Josu Jon Imaz said when he chaired the Basque Nationalist Party that Spain was populated by ethologists. Experts in interpreting any word or comma in an ETA statement. Ethologists have disappeared or are disappearing since the criminal organization practiced its own apoptosis.
In 2018 she was declared missing. The one who read the final statement was José Antonio Urrutikoetxea, alias Josu Ternera, who has been with the terrorist band all his life and who yesterday appeared at the Sant Sebastià film festival through an expected interview with journalists Jordi Évole and Màrius Sánchez, which will be broadcast by Netflix. The pass generated a lively controversy since it was announced three weeks ago.
Since 2018, ETA prisoners have mainly been transferred to prisons close to the Basque Country. There are around 160 left in Spain and a dozen in France. The Spanish National Court is still holding trials for gang crimes, but 379 murders – close to half – still have no known perpetrator. The figure comes from a report approved by the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament in April 2022.
That is why it is unfeasible for a documentary about someone who for fifty years served in the military in ETA and for some decades was in the leadership to be released without a scandal or a demand for reparation.
He went to ETA?, Évole begins and inquires, in a rough conversation. “I volunteered when I was 17. I have 71, already passed. There is no doubt that ETA is part of my life”.
Several generations will have to pass until, if it is not solved by the police or the courts, the number of pending crimes is not important, criminally or in the memories. That is why Urrutikoetxea appears in the documentary.
At 71 years old, he tries to outline his criminal responsibilities and with history. Turn on the flashlight and illuminate some parts of your life at or near the ETA dome. As far as he is interested, without us having the ability to know what is truth and what is make-up.
In the film, Urrutikoetxea – white shirt, navy blue jacket with a slight grid, with few changes in facial expression in 101 minutes – says he is “deeply sorry”, but neither regrets nor asks for an explicit apology. 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, in two different attacks: against the president of the Franco government Carrero Blanco (three dead) and against the mayor of Galdakao, Víctor Legorburu, who fell downcast
But “in no way” did he have anything to do with the attack on the Saragossa barracks, which in 1987 cost the lives of 11 people, including five children. Nor did he order those of Hipercor or Vic. But, he justifies, in all cases there was a political strategy behind it or, in the case of the Barcelona supermarket, a “calculation error” by ETA, which only wanted to cause “material damage” and trusted that the authorities would evacuate the premises .
So, in other words, they were co-responsible for it. These are some of the main revelations of the documentary.
The environment of the former leader of ETA is also not satisfied, no longer with the result, but with the fact that he granted the interview. “It doesn’t benefit him,” says a close source.
Why did he do it? Évole asks him at the beginning what he expects from the conversation, and he says: “So far there have been others who have spoken.”
He is on parole in France and awaiting extradition to Spain to answer justly for the Zaragoza crime. “A trophy has been made with me, I enter a story of victors and vanquished, and I am among the villains, I have been dehumanized, as if I had horns and a tail. I am a person like anyone else, with convictions and a family”, he defends himself.
The National Court accuses him of the eleven deaths in Zaragoza because it considers that in 1987 he was the head of ETA. Urrutikoetxea was not in the Aragonese capital (in none of the five judgments on the case is he accused), but at the time he was presumably a member of the top of the organization, which made the decisions.
A Civil Guard report that is the basis of the indictment now in force states that his comrade-in-arms (and ex-partner) Elena Beloki admitted in an interrogation that Urrutikoetxea was then the leader, so that, by elevation, would be their highest criminal responsibility. But Évole nuances: Beloki said that “it could be”, in the conditional. It was also splashed by two ETA penitents, including Juan Manuel Soares Gamboa, considered a whistleblower by the organization.
From a criminal point of view, the two attacks in which he admits to having intervened get away with it. They are prescribed and amnestied by the clemency measure of 1977. Both predate.
In 1973, Urrutikoetxea had just entered ETA through a gang friend and intervened in Hernani’s theft of the dynamite that was used in the Carrero Blanco massacre.
The action was a very hard blow to the dictatorship, and it was not only celebrated by the Abertzale left.
In 1976 he was part of the commando that executed Víctor Legorburu, mayor of Galdakao, and that almost also ended the life of his escort, the municipal policeman Francisco Ruiz, who saved his life when he threw 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 that “he would have done it if he had touched me”.
While skilfully trying to bring him to the point of contradiction, Évole reviews throughout the interview Urrutikoetxea’s career in ETA since 1968, and is interested in his military training, his role and his contacts, but also in their beliefs. He was brought up in a religious environment, but does not declare himself a believer. However, he is justified by 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 be because he bought it himself, for 500 francs. It was a 7’65 ??caliber MAB and he only used it “in self-defense”. It does not clarify when or against whom.
He constantly appeals to the political strategy set by the leadership of ETA, which was a kind of committee, he suggests, and which justifies all actions. If there was an attack on the barracks in Vic, or Saragossa, or against Carrero Blanco, or Miguel Ángel Blanco was kidnapped – he claims to have disagreed with the cruel kidnapping and murder of the PP councilor – or the gang dissident Dolores González was murdered Katarain, alias Yoyes, was for strategy.
When Évole asks him if the execution of someone who had disobeyed was a mistake, Urrutikoetxea says that he complied with “the organization’s decision, taken based on political decisions”. He dilutes his friendship with her, despite the fact that he went to see her in Mexico, before she returned and was killed, on September 10, 1986, at 32 years old and in front of her son: “It is very difficult to explain the feelings of that moment I knew her, we had a certain relationship. But ETA considered that Yoyes, since he had contacted and agreed with the enemy, was a target and that he had to cut that cancer because it was qualitatively very relevant. His death was the result of a political analysis”, he says coldly. What would he say to his son, asks Évole: “I would tell him that I’m really sorry.”
ETA also warned, it claims, that the barracks of the Civil Guard were a terrorist target. Take the children out, the band would say, as if it had the power. Since the State did not pay attention to it, there were child victims, ergo, the blame goes halfway, so to speak.
Cynicism?, asks Évole at a certain point. “I try to contextualize the why of things, there is no cynicism at all”, he replies.
ETA also warned, it alleges, that the Civil Guard barracks were targeted by ETA. Take the children out, said the band, as if it had the power. Because the State didn’t pay attention, there were child victims, ergo, the blame goes halfway, so to speak. Cynicism? Évole asks him at one point. “I try to contextualize the why of things, there is no cynicism at all”, he replies.
“Killing is not good”, he adds. “Neither you nor anyone 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 that of Madrid in 2004, with 192 deaths and that it was initially attributed to ETA, but the 2005 London one, with 56). Urrutikoetxea stands apart from the phenomenon: “Doing terrorism is the easiest thing in the world. I don’t think the purpose of ETA was to do terrorism at all, terrorism is that of London or Paris or Madrid, which aims to do harm, this is what jihadism seeks, but this is in no way what ETA sought. For jihadist terrorism, it is better to kill 1,400 than 400”.
And he clarifies the nickname that gives the title to the documentary: at a meeting in Sant Joan Lohitzune in the seventies, in a “poteo gathering” at the beginning of his militancy, he contextualizes, someone told him that he had reacted to a comment “like a beef”. Some time later, one of those who were there “was arrested and tortured and identified him as a member of the meeting and said his name was Josu Ternera”.
Until today
