The mayor of Ermua asks for "unity" in the tribute to Miguel Ángel Blanco next Sunday

Mari Mar Blanco, in a file image. Pradip J Phanse

The mayor of Ermua (Bizkaia), the socialist Juan Carlos Abascal, has finally accepted that Marimar Blanco, sister of Miguel Ángel Blanco, a PP councilor assassinated by ETA in 1997, take the floor at the institutional act that is going to be held in this town next Sunday, July 10, two days before the 25th anniversary of the crime.

The alderman has contacted by phone this Tuesday afternoon with the PP deputy in the Madrid Assembly to inform her that she is trying to "integrate her participation" in the act.

She had sent him a letter this Tuesday asking him to reconsider her decision not to allow him to intervene.

Abascal has indicated in statements to this newspaper that his intention is "not to veto anyone" in an act that should reflect the "unity" around the mayor of Ermua assassinated by the terrorist group ETA.

According to the mayor, Marimar Blanco has "appreciated" this decision.

The first mayor is in talks with the Royal House to definitively set up Sunday's act, in which the councilor himself, the lehendakari, Iñigo Urkullu, plans to intervene;

the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the King.

In the letter he had sent him, Blanco asked him to speak during the tribute.

Previously, the PP had already claimed that Marimar Blanco was one of the speakers at the tribute, which will also be attended by the popular president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

"I just want to speak in tribute to my brother and in memory of him," Blanco says in the letter, which she also sent to the Presidency of the Government and the Basque Executive.

In her letter, the sister of the councilor assassinated by ETA tells the mayor: "It is impossible for me to explain why I am not going to be able to give a brief speech on the 25th anniversary of my brother's death, in the same town where They murdered him."

From the content of the letter, it can be deduced that the councilman of Ermua had denied him the right to intervene in a telephone conversation.

Blanco assures that the explanations that Abascal had offered him are not "convincing".

According to his version, the mayor told him that this Sunday "the aim is to honor all the victims of ETA."

“No [victim] has been offered to speak.

In any case, nobody can question that on Sunday the terrorist attack that took the life of Miguel Ángel will be remembered and that mobilized, like never before, the whole of Spanish society, giving rise to the

”.

For this reason, Blanco informed him that in his opinion the refusal to give him a voice during the act was "incomprehensible" "in freedom and with the same respect with which he has always acted with his family since they killed him."

“I ask you, as the organizer of the event, to reconsider that decision.”

"Throughout these years," he states in the letter, "he had never had to chase loudspeakers of any kind."

“The party in which my brother was a member”, he says in reference to the PP, “and the Spanish society itself have generously offered them to me.

However, in an event as important as this year's, I think it is justified and necessary to be able to address the auditorium on behalf of my family, first, and the Miguel Ángel Blanco Foundation, second”.