The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Consuelo Ordóñez, to Ayuso: "My brother's party has used us. He betrayed us. That's the problem I have with the PP"

2023-05-21T20:30:11.581Z

Highlights: Consuelo Ordóñez is the sister of Gregorio Ordoñez, murdered by ETA in 1995. Consuelo helped found in 1998 the Collective of Victims of Terrorism (Covite) Covite denounced the presence of 44 convicted of links with ETA on the lists of EH Bildu. In recent days, they have accused her of making that complaint to benefit certain political formations and of having "problems with the PP" The statutes of Covite, which was born to "delegitimize terrorism," clarify: "We are absolutely independent of any party"


The sister of Gregorio Ordóñez, murdered by ETA in 1995, claims the independence of the group of victims and expresses her "disappointment" with Feijóo: "He wanted to confront the victims of Francoism"


"ETA didn't just kill. I used to let you know that I was going to kill you," says Consuelo Ordóñez, sister of Gregorio Ordóñez, leader of the PP of Gipuzkoa and deputy mayor of the San Sebastian City Council murdered by the gang in 1995. "I was the one who heard the first threats, on the answering machine on my parents' home phone." In the recording you can hear: "Gregorio, we are up to your balls. One more statement from you and your family is at risk of dying. Any of them. Get out of Euskadi, you bastard." "He had noticed that he was being watched. And yet, every morning, he left home to receive a queue of people at City Hall. They were heroes because of that, because they knew it."

This is how they threatened Gregorio Ordóñez in a telephone call a year and a half before he was murdered by ETA:

"Gregorio, we are up to your balls. One more statement from you and your family is at risk of dying. Any of them. Outside Euskadi, you bastard." pic.twitter.com/psAH1ADwuj

— COVITE (@CovitePV) August 20, 2020

On January 23, 1995, Consuelo Ordóñez was getting ready to go to work when she was called by the mother of a colleague of her brother's. "I was very upset. He asked me, 'Do you know where Goyo is?' I told him I assumed it at City Hall and he hung up. We called and were told he had left. So I called my sister-in-law and she asked me to come to her house. At the door, I saw a policeman. I asked what had happened and he said, 'Imagine the worst.' My father found out on the radio, while walking the dogs." The ETA Javier García Gaztelu, Txapote, had entered the restaurant La Cepa and had shot him in the back of the head. Gregorio Ordóñez was 36 years old and had a 14-month-old son with his wife, Ana Iríbar.

The life of that family, like that of many others before and after that January 23, changed. Consuelo helped found in 1998 the Collective of Victims of Terrorism (Covite), the association that, before the current electoral campaign began, denounced the presence of 44 convicted of links with ETA in the lists of EH Bildu. In recent days, they have accused her of making that complaint to benefit certain political formations and of having "problems with the PP". The statutes of Covite, which was born to "delegitimize terrorism" and "raise awareness in society about the claims of the victims," clarify: "We are absolutely independent of any party. Our objectives have to do with the dignity of the human being and, in that sense, they are far above partisan issues."

Question. His brother was the first victim of ETA's so-called "socialization of suffering." From that moment on, citizen mobilization against the gang began to increase. Did that help you not to be consumed by hatred?

Answer. In my brother's lifetime, and that is a thorn that I have, I was not aware of what I was doing, of what was being played. I wasn't interested in politics. I did not go to those rallies that had begun in the late eighties to condemn ETA. They were very few, they started with four cats. I started going after my brother's murder. We would be silent for a few minutes in protest of the kidnapping or murder of the previous day and then applaud. Little by little more people began to come. Meanwhile, a human pack full of hatred shouted at us: "ETA, kill them!" It was very hard. A van appeared from which they distributed stones to throw them at us. In September 1995, one of those stones hit me in the head and they had to give me stitches. Until that moment it was not known that I was the sister of Gregorio Ordóñez. I was alone, no one around me had told me: 'I accompany you'. My friends behaved as if my brother had died of cancer or in a car accident. Those rallies were key in my life because they transformed hatred, which is normal to feel when someone has been killed, into a constructive fight against terror. I learned a lot from those people who were harassed and persecuted by ETA and who exposed themselves without having victims in their family. The worst of this country has been Basques, but the best too.

They died for that word that Ayuso loves so much: freedom. To say that ETA is still alive is to disrespect them."

Q. Begoña Garmendia, HB's spokeswoman in San Sebastian City Council at the time, publicly rejected the attack. He said, clarifying that he spoke only for his "conscience": "Gregorio Ordóñez was probably the most forceful adversary of any Abertzale, but as a political adversary he had to be fought with political weapons and in the framework of a political confrontation. His death is a step backwards." Has the Abertzale environment changed in these years?

A. I know that my brother would be very grateful because those statements of Begoña Garmendia were very brave. Then I never heard from her again. My brother was passionate about politics, which is about seeking compromise. He had a relationship with some HB councilor. What has changed? Everything has changed, because ETA no longer kills, but in the Abertzale left almost nothing has changed. They do everything out of tacticism. The law of parties established as a requirement the rejection of violence, but not the condemnation of ETA, and of those muds these muds.

Q. How do you remember the day ETA announced its dissolution, in May 2018? How does someone who has sacrificed so much because of terrorism feel at that moment?

A. The victims have shown on many occasions that we believe in the rule of law and we wanted the rule of law to defeat ETA. Zapatero negotiated with ETA, but he did not deceive anyone, he said so. The PP deceived us because we thought it was going to stop that process and it didn't. In 2012 the Constitutional Court legalized Sortu and then it was renewed by a pact between parties. What has happened since the announcement of the cessation of violence in 2011 and the announcement of its dissolution in 2018 is the legalization of its political arm. I felt like the photo of ETA's defeat had been taken away from me because it was a negotiated end, so the feeling was very bittersweet.

