ETA victims do not deserve this contempt

Txapote. Guridi. Gaddafi. Kantaouri. Olatz. Anboto. Amaya. Aguirrebarrena. Mobutu. Face of the tower. And the list goes on.

Names to remember. Murderers and collaborators who will see their sentences reduced by a Sumar amendment. An amendment that repeals the provision that avoided validating the sentences of ETA prisoners who had previously served their sentences outside Spain.

An amendment unanimously approved in Congress.

I’m talking to my father on the phone. I ask him questions about that time. At the time when it was rare for the television news not to open with the murder of a police officer, a civil guard, a soldier, a politician or a judge.

That time when Spain was tinged with the color of fear that freezes the blood in your veins and leaves your breath stuck in your chest.

That time when it was a reflex to look under the car, just in case.

This era which for my generation is vague, distant, even incomprehensible.

I ask him questions about my colleagues and acquaintances. Together we do this exercise of navigation in memory to circumvent forgetting, avoid ignorance, overcome incomprehension.

tell me about Paco Casanovaarmy second lieutenant, whom he met while stationed at the Pamplona barracks and who was murdered in August 2000. In his garage. Three shots to the head. One in hand. It was his eleven-year-old son who found his father’s lifeless body.

tell me about Ignacio Mateu Isturizwhom he met briefly in 1978 in the selective course of the General Military Academy of Zaragoza. It was during this course that his father, the judge José Francisco Mateuwas killed by the command led by Henri Parot. In front of his house in Madrid. A bullet in the back of the head.

Ignacio wanted to join the Civil Guard from the start, but his father warned him: one threatened family member was enough.

However, after the assassination of his father, after this omen that had weighed on the family for years had come true, Ignacio requested a special pardon from the king to carry out the transfer to the Civil Guard. To help put an end to the tragedy experienced by so many families in Spain.

To honor the memory of his father and help put an end to ETA.

Eight years after the assassination of his father, in July 1986, while he was part of the GAR, it was his turn. Near the barracks of the Guipuzcoan town of Aretxabaleta. A bomb trap in the bush. His partner died instantly. Him, in the ambulance, his legs amputated. She had little left to get married.

There is silence on the line. But there were many, my father said, many more. It was a real nightmare.

I think of these three murders. In all the others. In tragedy. In the amendment. By reducing sentences. In the words “it’s for human rights”.

And the reality is absolutely incomprehensible.

The effort to grant facilities and privileges in the name of who knows what rights to murderers is not understood. The effort to whitewash what cannot be whitewashed, to forgive and silence the real carnage, is not understood.

And this is not understood, because it is hurtful, because it is offensive, because it is twisted, the desire to silence and relegate to oblivion the fear, pain and sorrow of so many families.

More than 300 years in prison in total erased by a vote, canceled by a signature. They say it’s to avoid paying twice for the same crime, no bis in the same way. That it has to do with human rights.

But they know it as well as the others. It is the result of a simple transaction, of an exchange. These prisoners for these budgets, as already announced at the time Arnaldo Otegi.

The government knows that it is a disgrace, it knows that it is wickedness, a spit in the face of the victims of ETA. He knows it’s indecent, because there aren’t enough years in a human life to pay for these crimes. Just as there is no forgiveness, no correction or reparation that can alleviate this, that can excuse this treatment, this injustice. This evil.

There simply isn’t any.