He feels it “deeply” but neither repents nor asks for explicit forgiveness. If all that happened it was because ETA had a political strategy that led to killing. “All that” is 853 murders and he participated in some way in four of them, in two attacks: against the president of the Franco government Carrero Blanco and against the mayor of Galdácano, Víctor Legorburu.
But “absolutely” he had nothing to do with the attack against the Zaragoza barracks, which in December 1987 cost the lives of 11 people, including five children. He also did not order those of Hipercor or Vic, of bloody memory in Catalonia: 21 and 9 dead, respectively. But, he justifies, in all cases there was a political strategy behind it or, in the case of the Barcelona supermarket, a “miscalculation” by the organization, which only wanted to cause “material damage” and trusted that the authorities would vacate the premises. In this way, it means that they were co-responsible.
These are some of the main revelations that José Antonio Urrutikoetxea, alias Josu Ternera, a member or leader of ETA for fifty years, makes in the documentary Don’t Call Me Ternera, by Jordi Évole and Màrius Sànchez, which premiered this morning at the festival of San Sebastian. White shirt, navy blue jacket with a slight grid, with few changes in facial expression in 101 minutes.
Collectives of victims and political parties opposed the pass because they considered – before seeing it – that it would serve to whitewash someone who is considered one of the most bloodthirsty figures of the last half century in Spain. But he is not satisfied either. In an interview given to the Basque newspaper Berria and published today, Urrutikoetxea regrets the result of the work: “They have done what they believed; I have a different vision and a different idea about this work, but I say it with all due respect.”
The former ETA leader’s entourage is also not satisfied, not only with the result, but with him granting the interview. “It doesn’t benefit him,” a source close to him tells La Vanguardia.
Why did he give it? Évole asks him at the beginning what he expects from the conversation and he says: “Until now it has been others who have spoken.”
José Antonio Urrutikoetxea is on parole in France and pending surrender to the Spanish justice system to respond precisely for that crime in Zaragoza. “A trophy has been made with me, I enter a story of winners and losers, and I am among the bad guys, I have been dehumanized, as if I had horns and a tail. “I am a person like anyone else, with his convictions and his family,” he defends himself.
The National Court charges him with the eleven deaths in Zaragoza while in 1987 he was a leader of ETA. Urrutikoetxea was not in the Aragonese capital (in none of the five rulings on the case does he appear accused), but then he was allegedly a member of the organization’s leadership, the one that made the decisions. He describes himself as a member of ETA’s international apparatus, but not involved in operational decision-making.
A report from the Civil Guard that is the basis of the accusation now in force ensures that his comrade in arms (and former partner) Elena Beloki admitted in an interrogation that Urrutikoetxea was the leader of the organization at the time of that attack, so which by elevation would be his maximum criminal responsibility. But Urrutikoetxea qualifies Évole: Beloki said that “it could be”, conditionally. He was also splashed by two repentant ETA members.
The two attacks in which he admits having intervened come for free, from a criminal point of view. They are prescribed and amnestied by the pardon measure of 1977. Both are previous.
In 1973, Urrutikoetxea had just joined ETA through a friend of the group and intervened in the theft of dynamite in a company in Hernani that was used in the assassination of Carrero Blanco. He details that it was going to be a kidnapping, but that Carrero’s appointment as president of Franco’s government led them to change their plans. The action was a very hard blow to the dictatorship, and it was not only celebrated by the nationalist left.
In 1976 he intervened in another attack. On the morning of February 9, 1976, Urrutikoetxea was part of the command that executed Víctor Legorburu, mayor of Galdácano, and that also almost ended the life of his escort, municipal police officer Francisco Ruiz, who saved his life by throwing himself between two cars. .
An interview with him opens and closes the documentary, in which he is seen discovering Urrutikoetxea’s previously recorded confession. The then member of the commando assures that he did not shoot, but he “would have done so if he had touched me.”
Skillfully trying to lead him into contradiction, Évole reviews throughout the interview Urrutikoetxea’s career in ETA since 1968, taking an interest in his military training, his role and his contacts, but also in his beliefs. He was raised in a religious environment but does not declare himself a believer. Even so, he justified himself with two commandments: he violated the seventh (“thou shalt not steal”), but not the fifth (“thou shalt not kill”).
The interviewee explains that he received military training from ETA in France, at the end of the 60s, with shooting classes in which he shot “once or twice,” he minimizes, and if he had a gun it was because he bought it himself. , for 500 francs. It was a 7.65 caliber MAB and he only used it “in self-defense.” He does not clarify when or against whom.
At all times he appeals to the political strategy set by the ETA leadership, which was a kind of committee, he suggests, and which justifies all actions. If there was an attack against the Vic barracks, or Zaragoza, or against Carrero Blanco, or Miguel Ángel Blanco was kidnapped, or the dissident of the gang itself, Dolores González Catarain, alias Yoyes, was murdered, it was by strategy.
When Évole asks him if the execution of someone who stood up was a mistake, Urrutikoetxea says that he complied with “the organization’s decision, made based on political decisions.” He dilutes his friendship with her, even though he went to see her in Mexico, before she returned and she was killed, on September 10, 1986, at the age of 32 and in front of her son: “It is very difficult to explain the feelings of that person.” moment. I knew her, we had a certain relationship. But ETA considered that Yoyes, by contacting and agreeing with the enemy, was an objective and that she had to cut that cancer because it was qualitatively very relevant. Her death was a consequence of a political analysis,” she says coldly.
What would he say to his son, Évole asks: “I would say that I am truly sorry.” “Killing is not right,” he adds. “Neither you nor anyone else will have heard me say that killing is okay,” he says at another point in the interview when Évole confronts him with jihadist terrorism (curiously, not the one in Madrid in 2004, with 192 dead and which was initially attributed to ETA. , but that of London in 2005, with 56). Urrutikoetxea distances himself from jihadism: “Doing terrorism is the easiest thing in the world. I do not believe at all that ETA’s purpose was to do terrorism, terrorism is what London or “Paris or Madrid, which seeks to do harm, that is what jihadism seeks, but that is not at all what ETA sought. For jihadist terrorism, 1,400 are better than 400 deaths.”
And he clarifies the nickname that gives the title to the documentary and to his own life: at a meeting in Saint Jean de Luz in the 70s, in a “poteo gathering” at the beginning of his militancy, he contextualizes, someone told him that he had reacted to a comment “like a calf.” Some time later, one of those present “was detained and tortured” and was identified as a member of that meeting “and called Josu Ternera.” Until today.
