The documentary Don’t Call Me Ternera, by Jordi Évole and Màrius Sánchez, joins a long list of cinematographic approaches to the ETA phenomenon. In fact, its billing is especially reminiscent of the first film that focuses on the band as a whole: The Burgos Trial (1979), by Imanol Uribe (there are two previous titles focused only on the attack on Carrero Blanco).
It is interesting to see again that brave film filmed in the middle of the transition, based on the testimony of several defendants. The majority either abandoned politics or fled the radical path, ending up in Euskadiko Ezkerra, first, and in the PSE-PSOE, later. Only a minority remained in the ETA environment after the trial, prison and amnesty, such as Jokin Gorostidi or Itziar Aizpurua.
If the testimonies of those first generation ETA members are compared with that of Josu Urrutikoetxea, Josu Ternera, what is surprising above all is the coincidence in the lexicon and the arguments, the narrowness of the reasoning framework of each, locked in a spiral of repression. conflict-action.
But there is a substantial and obvious difference: those interviewed by Uribe speak to us from an oppressive time in which the dictatorship and its thugs were still giving their last blows. Two years had passed since the Atocha massacre and there were as many more left until February 23rd. They were still young people, with time ahead of them to see that democracy would make its way and that the conditions that had motivated their youthful enthusiasm for ETA would disappear.
Évole and Sánchez’s Josu Ternera, on the other hand, turns out to be a character stranded in time. While many of his generation and militancy colleagues evolved in line with a society that was modernizing and opening up to the world, he, from what can be seen in the documentary, was confined in a mental prison from which he has not yet emerged. When they woke up, Josu Ternera was still there.
Perhaps one of the main contributions of this interview is to show the emotional and intellectual poverty of a character who for decades pulled the strings of a band that seduced sectors of the radical left outside of Euskadi until the end and who, in a certain way, I could continue doing it. The interviewer contributes to highlighting the character’s plot weakness with questions that bring out his contradictions.
It is not a minor purpose. Armed struggle always generates fascination. In the same way that the first punk used Nazi symbols to provoke and that the world of ETA itself looked in the mirror of the IRA and the Cuban or Algerian revolutions, the symbol of the ETA snake still circulates on the networks as emblem of rebellion and insubordination. It is used from innocence by young people who were children when the terrorist group dissolved and do not know everything about it. That’s why movies like this are necessary.
The one from Évole, in some way, renews the certainty that the ETA leadership was nourished by young people who had failed at school, without enough reading to form a critical sense that would help them distrust the gang friend who invited them to join the sect. Nothing could be further from the delicate revolutionary of Camus’ The Rebel Man.
The testimony of Francisco Ruiz, escort of the murdered mayor of Galdácano and survivor of the attack despite being shot twelve, frames the interview with Ternera. His is a thorough and articulate speech that contrasts with the poverty of the terrorist’s approaches.
In his first intervention, he explains that, weeks after the attack and still in a wheelchair, people turned in his face in the street, while his wife had to listen to offensive comments in the stores. Then the banality of evil was also this: the pain that any member of a community subjugated to a perverse system in which one hitman succeeds another in decision-making can cause. Valuable information for those who did not know ETA.
