I knew they were going to kill him. Before that day ETA had murdered another 848 people. The line in which the ideological justification exempted them from all moral guilt was already crossed, to spare. 848 different stories of employees, truck drivers, gravediggers, businessmen, workers, politicians..., of course, state servants, civil guards, police, military, also municipal or regional police. Children, pregnant women…, 848 souls. All their numbers passed before us. But those July days were different. They killed that boy right under our noses and it was as if we woke up to something truly terrible and with a courage never seen before. In Bilbao, we even go to the 'herriko tabernas' to show them our teeth. And we scared them. For a day. Latest. 55 days later policeman Daniel Enciso was assassinated in Basauri and it was no longer the same. While the PNV forged alliances with ETA itself to recover its space under the lure of the search for 'peace', the streets of Bilbao, where thousands and thousands of people had demonstrated in July, contemplate a couple of small groups protesting in silence. For more than ten years the assassinations of councilors from the popular party, the socialist party, the UPN, more civil guards, police and military, ertzainas, civilians of all kinds, continued... Not many were protested in the street. The blood anesthetized us, and not only the Basques. Finally, the tragedy continued to make us cry but we already did, rather, each one at home. There were NGOs, but none dedicated themselves to denouncing the flagrant human rights violations committed by a terrorist group in their country. Only a few groups of relevant citizens emerged as a result of that 'spirit of Ermua' to combat the fatigue of a civil society that had to be revived. Beyond Gesto por la Paz, with its silent protests, the Ermua Forum (1998), the El Salvador Forum (1999), Basta Ya! (1999), the Foundation for Freedom (2002), contributed unprecedented initiatives going further than ever in denouncing, not only terrorism, but also the nationalism that promoted it. Less silence, more denunciation. It is important to talk about these civic groups (it would be more important to name each one of their promoters, free spirits with plenty of courage, privileged minds dedicated to activism, but I am not going to do so because the list would be long and unforgivable to leave out of it some of them), now that they seem to have disappeared from the 'timeline' of 'official' memory, even from that of those who knew them. My God, selective memory. Their importance lies in the fact that they were the spearhead of the buried illusion that a silent part of the Basque citizenry had not so much in defeating terrorism as in being able to shout against terrorism in the streets of their city, in their town square. , for the first time in his life. We were understood that the persecution was not only a threat to coexistence but also the path to extermination. Understand me, modern extermination, selective, well seasoned with propaganda, justified with victimhood, false history..., misleading, sibylline, paralyzing. But in addition, and no less transcendental, was discovering that the political project for which he killed did not stop advancing in the Basque community, in which the ideology that survives everything ruled, as if nothing serious happened: the nationalist. In those years at the beginning of the new century there were some moments in which it seemed that the Police and (surprise!) the simple application of the law could end not only with the terrorists but with their complex network. Contrary to 'moderate' nationalism, the two major parties signed the Agreement for Freedoms and Against Terrorism in 2000 and the party law that allowed the outlawing of Herri Batasuna. From the most grassroots nationalist militant to the Lendakari of those years and, of course, the addict press, considered these constitutionalist groups as 'crispers'. Enemies number one. Provocative, anti-Basque, absolutely negative elements financed by the Spanish State to disturb the peace of the citizenry, of that 'people on the move' who seemed not to be irritated by the existence of ETA and who were capable of walking naturally from bar to bar on the blood spilled by the gunmen on the same sidewalks. The accusation of tension was the throwing weapon that he shamelessly launched at the leaders of the constitutionalist parties in Basque public television or radio talk shows, some of which were punctually eliminated. murdered. Basque nationalism encouraged their own to raise the level of tension against what is Spanish or what what is Spanish could represent. In practice, against the neighbor, the merchant or the co-worker. We discover the exact aroma of an ideology that leads directly to evil in many of its variants, from narcissism to abuse, from discrimination to murder. I think it was in 2002, on the fifth anniversary of the MAB assassination, that the Ermua City Council asked me for my film 'Without freedom' (25 testimonies of Basque and persecuted victims). Projected in the town square. I was there and we spent the time looking around. It wasn't so much the fear as the tension... but we were. And that was what was really new: we were where we had to be. Nothing happened. Probably because, in those days, abertzalismo feared for its future. The president of the socialist Zapatero in 2004 was responsible for deactivating, little by little, all the civic reaction of these groups and the victims' associations, although she had to contemplate massive demonstrations against her policy of rapprochement and negotiation with the terrorists. Then too, socialism found tension in the discourse of the Basque constitutionalists. The same mayor of Ermua who handled the fire extinguisher to prevent the Batasunos bar from burning down in July 1997, asked the Ermua Forum ten years later to stop using the town's num because the Forum "sowed hatred and criminalized dialogue" . Zapatero inaugurated the era of posture in Spain: a permanent good-natured attitude compatible with the hidden escalation of radicalization and obsession with the right, while sympathetic to nationalism. His dedication to prevent the total defeat of terrorism, to build the landing strip with which the PNV had always dreamed, was his definitive work. That's probably how these current quagmire times began. Today, the murderers, their heirs and their followers, with their totalitarian ideology intact, not only don't hide but show themselves. Many of us knew that Miguel Ángel was going to be killed, but none of us could imagine, even remotely, the bleak and strange state of affairs 25 years later.
