On the 14th of May, 1977, Ramón Viladás picked up José Martínez from the El Prat airport in Barcelona, who had arrived with a passport and a new publishing house, the Iberian Society of Publication and Editing (Sociedad Ibérica de Ediciones y Publicaciones). Thus José Martínez ceased to live in exile on losing his main antagonist, the Franco regime. The dialectic conflict that characterised most of the Ruedo ibérico catalogue went on to be substituted by a critical vision of the way in which the democratic transition was being handled. Neither the market where political books were beating an inevitable retreat, nor the financial status of the company, nor the direction of the transition would allow the main publishing project of anti-Franco opposition to survive except as a marginalised voice of dissent. When Ruedo ibérico and its subsidiary were presented in Spain on the 20th of April of 1978 in the Maeght gallery of Barcelona, in the presence of one of the great supporters of the publishing house, the president of the Generalitat, Josep Tarradellas, the project was already on the verge of extinction. The Cuadernos de Ruedo Ibérico would last only one further year and the publishing house only a bare four years longer.

On the 22nd of October of 1982, Marianne Brüll wrote from Paris announcing that it was no longer possible to hold off the creditors. Ironically, only six days later the first PSOE government under democracy took office and with it some of the collaborators of the Ruedo ibérico’s first decade.  Paradoxically, what censorship had been unable to accomplish, to do away with Ruedo ibérico, was accomplished by democratic normality. Although it was directed at home, the tragedy of Ruedo ibérico is that it never ceased to be a publishing house of the exile.

At the age of sixty, José Martínez was forced to build a new life. Fernando Chueca Goitia offered him a post in the Spanish Institute and on the 11th of March of 1986 he died of accidental causes. His vast personal archive and that of the Ruedo ibérico is now stored at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis in Amsterdam, the custodians of material of great import related to social history. The archive is fully inventoried and open to researchers as can be found at http://www.iisg.nl/archives/html/r/10760597.html