The Bidasoa border, imperceptible to Europeans today and still armored for many African migrants, had a different face half a century ago. To one side was the rancid stench of a decadent dictatorship and growing political turmoil. On the other, in the peaceful Côte Basque, there was an air of freedom that would take years to overcome. Humberto Fouz, Fernando Quiroga and Jorge Juan García, three young Galicians living in Irun, wanted to savor that feeling of freedom and crossed the border to enjoy Last Tango in Paris, censored by the regime. On their return, however, they ran into several ETA militants, who mistook them for plainclothes policemen. They became victims of the darkest attack ever perpetrated by ETA.
Today the Memorial Center for Victims of Terrorism and the Gogora Institute, dependent on the Basque Government, pay tribute to Humberto Fouz Escobero, Fernando Quiroga Veiga and Jorge Juan García Carneiro. The event will be attended, in addition to political and institutional representatives, relatives of the three young people, among whom is Coral Rodríguez Fouz, niece and goddaughter of Humberto Fouz. The writer Adolfo García Ortega, author of the novel Una tumba en el aire, based on these events, and an exhaustive parallel investigation will also attend. They are two of the people who have made the most effort to find out the facts, which point to a bloody crime that began with a fight at night and ended, according to some testimonies, with terrible episodes of torture on a Basque-French farm.
Coral Rodríguez Fouz was four years old when the crime occurred, which has marked her personal and professional career. She studied medicine and made the leap into politics as a socialist councilor in Eibar over the years, a Basque parliamentarian and senator for Gipuzkoa. She has spearheaded numerous political and judicial initiatives aimed at clarifying the crime of the three young Galicians, between the ages of 23 and 29 at the time of the crime. She has even met with ETA militants of the time.
His thesis is that there is little doubt that ETA was behind the events, even if they did not recognize it for fear of losing popular support. “It was E.T.A. Soares Ganboa wrote it in his memories; Peixoto recognized the Wolf, when he was infiltrated; Zabarte asked Pérez Revilla and he replied that ‘the less he knew, the better’…. Recently, a member of ETA at the time has also recognized the writer Adolfo García Ortega. They need to publicly acknowledge it, but since the 1970s there have been references to what happened and who the material authors were,” explains Rodríguez Fouz.
The account of the events handled by Humberto Fouz’s niece coincides with García Ortega’s investigation. Together with the novel Una tumba en el aire, the writer published, through the Memorial of Victims of Terrorism, a report entitled Notes on an investigation in which he reports on interviews with former ETA members, former police officers or family members of the missing. An investigation that reveals the brutal authorship of a group of ETA members, led by Tomás Perez Revilla Tomasón, assassinated in 1984 by the GAL.
García Ortega places the key point of the case in the return home of Fouz, Quiroga and García after having attended the screening of the historic Bertolucci film in Biarritz. The young people stopped at a couple of discos before returning to Irun, in the surroundings of Bidart, Gertari and San Juan de Luz. In one of them – there are disagreements about the exact place – they met a group of ETA members, who mistook them for Spanish policemen and followed them.
“In those years, ETA, very divided internally, became paranoid about suspecting all kinds of possible informers of the Spanish Police and fearing that the agents themselves had infiltrated among the political refugees who were in San Juan de Luz and Bayonne” , explains Garcia Ortega.
In a second nightclub they were approached, “five in number and led by Tomás Pérez Revilla, alias Tomasón.” According to what the writer collected, after a first confrontation, they were taken to a nearby beach to beat them up. “There, one of them —Jorge, probably— dies due to a withering blow dealt by one of the ETA members who were holding them,” he points out.
The main references to what happened from then on come from journalistic investigations, most of them related to a first publication in ABC in 1973, and from successive police investigations carried out since 1974. The main hypothesis is that the young people were transferred to a farm, tortured for several days and executed by Pérez Revilla.
ETA infiltrator Mikel Lejarza, known as Lobo, pointed out in an interview that Peixoto, ETA leader in those years, confessed to him that they “gouged out their eyes with a screwdriver” so they would confess that they were policemen.
Gogora, the Basque Institute of Memory, has spent years working on an initiative that seeks to compensate as much as possible the pain of the victims of ETA whose attacks continue without being clarified. The murder of the three young Galicians has been addressed within this initiative, and the families of Fouz, Quiroga and García received a monographic report on the case in which all the information, judicial and extrajudicial, regarding it is compiled. The report includes the different journalistic publications in this regard and the unsuccessful legal proceedings that have been carried out at different times.
Prepared by the Chair of Human Rights and Public Powers of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), the report, however, concludes that “the collection of judicial sources or newspaper archives” yields a hypothesis about the account of the extraordinarily weak”.
“Journalistic information also seems to be excessively weak and not very reliable due to its constant evolution in the version of the facts and its unverified interpretative orientation”, he indicates. Likewise, he highlights that “research, both in France and in Spain, was very deficient from the beginning and throughout the following years.”
Gogora’s report also questions Mikel Lejarza’s version and points out that he would have incurred in contradictions when explaining to the media how he learned of the death of the three young people and when explaining what would have happened to the corpses.
This work, however, recommends “the implementation of a proactive institutional line of action that provides updated information on the facts of these disappearances and urges citizen collaboration so that new data can eventually be revealed.”
In November 2018, ETA published a Zutabe in which it recognized its authorship in several attacks that until then it had not recognized, such as the bomb in the Rolando cafeteria in Madrid, in 1974, in which 13 people lost their lives; or the murder of three young book sellers at home in Tolosa in 1981, when they were mistaken for national police officers. At the same time, he denied his responsibility for the fire at the Hotel Corona de Aragón or the murder of Begoña Urroz, whose attack today is widely accepted to have been committed by DRIL. In that document, however, ETA kept absolute silence about the death of Fouz, Quiroga and García.
García Ortega also has no doubt that ETA is behind the disappearance of these three young people. “It is obvious that the authorship is from ETA. There are multiple indications and even statements from ETA militants to the infiltrator Mikel Lejarza. Furthermore, the terrorist organization never denied the facts. What happens is that ETA has seized on a kind of verbal excuse. ‘ETA did not do it, some ETA members who were drunk did it’, they come to say. But it is not credible. ETA had been preparing the Carrero Blanco attack for a year at that time and there was, in addition to a great division, a hierarchy. Those who commit the crime consult their superiors and, in fact, once they kill one of them, within that hysteria that led them to think they were policemen, they choose to kill the other two”, he explains.
Coral Rodríguez Fouz is grateful for events like the one that will remember the three youngsters this Friday: “Memory is the only victory we have been able to achieve. For years we remember them in solitude, since a wall of silence was built. Now, we have knocked down that wall and we remind them hand in hand with the institutions”. Humberto Fouz’s niece, however, will take advantage of the act to try to open a crack that sheds light on this dark crime.
“We are going to publicly ask that they recognize what they did. Apart from those directly involved, we believe that there are still people who know what happened. We still don’t know where the bodies are, and that is an added pain. We are going to keep fighting ”, he concludes.