– This year I want to prepare to take the eighth dan exam. I am very good in sports and professional, and in health, phenomenal, after an operation for a tumor in the thymus, in April it will be a year.
–In a pandemic.
“No one could come to see me.” My brother-in-law took me to Madrid to the Quirón clinic and they operated on me the same day. Good professionals, Da Vinci robot and on the fourth day I was walking in Pola de Lena, where I live.
– How did you find out sick?
“I had a strange cough and, when doing sports, inspiration did not fill my left lung well.” In a company recognition the doctor saw something in my heart. After several tests, they did a chest x-ray and they saw that the thymus, a vital gland in growth but that over time loses its function, grew and weighed on my lung.
-He was afraid?
– Something of suspicion to enter the operating room and the illusion of removing it.
José Pajarón arrived in Mieres when he was 13 years old. He is the oldest of the five children of Antonio, a mining foreman from Huarte, a subcontractor who worked throughout Spain, and Angela, a housewife. Antonio is 88 years old and he took the family with him to Barcelona. Pajarón, who defines himself as “Asturmeño”, is the only one left in Asturias.
–I started working when I was 16 years old. As a waiter, for two years at Casa Villa. Ramón Menéndez, a student of the judo master Shu Taira, lived on top of the Castiel Freeria. We met at the sports hall, where I played basketball. It was 1973, I didn’t miss “Kung Fu” on TV and my idol was Bruce Lee. I wanted to try, fight and shoot, to see who can do more. I told Menéndez, he offered to teach me at Pola de Lena and he lent me a suit. I went and until today. I entered the mine and the Police for judo.
“Why in the mine?”
–To have free every afternoon from Monday to Sunday. When I turned 18 I entered the San Luis well as a pawn. I trained Monday, Wednesday and Friday at Pola de Lena. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, in Mieres, and on Sunday, in Oviedo with Taira. In three years I was a black belt, something that is achieved in four. I was three years in the mine.
“Why did he leave her?”
–I joined the ranks and had already been read by two policemen who were training with me to prepare myself as a police officer in the camp. I did the CIR in Colmenar Viejo, I applied to the COES, the green berets, I did the tests for the Armed Police and I am one of the 240 who passed. On January 1, 1978 I entered the special academy of Canillas (Madrid). I did the training course and the internship in Madrid.
– “Gray” in Transition …
–It was an aging body and that is why the Police, as an altered political transition was expected, went to recruit the CIR. We wore our muzzle on the outside, helmet and chinstrap … The suit was scary and we didn’t even like it. Better blue. With the title freshly taken, I went to San Sebastián in 1978.
– Bad years.
–There was only terrorism and “kale borroka”. In 1978 there were 107 or 109 victims. You were a 24-hour policeman: I lived in the barracks, two or three of us went out together, and if we went into a bar, one was left out … I was left with the reflection of permanent self-protection and I like it. I finished and came to Cangas del Narcea for four months.
-I wanted to go back?
– For Margarita, today my wife. She has a degree in Art History, although she did not practice. We have two children: Nadia, from 1981, a police officer in Torrejón de Ardoz, and Rubén, from 1983, a computer engineer in Gijón. They are athlets.
How did you meet your wife?
–For judo. A cousin of hers was training with me and she said to her gang: “You have to see a kid, you’ll see what pineapples hit.” At a Blimea championship she appeared with her friends. I spent almost two years hanging out alone in a gang with those five girls. We have been married since 1979. I came to live with my in-laws in Pola de Lena.
He began his sporting life within the Police in 1980. He was Spanish police champion of judo, then of the Armed Forces and of police pentathlon in the nineties. When he returned to Asturias, he began with the IPSC shooting, which simulates real cases, of which he was the Asturias Police Champion and also in the senior civil category.
-In Lena he created a sports nucleus.
-Yes. I was teaching judo, I did the physical education instructor course in Toledo and in the summer I was a lifeguard and swimming teacher. From 1982 to 1988 I taught hundreds of children to swim in the frozen pool of Pola de Lena. As I was ten years technical director of the judo team of the National Police Corps and selector, I joined the Police Martial Arts Club in the Lena Judo Club.
– How has the pandemic affected judo?
– Now it is prohibited. I usually teach nine hours a week and six more hours for myself.
In the Mieres Police Station he made citizen security in uniform in the eighties and nineties, and then, for eight or ten years, he was on duty inspection making reports. He was an escort in Madrid, on commission, a volunteer, for the prosecutor Olga Sánchez when the 11M. She has been in the judicial police for ten years, in the Family and Attention to Women Unit.
–I protect victims of gender violence, a permanent service in which I have to be contactable 24 hours a day. I chose it because of a change of air and because, from an age, shifts give you a headache.
–He is retiring this year.
-I will continue doing judo, shooting, some climbing and mountain and ballroom dancing with my wife. I never get bored. When it has to be done, I get involved. I am serene and not aggressive because of my education of respect for others at home, martial arts and the Police.
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