How am I going to oppose that the victims of Francoism have a law of recognition and reparation as we do?"

Q. Why do you think that the PP candidate for the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, says today that ETA is still alive and in power?

A. Because it has no democratic culture. How can you say that ETA is alive? Is ETA killing the same as now? Of course not. To say these barbarities, which are very painful for the victims, is to disrespect her own murdered comrades, those who died for that word she loves so much: freedom. And this is not the first time this has happened. Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo also said that the political situation was worse than when ETA was killing. Because the PP and the PSOE got along badly! That day I felt my brother asking me, "Do something, say something."

Q. After the criticism received by victims of ETA, among others his own, Ayuso has suggested that you have "problems with the PP".

A. What problems do I have with the PP? That I was deceived. That they betrayed me. My brother's party deceived us and used us. That's the problem. We belong to no one. We have proven it extensively. We do not make electoral calculations. We founded Covite in 1998, the year in which Aznar authorized contacts with the "Basque Liberation Movement". Our manifesto ended by saying: "We do not also want to be victims of peace." And we have ended up with different rulers of different colors who continue to say that they have ended ETA with the rule of law when it was a negotiated end.

Consuelo Ordóñez, on Friday in Valencia. MONICA TORRES

Q. Last year they refused to attend a meeting convened by Alberto Núñez Feijóo in the middle of the debate on the law of democratic memory. Why?

A. We were at an event in Valencia and we received a wasap summoning us practically from one day to the next to a meeting in Congress, without an agenda or anything. He missed me very much. Then I learned that it was to use the victims of ETA, to confront the victims of Francoism while the law of democratic memory was being debated. And I went into a rage. How am I going to oppose that the victims of Francoism have a law of recognition and reparation just like we have? To use some victims against others is to fall too low. That was my big disappointment with Feijóo. When he became [president of the PP] I thought he was going to change things, that they were no longer going to be with ETA all day. I don't expect anything from him anymore.

Q. There is a lot of talk about ETA, but that does not always mean talking about the victims.

A. It's that being with the victims is something else. In the 2011 law, victims who did not have justice were worth half because there was, as the Ombudsman's office warned, and as we had already warned in 2010, compensation inequality according to whether there was a conviction or not. And in the autonomous law of victims of terrorism of Madrid, the victims of an attack that occurred in the Community were required to be registered at that time. Those threatened, those who had gone to live in Madrid fleeing terror, were picked up, but the relatives of the dead and wounded were not. With the opposition, last year, we managed to change that. Who has paid the highest price for the best thing that has happened to this country, which is the end of ETA? The victims. Saying things like those Ayuso says or comparing, as [Pablo] Casado did, the agenda of Catalan independence with ETA, that frivolity of pain, that trivialization, hurts.

Q. You had already criticized the presence of those convicted of links to terrorism in town halls. Why do you think the EH Bildu lists have caused more of a stir now?

A. We have always criticized the revolving doors of ETA, that they are representatives in municipalities... But this year we decided to do a thorough investigation of their lists, we checked more than 2,000 names and detected those 44, 7 of them with convictions for blood crimes. We did not imagine that it would cause this earthquake. We are happy with the resignation of those seven, just as we are happy for the elimination of ongi etorri [tributes to prisoners], which took us seven years. Who has behaved best in this matter has been the PNV. He has been impeccable in his response.

👉 @AITOR_ESTEBAN wonders if the decision of EH Bildu that those convicted of blood crimes do not take possession of their positions "responds to an electoral calculation or an ethical reflection".

"The Abertzale left has a long way to go" pic.twitter.com/675RgiIpuB

— EAJ-PNV Kongresua (@EAJPNV_Congreso) May 16, 2023

Q. They have fought the lists, the public tributes to ETA, but not the approaches of prisoners. Why?

A. We have never criticized the approaches, neither when they were made in PP governments, when ETA was still active, nor now. We have never cared where prisoners serve their sentences, but whether they serve them in accordance with the law, which I know very well. We do not have the right to choose the prison of the convicted, the privileged ones that we have convicted murderers. Dispersal was legal and rapprochement is also legal. This government is now informing us when the rapprochement is going to take place. The PP wanted to impose demonstrations against this on the victims.

Q. Covite decided to include victims of the LAGs as well. Why?

A. Because they are all victims of terrorism. We are all equal, victims of serious human rights violations.

Q. Several studies have revealed the lack of knowledge of many young people about terrorism. They don't know who his brother or Miguel Ángel Blanco was. What went wrong?

A. Very little has been done by the institutions. In Covite we made the map of terror, which geolocates the terrorist murders committed since 1960, and the most important thing I do in my life are Twitter threads explaining who the victims were, to make them visible. Most young people don't know anything about them, but in my generation it happens too. Now they start doing things, talks in institutes ... And it happens the same to the victims of Francoism. I also didn't know the magnitude of what had happened because I had never been taught any of it. In this country, memory is used to pit one victim against another. Some arrogate to themselves the defense of some victims, others those of others. And so it goes.

#TalDiacomoHoy 1977 #ETA shot five times at @policia Manuel Orcera at the old Amara station in #SanSebastian.

His wife She was also pregnant with their second child! How many times do I repeat this phrase.

Also #Impune

HILO ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/nebngxUDma

— Consuelo Ordóñez (@ConsuorF) May 18, 2023

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Read more

I'm already a subscriber

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-05-21

You may like

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.