The agenda of the homage that the City Council of Ermua (Vizcaya) will pay to Miguel Ángel Blanco continues to undergo last-minute changes in regard to the attendance of members of the PP. Thus, while the sister of the former municipal mayor assassinated by ETA, María del Mar, will attend the 25th anniversary ceremony, José María Aznar has fallen off the list.
According to the EFE agency, who was President of the Government during that summer of 1997 will be absent from the institutional tribute after the controversy over the pact sealed at the beginning of the week between the central Government and EH Bildu for the processing of the new Law of Democratic Memory .
On the other hand, it is planned that Aznar will attend, and intervene, on Saturday in the particular tribute that the PP will pay to the former councilor in Ermua and in which his sister, the current leader of the PP, the president of the Basque PP, Carlos Iturgaiz and the president of New Generations and deputy, Bea Fanjul.
The celebration of the official act of homage has been surrounded by tension, both due to the law of memory, and due to the initial intention that María del Mar Blanco, Miguel Ángel’s sister, not intervene, who finally will after her public complaints and the subsequent rectification of the mayor of the Biscayan town.
Going back to Aznar, the former president has been very critical of the new Democratic Memory Law, which the Government has agreed with the nationalist left and which Congress will validate next week, pending final approval in the Senate next month. September. And he has described it as “nonsense made by terrorists and agreed with terrorists.”
That same reason has also been alleged by the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT) or the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, who in 1997 was a partner of the mayor of Ermua in New Generations, who considers that the event is a “false tribute” “together to the whitewashers of ETA”, in reference to the PSOE.
Although the president of the Victims of Terrorism Federation (FVT), Tomás Caballero, will attend and has even demanded an effort for harmony so that a feeling of oblivion and abandonment is not transferred nor is the “whitening” of the story allowed. It has done so through the monthly magazine of the FVT itself in which it regrets the evident division in the tributes to the victims, such as the one that took place on June 27 in the Congress of Deputies and that took place with the absence from Vox, with a minimum representation of two deputies from the PP and without representatives from the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT).
Caballero’s words overlap with the position published yesterday by the Collective of Victims of Terrorism (Covite) recalling that the Spirit of Ermua is “heritage of all citizens” and a “symbol of the fight against terrorism above ideologies”.
José Antonio Ortega Lara, former member of Vox and pressure official kidnapped by ETA, and María San Gil, former president of the Basque PP, participated this Friday in front of the Congress of Deputies in the reading of a manifesto in memory of Miguel Ángel Blanco
According to the Assembly of Associations for Life, Liberty and Dignity and the Platform Every Life Matters (NEOS), promoted by the former Minister of the Interior of the PP Jaime Mayor Oreja, the central government has made a “perverse use” of the anniversary of the death of Miguel Angel Blanco.
As NEOS recalls, the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Blanco in July 1997 was carried out “in retaliation for the release of José Antonio Ortega Lara, two inseparable events that led to the birth of the Basta Ya movement and the spirit of Ermua.”
