The judge returns to Ermua to judge those who kept silent

A word.

All it took was a word, a phrase, a statement.

For 48 hours, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated throughout Spain to ask ETA not to assassinate Miguel Ángel Blanco.

At 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, July 10, 1997, an anonymous caller had called the daily

to report that the young councilor of the PP of Ermua (Vizcaya) had been kidnapped by the terrorist group and that he would be executed if before 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, July 12, the Spanish Government, then chaired by José María Aznar, did not send the Basque prisons to all ETA prisoners.

Judge Manuel García Castellón, on duty that afternoon at the National Court, took charge of the investigation and flew on a military plane to Bilbao.

From the Ertzaintza police station in Deusto, he coordinated the efforts of the Basque police, the National Police and the Civil Guard to find the 29-year-old son of Galician emigrants, recently graduated in Economics, who had left his house on his way to work two hours before ETA announced his kidnapping.

Although the then Minister of the Interior, Jaime Mayor Oreja, immediately warned that it was not a kidnapping, but a slow-motion assassination, the citizens took to the streets as they had never done against ETA and the security forces scrutinized every corner and asked Judge García Castellón for dozens of entry and search warrants in any ship or farmhouse that could serve as a hiding place.

Nine days earlier, the Civil Guard had managed to rescue prison official José Antonio Ortega Lara from the cell where he had been held for 532 days, and Herri Batasuna's spokesperson, Floren Aoiz, had already warned the Interior Minister to be careful in not to fall "into the drunkenness of police efficiency", because that state could be followed by "the hangover".

So it was.

The terrorist group wanted to prove and prove to themselves that their kidnapping and killing machine was still well oiled.

Despite the citizen mobilization —also in some Basque towns where ETA had never been raised— and the efforts of the security forces, on the afternoon of Saturday, July 12, some hunters heard on the outskirts of Lasarte, along with to San Sebastian, some shots and their dogs led them to the dying body of a young man, handcuffed, barefoot, with two shots to the head.

The word, the phrase, the statement from the ETA leadership that was needed to stop the murder did not arrive, and now, when they are about to celebrate their 25th anniversary, Judge García Castellón, who can be seen in the photograph of Jesús Uriarte arriving to the Donostia Hospital,

where Miguel Ángel Blanco had been transferred still with a thread of life, he wants to close the circle of that crime.

The material authors have already been arrested, tried and imprisoned, but the magistrate wants to prosecute the nine ETA chiefs who at that time held the leadership of the different gang apparatuses for "crime by omission" and who, being able, did nothing to stop that murder.

There is a paragraph in García Castellón's car that is especially significant.

The magistrate warns that it was he who instructed the case in the first moments, and adds that "knowledge in the first person" of what happened before and after the murder allows him to "infer" that that crime "can be outlined in the figure of the commission by omission, because those who exercised the leadership of the terrorist organization, the so-called executive committee, had at least 48 hours to stop the action.”

Or what comes to the same thing, García Castellón, like all those who lived through that anguished wait on the ground, knows that never before has the leadership of ETA and its political entourage received so many requests and from so many instances not to carry out the threat.

If someone can attest to this better than anyone, it is Carlos Totorika,

Totorika, now retired, remembers that even the Basque Church used its "high voltage connection" with the ETA environment to stop the assassination of Miguel Ángel Blanco.

The then mayor remembers the place and time he received the news and the decision he made: “I was on a march to Madrid.

The sports center had collapsed, the construction company ignored it and we organized a walk to denounce it.

We were at the height of Bergara and I received the call from the Government delegate.

He told me that Miguel Ángel had been kidnapped.

We went right back and focused on the human aspect.

It was enough to justify the murders in the Basque conflict or something will have been done.

We had to talk about the person, about Michelangelo, about human rights, about freedom.

We welcomed his family in the town hall, that was his house for 48 hours,

we took care of them the best we could, and we decided on a lot of mobilization and little silence.

Until then, the concentrations had been almost always the same: us in silence, behind a banner calling for the release of a kidnapped person or condemning a murder, and they, the nationalist left, in front of us, insulting us.

We had to overcome the silence.

We didn't know if we were going to get him released, but we didn't want him to be free.

We discovered that by demonstrating against ETA, we gained freedom and the personal satisfaction of not remaining silent.

A space of freedom was gained.”

the nationalist left, opposite, insulting us.

We had to overcome the silence.

We didn't know if we were going to get him released, but we didn't want him to be free.

We discovered that by demonstrating against ETA, we gained freedom and the personal satisfaction of not remaining silent.

A space of freedom was gained.”

the nationalist left, opposite, insulting us.

We had to overcome the silence.

We didn't know if we were going to get him released, but we didn't want him to be free.

We discovered that by demonstrating against ETA, we gained freedom and the personal satisfaction of not remaining silent.

A space of freedom was gained.”

The flame lit like never before.

During those days, this reporter was also in Ermua.

One of his neighbors, Javier San Ildefonso, then said that he had never seen his 16-year-old daughter moved in that way.

Now the daughter is 41 years old and has three children, and he has already explained to her eldest, 11, some things about those dark times.

“All of us neighbors organized ourselves to try to get ETA to back down”, explains San Ildefonso now, “it was not possible, but in Ermua the silence against ETA was broken forever.

It was the only time I cried hugging my mother and my daughter”.

Former mayor Totorika reflects on the judge's order: “I don't know the legal interpretation, but of course they could have stopped it.

They had 48 hours to do it and they didn't.

And they are indebted to everyone, a debt that is still valid and that they have not paid.

I am not talking about nostalgia or wanting to remove the past, but about justice.

Judge García Castellón cannot comment on the case that he is beginning to instruct, but he does remember the impression that visiting Miguel Ángel's father had on him.

His son, to whom he had managed to give a career and a future after a life of emigration and sacrifice, was at that time somewhere, a captive of ETA.

There was still a silver lining, but it could not be.

Those who could have spoken fell silent.

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber