arrived in Madrid, begging, when he casually came across one of the many student demonstrations that were going through the city at that time. On that occasion the scene was the confluence of Calle de Alcalá and Gran Vía, where the Ministry of Education is located, and the demonstration was one of unusual violence. The police came to fire shots that hit a protester, María Luisa Prado Berenguer, 15 years old. The young woman later recovered, but she was not compensated and no one was convicted for not being able to prove her facts.
Jon Manteca, infected by the violence of the environment, as he would explain later, used one of the crutches he was leaning on when walking to break the sign of the Banco de España metro station and a clock-thermometer in front of the Banco de España. Spain, and in that attitude he was captured by the cameras of the EFE Agency. Something much commented on by some protesters, and not by the press, was the astonishment caused by the extraordinary speed at which he moved, with only one leg and crutches, to flee from police charges.
The photograph made the covers of national and foreign newspapers due to the character’s picturesqueness (punk aesthetics, mutilation, scars, violence), and in a short time it ended up being converted by the media into a symbol of student mobilizations, despite the fact that Jon Manteca was not a student and had no more to do with all this than the fact that he had accidentally encountered a demonstration in the center of the city.
This is not the only interview that Quintero has done with someone from Vitoria. In 1996, in this case on Antena 3, he interviewed José Ramón Gómez Prieto, a rebel who was in jail.
Years later, in 2006, Quintero, in this case while already in Vitoria, met with writer Paulo Coelho to record El Loco de la Colina (TVE). The chosen setting was the central nave of the Santa María Cathedral. Coelho had come to the city to
The Brazilian mystic, writer of fortune and leader of a certain contemporary spirituality, arrived in the capital of Alava to receive an award from the Provincial Council for the diffusion he made of the city.