José Antonio Urrutikoetxea, known by police and journalists as Josu Ternera, was arrested in France in 2019. He is on parole and currently resides in the French Basque Country. He is awaiting extradition to Spain, where he is accused of being in the leadership of ETA at the time it ordered and prepared the massacre of the Civil Guard barracks in Zaragoza, in 1987. Eleven dead, five of them children .
Was Urrutikoetxea then the head of ETA and therefore the intellectual author or the instigator of that crime? Surely Évole has asked him about it. And for the attack in Vic, or for that of Carrero Blanco (it was in 1973, and Urrutikoetxea was already a member of ETA), or for that of the Catalan socialist Ernest Lluch, or for that of the PP councilor Miguel Ángel Blanco, or even for the massacre of 11-M, which even the nationalist leader Arnaldo Otegi condemned, or for his time as a nationalist parliamentarian in Vitoria, or for his negotiations for peace with Jesús Eguiguren in 2005-2006... The history of ETA is full of gaps , and surely the Producciones del Barrio documentary helps to better understand a black page in the history of Spain.
It happens that around 330 murders committed by ETA currently lack a known perpetrator and therefore it is normal and human that the prospect of the screening of the documentary about the head of the bloodthirsty gang generates virulent (previous) reactions against it. We will have to wait to see what it reveals and what it hides. But let's wait.
Also with all certainty (as Évole himself has stated) the documentary is not kind to the interviewee. Journalistic and historical interest is assured.
For now we know that Urrutikoetxea admits for the first time in the Évole documentary to having participated in the murder of the mayor of Galdácano, Víctor Legorburu, in 1976. Criminally it does not count, because it is before the amnesty of 1977. But it surely gives a tremendous forces the film, which opens and closes with the testimony of Francisco Ruiz, who was Legorburu's escort. Thanks to Producciones del Barrio, he discovers Urrutikoetxea's participation in that action.
With 50 years of militancy, Urrutikoetxea is the pure history of ETA. Why not listen to it? We must remember this phrase: “It is preferable that I take his seat than that I take a weapon.” He pronounced it when the terrorist leader was elected parliamentarian for Euskal Herritarrok, a certain José María Aznar. Year 1998.
