"We are fed up, hurt, sunk and trampled: we have reached our limit." This is how the president of the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT), Maite Araluce, started the act that this group called yesterday to put figures, numbers and specific dates to the initiative in which the Government is already working to fulfill one of the old used of the ETA prisoners: that the sentences that not a few of them have already served in France for different crimes can be deducted in Spain. Something that, to date, is prevented by a law approved during the Rajoy government in 2014 and endorsed by all Spanish and European courts.
Sources from the Government itself acknowledged to ABC last week that the initiative
to modify that law "is already underway" and also "clearly", which would allow up to 54 ETA prisoners to save more than 400 years in prison, according to detailed calculations by AVT itself.
Up to 48 are in Spanish prisons and more than half for blood crimes. If this measure succeeds, as the Government has already contemplated, each of them would save an average of 7.8 years in prison. In other words, between all of them, almost 375 years of sentence would be discounted. Even a dozen will have to be released immediately or suspended this year thanks to that hypothetical discount of sentences that they cannot access now.
In addition to these 48 in Spain, there are another dozen media outlets that are currently in French prisons, but with pending sentences in our country, so at least 54 ETA members could save more than 400 years in prison if the PSOE government and United We Can (UP) changes the law to allow them to have their sentences deducted in France.
This initiative would grant more advantages to ETA prisoners, since, by reducing all terms so considerably, it would also make it easier for them to achieve other penitentiary benefits much sooner, such as third degree and parole.
discounts for decades
Someone could have horrified more decades of a coup with respect to the sentence imposed by the Spanish Justice. Is the case of Félix Alberto López de Lacalle, whose sentence does not expire until 2036, but he would be released immediately after the 23 years he was imprisoned in France are discounted if this legal reform prospers.
By mid-century, the greatest number of possible beneficiaries will also be several, with more than a decade of sentence left behind. In fact, the one who would save the least is Javier Zabalo, who would shorten his sentence by almost four years.
In this name there are also numbers that have been most responsible for ETA and its worst crimes, such as Kantauri, Txapote, Gaddafi, Anboto or Karaka, to name just a few of those that have caused the most havoc. And, among his victims, the popular Gregorio Ordóñez or Miguel Ángel Blanco, or the socialists Fernando Múgica and Fernando Buesa, the former president of the Constitutional Court, Francisco Tomás y Valiente.
Also policemen, civil guards, ertzainas, journalists or hitherto anonymous citizens who were killed, wounded or kidnapped throughout Spain. In a barracks house in Zaragoza, in the neighborhoods of Madrid, Santander, Córdoba or Bilbao. At airports like Malaga and hotels in Alicante or Tarragona... The list is as long as it is heartbreaking.
For all these reasons, the AVT said yesterday "enough" and announced that "in the next few days" it will call a demonstration against the "maneuvers to modify the legislative framework for the benefit of terrorists." He will also grant that he will request meetings with all the parliamentary groups -except Bildu- to transfer the dossier that he presented yesterday and thus combat this legal reform with figures and specific cases such as those mentioned.
"We are not dead"
The president of the AVT was firm in clarifying that "if we have to return to the streets, there will be no doubt that we will" and added that the victims of ETA "we may be touched and sunk, but we are not dead." And they will do it, as Araluce herself will explain, to show their rejection of a government "that does not stop deceiving us, dismissing us and using us as bargaining chips."
He also denounced that the Executive chaired by Pedro Sánchez "is allowing the terrorists, in addition to having murdered our relatives, to now be laughing at us." And he did not forget the head of prison policy as Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, whom he accused of having lost "decency and dignity."
Regarding the certainty that the PSOE and UP are already working on this "maneuver" to reduce the sentences of the ETA members -as La Moncloa sources confirmed to this newspaper-, the AVT assures that "we have no doubt that this defense is above from the government table.
