On February 6, 1996 at 1:45 p.m., when Fernando Múgica Herzog, a 62-year-old lawyer and former Basque Socialist leader, was leaving his office on Calle Prim in San Sebastian, Javier García Gaztelu shot him in the back of the neck.
He died almost instantly.
Eight days later, Francisco Tomás y Valiente, 63-year-old former president of the Constitutional Court, was assassinated by ETA member Jon Bienzobas in his office at the Autonomous University of Madrid when he was talking on the phone with his colleague Elías Díaz.
Tomás y Valiente had just written a text, Reasons and Temptations of the State, in which he referred to the crime of Múgica and which was published by EL PAÍS the day after his own murder.
The coincidence did not end there.
A few weeks later, José Ramón Recalde would gloss, also in this newspaper, the debate opened by the late Tomás y Valiente with another text, Sense of State.
The professor and former counselor of the Basque Government would be seriously injured, also by ETA, four years later.
Luis Castells, Professor of History at the University of the Basque Country (UPV), remembers him when the two murders have passed 25 years.
Both crimes had a special impact on a socialist family on the verge of losing the Government.
"ETA is killing my friends," said then-president Felipe González.
“Since 1995, ETA began a murder campaign with great social impact to compensate for its weakness after the arrest of its management in Bidart (France).
He also activated the kale borroka, which in 1996 broke his record with 1,113 attacks.
ETA wanted to spread fear to the entire population.
It even imposed a new leadership in Herri Batasuna, replacing moderate leaders such as Patxi Zabaleta or Iñigo Iruin with a leadership, subordinate to her, around Floren Aoiz ”, Castells points out.
ETA began its campaign to spread terror with the assassination of the leader of the Basque PP, Gregorio Ordóñez, in 1995. It tried, but failed with the then opposition leader, José María Aznar, and King Juan Carlos, the same year.
And in 1996, in the pre-campaign of the general elections, which Aznar won, he assassinated Múgica and Tomás y Valiente.
Both shared his anti-Franco militancy, and ETA knew the impact of his assassination.
“Tomás y Valiente was filed with three other professors from the University of Salamanca, by Franco's Minister of Education Julio Rodríguez for his democratic attitude.
With democracy he was a magistrate of the Constitutional Court and from 1986 to 1992, its president.
Felipe González, of whom he was a friend, offered to be Minister of Justice, but preferred to return to the University ”, Castells recalls.
Ana Tomás y Valiente recalls her father's disgust, a militant against the death penalty, for the executions by the Franco regime of two members of ETA and three of FRAP in 1975 as well as his texts in which he rejected terrorism, but also war dirty against terrorism.
ETA's delirium went so far as to explain its crime for "inspiring strategies against the Basque people."
The jurist had no escort, like Múgica, so they were easy targets.
Múgica joined the PSOE in 1964 with his brother Enrique, Minister of Justice between 1988 and 1991 and the architect of the policy of dispersal of ETA prisoners.
“Unlike Enrique, he hardly held public office.
Only, for a short time, he was a councilor in San Sebastián.
He participated in the reconstruction of the PSOE in the Congress of Suresnes, in 1974, and was key in the rebirth of Basque socialism ”, Castells highlights.
His son, José Mari, highlights his roots: “My father suffered the plague of Nazism, Francoism and ETA.
His father, a Republican, died in exile.
His uncle, a socialist, shot.
And part of his mother's family, Paulette Herzog, a Polish Jew, died in Auschwitz.
His Judaism was not only a family heirloom but militant outrage against Nazism and the Holocaust.
ETA did not calculate that both murders would mark a qualitative leap in the mobilization against ETA.
“After knowing the murder of Tomás and Valiente, the students of the UAM demonstrated en masse.
The movement of the white hands and the slogan of Enough already!
and Basques yes, ETA no!
The university felt attacked.
And neither, until then, was there such a massive demonstration against terrorism as the one held in the center of the capital, ”Castells emphasizes.
It was the preamble of the rebellion that the following year began with the murder of the councilor of the PP of Ermua (Bizkaia), Miguel Angel Blanco.
Carlos Totorica, then mayor of Ermua, remembers that when he found out about the murder of Tomás y Valiente he was so outraged that, for the first time, he drafted a bill with an appeal to the population with his conviction.
Múgica's murder coincided in Euskadi with the ETA kidnappings of businessman José María Aldaya and prison official José Antonio Ortega Lara.
“At that time, in the Basque Country, the silent demonstrations against ETA went from shouting Enough already !, to wearing the blue ribbon in protest against ETA;
to resist radical nationals;
to go to demonstrate before the headquarters of Batasuna to ask them to account ”.
ETA, after killing Múgica Herzog, succeeded in making the Jewish community equate its persecution with that of the Nazis.
The rabbi of Bayonne said the Kaddish in his farewell, and on behalf of the Jewish community he said: “If the persecution of the Nazis suffered by his mother, Paulette Herzog, a Polish Jew, marked his life, that of the ETA terrorists has put an end.
Our community is grateful to a man who fought for Spain to recognize Israel as a State, a country that it considered its second homeland ”.
The Jewish National Fund planted thousands of trees in the Israeli town of Haruvit in his memory.
When they learned of the murder of Tomás y Valiente, the Múgica family traveled to Madrid to visit their relatives and attend the large demonstration against ETA. Ana Tomás remembers how the Múgica family told them: “People support you. But in the Basque Country we have seen a graffiti that said “Fernando, fuck you!”. Almost at the same time, the then rector of the UPV, Pello Salaburu, raised the great question in the homage of the Basque university to the two referents assassinated by ETA: "They want us to believe that there are two sides where there is only a fascist minority"