Twenty years after the most serious jihadist attack in the history of Spain, José María Aznar continues not to admit that the Etarra track began to be discarded in a matter of a few hours. The PP government insisted that nothing could be ruled out. In the midst of the Iraq war, strongly contested by Spanish society, the fact that the perpetrators of that massacre were Islamic terrorists could mean a fall in the polls in favor of the PSOE. And so it was.
As much as the police investigation and the sentence did not offer any doubt, the former president has never changed his position, and yesterday, on the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, the FAES, a foundation that he himself leads, came out to defend- him to reply that his executive “never received any report that ruled out his authorship”.
In an analysis published to commemorate the sad anniversary, the FAES points out that Moncloa “did not ignore any police or intelligence report that contradicted his attitude or his communication policy during those days” and adds that “the management of the CNI once denied information that attributed to him solid knowledge of the Islamic track”. “An official document never reached the hands of the government that definitively ruled out Etar authorship and unhesitatingly affirmed jihadist responsibility.”
Maintain it and do not amend it. The cliché about the Spanish character was repeated at the event in memory of the victims that the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and the mayor of the Spanish capital, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, starred in the Puerta del Sol Neither of the two uttered the word jihadism in their generic condemnation of terrorism, so they sounded support for the FAES thesis, which regrets in its note that “the controversy is more important than the institutional fact” and accuses ” the media terminals of the left” to heat up the atmosphere “in case the smoke could cover rigorously current shames”.
The FAES rejects that he lied at that time for electoral calculation and counterattacks by asking the central government, in view of the Koldo case and the Amnesty law, the same as Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba demanded of the PP in those days: “The Spanish deserve a government that doesn’t lie to them”.
But in a very different context than two decades ago, in which ETA has passed into history and Al-Qaida has been defeated, terrorism has unexpectedly reappeared as the most serious charge facing those accused of the independence process of Catalonia.
“Today marks twenty years since the day of infamy, in which terrorism caused immense pain and deep sadness, but failed to bring the city of Madrid to its knees,” said Almeida. “All terrorism is inadmissible and there are no gradations of any kind,” he added.
“That morning, Madrid woke up startled with the first news of an attack of enormous magnitude”, recalled Ayuso, who, like the mayor, spoke of the victims without pointing out their executioners. “Because terrorism wanted to change, cower and subjugate us, there is no better resistance than continuing to be who we are. Nothing and no one can condition our path through threats or blackmail”, concluded the president from Madrid.
When asked about the issue, the general secretary of the PP, Cuca Gamarra, was laconic: “This is not the day to attack who was at the head of the government of Spain at that time”.
