The image is iconic: a few minutes have passed since the death of Miguel Ángel Blanco was confirmed and the ertzainas who guard the headquarters of Herri Batasuna in San Sebastián are surrounded by dozens of more than outraged people who threaten to storm the premises. First one, then another, all the agents take off their “verduguillo”, the buf that covers almost their entire face. In that Euskadi of the 90s, it serves them above all so that no one recognizes them as police, so that no one can point them out as a possible target of ETA.
That afternoon of July 13, 1997, first an agent and in the end everyone takes off their mask and with it, without words, they tell the angry mass that they are on the same side. Some people hug them. Something has just changed in Euskadi.
“ETA surely did not calculate that there was humus, that people were already going out into the street. The images of Ortega Lara leaving the jail [he was released on July 1, 1997, after 532 hours in a basement] were a shock, and instead of giving that a break, ETA again defies the State by kidnapping Blanco with that deadline 48 hours. This allows for an unprecedented mobilization and sociological outcry”, analyzes Martxelo Otamendi, director of the Berria newspaper and a profound connoisseur of Basque reality.
For María Jesús Funes, sociologist specializing in participation and social movements, professor at the UNED and author of The Way Out of Silence. Mobilizations for peace in Euskadi: 1986-1997 (Akal), Miguel Ángel Blanco was “the final link in a process”. In the previous decade, Gesto por la Paz was born and consolidated, an entity with an unequal presence in Euskadi that generated a key dynamic: "It established a fixed day and time to protest the attacks," says Funes, "and in terms of mobilization This routinization is very important for social society, because it allows us to foresee. From there, to find them every Monday at such a time in such a place, people either joined or avoided it. That act challenged."
For Iñaki Ortega, at that time president of the New Generations of the Popular Party, a classmate and friend of Blanco's studies at the Sarriko university, that murder “meant the end of the domestic mourning, which was fine but did not help to put an end to ETA. The street changed. Just two years before, in 1995, when ETA assassinated Gregorio Ordóñez, I had been putting up protest posters at the university, and I was alone. After the murder of Miguel Ángel in those acts there were already many of us”.
The kidnapping immediately shook the nationalist left as well. Patxi Zabaleta was a member of Batasuna, but Aralar promoted within the party, which was an internal current critical of the violence that had splintered as a party since 2001: "We issued a statement immediately after the kidnapping -he recalls- and the first thing we asked for was his liberation, and also a respect for human and political rights. We had a strategic idea, we knew that this could have important political consequences, but there was no help from anywhere, ”he laments.
“It is obvious – he adds – that ETA was responsible, but it is also true that the government at that time did not even speak out. If he had said two sentences, ETA would have had a harder time justifying that horror. But the government only sought political advantage of what was going to be an assassination. And not only a murder, it was also going to be a serious political mistake by ETA”.
“Without going into details, I know that there were calls from Madrid to people from the nationalist left to intercede, I know what I'm talking about. They tried to get ETA to postpone the ultimatum, or to ask for a postponement in public, but they did not do it”, reveals Otamendi. “And that was a milestone in the history of ETA. Many people were activated from that, but also within the abertzale left ”.
Ortega disagrees with the political effects of the attack on the nationalist left: “Batasuna did not take a bath in reality, they simply felt panic because they could run out of voters, they realized that this could sweep them away. But then what they did was the Lizarra pact, to get closer to other nationalists”, he recalls. La Vanguardia contacted two commanders of Bildu, Batasuna's political heiress, who declined to offer their opinion.
Twenty-five years later, and despite what that attack meant in the defeat of ETA, the director of the Miguel Ángel Blanco Foundation, Cristina Cuesta, says in an email interview that "we have not defeated that part of society, especially the Basque and Navarre, maintain a legitimization of terrorism. There is no story shared by all. There are many pending issues and, unfortunately, a lot of disunity”.
“I had to experience it very personally and that is why right now – Iñaki Ortega explained this week by phone – I am writing an article about him. I want my children to know who he was: a son of immigrants, who lived in a working-class town, who went to work by train, who was kidnapped and murdered by someone who claimed to defend that working-class town. That man was shot twice on the mountain. I need my children to know what happened in this country.”
