In his worst dream, a PP leader sees himself surrounded by a crowd of party voters, including some victims of ETA, who shout “traitor” to him. The escorts give way to him. The insults multiply. There are gestures of shoving and embarrassment.
The events recorded on October 27, 2013 are not a nightmare. They were real. Esteban González Pons, Iñaki Oyarzábal or Esperanza Aguirre can account for scenes like the previous one, with them as unwitting protagonists.
The Popular Party had made the Plaza de Colón in previous years a symbol of its unwavering support for the demands of the victims of ETA terrorism. This is where the demonstrations called by the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT) against the anti-terrorism policy of former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero concluded, which the PP was responsible for animating with a demonstration of resources material and human.
At the end of one of these demonstrations, Mariano Rajoy, then leader of the opposition, listened to the Spanish anthem at attention, on a lectern located on the southwest side of the square and in front of a wave of national flags. Victims were betrayed while Spain was auctioned off in a negotiation with ETA, organizers say.
But let’s come back to October 27, 2013. That fall, the PP had been in government for a year and ten months. The PSOE did not benefit from the fact that ETA announced in December 2011 the definitive end of violence without compensation, even for its prisoners. The PP won the January 2012 elections, and Rajoy appointed a friend of his, Jorge Fernández Díaz, as Interior Minister, who used language to deny that the end of the gang was real. And he did it while the information services were telling him that the terror of ETA was over, that the gang had almost no more prisoners and that desertions among them had already begun.
It was then that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled on appeals brought by the gang’s prisoners and overturned the Parot doctrine. As established by the Supreme Court in 2006, the days deducted from prison work or study sentences would be subtracted from the total sentences and not from the years of actual service. For example, 200 cumulative days of sentence reduction would not be subtracted from a convicted terrorist’s maximum 30 years of service, but hundreds would be included in sentences for blood crimes.
It was up to the National Court to calculate the effect of the sentence reduction for ETA prisoners – and other prisoners sentenced to long sentences – and to apply the judgment of the Strasbourg Court. And to the Government, apply the resolutions of the National Court.
The AVT then launched a protest campaign which broke the relations it had maintained until then with the PP. Its president at the time, Ángeles Pedraza, was received by Mariano Rajoy in Moncloa, but this did not mean the cancellation of the concentration in Plaza Colon. The PP had to decide whether to remove it or send a delegation to the event. The national PP, we understand, because the Madrid PP was already constituted at the time as the hard arm of the party, unconscious of the line imposed on Genoa.
Some, like Esperanza Aguirre, did not measure well. Supported by everything the victims said and beyond, Aguirre received hugs, kisses and applause, but also cries of “traitor”. What happened to González Pons or Iñaki Oyarzábal was worse. Against the latter, some demonstrators shouted insults about his sexual orientation.
Vox was there even though no one recognized him
At that time, Vox was a residual party. In Plaza Colon were the party’s future voters, even if they did not yet know it at that time. That day they were represented by the political brutality experienced, always welcomed by the hard wing of the PP. The process of sovereignty in Catalonia would have to continue to develop, during the years of Rajoy and the replacement in Moncloa, for the first far-right party to emerge in Spain with parliamentary representation since the transition. On October 27, 2013, in Colón, it was affirmed that there was a basis on which to build a political option like Vox, a real competitor to the PP.
In a few months, a total of 66 ETA detainees benefited from the new count resulting from the cancellation of the Parot doctrine. The names of some of them date back to the group’s cruelest periods. They are those of serial killers like Henri Parot or Iñaki from Juana Chaos.
However, the dark omen of Colon Square did not mean greater wear and tear for the government of Mariano Rajoy, who found in the process of sovereignty in Catalonia the enemy to defeat, once ETA was defeated at home. Zapatero era. This executive was used for this in such a way that it even reproduced – without deaths – the dirty war against the GAL of the socialist executives of Felipe González.
The AVT influenced this limited attrition of the PP through the application of the Parot doctrine. That the main association of victims of terrorism, or at least its leadership at the time, did not want to erode the right-wing party was clear in the speech given by its president in Colón.
After a week of insistent calls from Genoa, Ángeles Pedraza attacked the judges of the National Court and the PSOE and did not mention the Rajoy Executive. Nor did it serve to contain the anger of some demonstrators at the end of the event, even if it anticipated the conciliation of the AVT with the government which would take place in the following months.
History is being retold these days. The victims shouted against the government and its parliamentary partners, in particular Bildu. But also against a Popular Party which did not prevent the repeal of the additional provision of the law transferring the European directive putting an end to the duplicity of sentences served in France.
The AVT repairs the enemy and it is not the PP
However, the current president of the AVT, Maite Araluce, daughter of the president of the Provincial Delegation of Gipuzkoa assassinated in 1976, confronted the Minister of the Interior in person, calling him a “liar” and the meeting, which ended was produced privately, had immediate publicity.
Araluce, supervised since her appointment by the former president of the Association of Victims of Terrorism and the entourage of Ángeles Pedraza, quickly took charge of clearly exposing who the real political enemy of the AVT is. Months of release of ETA prisoners are approaching and the damage caused to the PP on the side of its victims, a territory that the party considers its own, must be limited. Columbus’s nightmare must not become real a second time. Less so now, when the right has another party to adopt.
The morning after the clash between Araluce and Marlaska, Mari Mar Blanco, sister of the PP councilor assassinated by ETA, burst into the Congress of Deputies to sit next to her boss, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and applaud as he accuses Pedro Sánchez of the future release of ETA prisoners.
Mari Mar Blanco has been complying for years with all the decisions of the PP while playing a dual role, as a politician with position and as a victim, from which she attacks the political opponent as leader of the party.
The image with Feijóo is the culmination of a political exploitation agreed between the two actors. The PP put Blanco at the head of the Foundation for Victims of Terrorism to end the partisan neutrality that the organization had maintained during the era of Maite Pagazaurtundua. He took her salary, to differentiate her from her predecessor, and in the meantime paid her another salary as a parliamentary advisor even though she never worked.
Like Ángeles Pedraza, Mari Mar Blanco has held positions in the Madrid administration, with high remuneration from public money, which have nothing to do with the professional training of both. Blanco, housing advisor at Madrid City Hall; Pedraza, commissioner of Cañada Real or director of Community Emergency Service.
