The events date back to the 2001 wrestling season when Andrés Barreto was the president of the Canary Islands Wrestling Federation in Lanzarote. Unión Sur Yaiza was preparing to participate in the Regional First Category Wrestling League, as it had done in recent seasons, even becoming runner-up in said competition.
But that year, Unión Sur Yaiza, the only Lanzarote team in the championship, was not allowed to register for the competition by the Federation that Barreto directed at the time, preventing any possibility of a conejero team accessing the highest category, as had happened in previous years.
Former club secretary and vice president Francisco García (Curro) recalls: "Andrés Barreto told us clearly, either you wrestle in Lanzarote or you don't wrestle this year." This was how he tried to prevent the team from his island, which he had to defend, from wrestling at the highest level of the Canarian wrestling competition. The truth is that the southern team started and finally won a legal battle against what they understood to be discrimination and injustice.
After several attempts by the team to participate in the Regional First League, the Wrestling Federation started the league without the Lanzarote team: "These gentlemen should resign, because what they did with Unión Sur Yaiza is an injustice, and that is what we expressed at the time in the media," Francisco García indignantly says. And it was precisely Andrés Barreto, together with Eduardo Hernández, president of the Regional Federation, who vehemently maintained the exclusion of the conejeros from the most prestigious wrestling league. It seems that they were against holding this first league. They did not succeed.
What Andrés Barreto did achieve was a clarifying sentence against him: "The constitutionally relevant discrimination to which the club was subjected (referring to Unión Sur Yaiza) by not having a single reasonable or justified fact or reason for the unequal treatment in relation to other clubs (...) the violation of unjustified equality in the application of the regulations already implies a reason for radical nullity of the agreements of the different bodies," the sentence says.
Some unanswered questions now arise that the vice president himself asks: "Why did the general director of sports allow this injustice with Unión Sur Yaiza? What work did the Canary Islands Sports Discipline Committee do? Why did they support Barreto when the approaches and the injustice they committed were so absurd, as has been demonstrated in the courts?", Francisco asks.
The result of the Wrestling Federation's stubbornness was that the competition started without the Lanzarote team and that, in the middle of the championship, for the first time in the history of Spanish sport, a court paralyzed a competition so that Yaiza would not be discriminated against. Two sentences prove right a club that won the legal battle but was ruined sportingly speaking by Barreto's direct management: "The legal crisis extended to the club; we went from being runners-up to last, we had to do fourteen fights in a month, there was a direct persecution of our club."
Barreto's legacy
The sentence opens the door for Unión Sur Yaiza to initiate legal actions against the Lanzarote Wrestling Federation, which, if it had to face compensation, it would be the general directorate of sports that would have to take charge of the possible payment. "I hope that the club continues fighting so that the federation pays for the damage that has been done to Yaiza," concludes the former vice president of the wrestling runner-up of the Canary Islands, Francisco García Aguilar, better known as Curro.