The documentary No me llame Ternera, by Jordi Évole and Màrius Sánchez, is added to a long list of cinematic approaches to the phenomenon of ETA. In fact, its score is particularly reminiscent of the first film that focuses on the band as a whole: El proceso de Burgos (1979), by Imanol Uribe (two previous titles were shot focusing only on the attack on Carrero White).
It is interesting to see again this film shot in the midst of transition, based on the testimony of several defendants. The majority either left politics or ran away from the radical path and ended up in Euskadiko Ezkerra, first, and then the PSE-PSOE. Only a minority continued in the ETA environment after the trial, prison and amnesty, such as Jokin Gorostidi or Itziar Aizpurua. If you compare the testimonies of those first-generation elders with that of Josu Urrutikoetxea, Josu Ternera, it is surprising above all the coincidence in the lexicon and the arguments, the narrowness of the reasoning framework of one and the other, closed in a spiral of repression-conflict-action.
But there is a substantial and obvious difference: those interviewed by Uribe speak to us from an oppressive era in which the dictatorship and its thugs had not yet said the last word. It had been two years since the Atocha massacre and there were still a few years to go before the 23rd F. They were still young people, with time ahead of them to see that democracy would make its way and that the conditions that had motivated by his youthful enthusiasm for ETA.
Évole i Sánchez's Josu Ternera, on the other hand, is a character stuck in time. While many colleagues of his generation and militancy evolved in accordance with a society that was modernizing and opening up to the world, he, as can be seen in the documentary, was confined in a mental prison from which he has not yet come out. When they woke up, Josu Ternera was still there.
It may be that one of the main contributions of this interview is to show the emotional and intellectual destitution of a character who for decades moved the strings of a band that seduced to the end some sectors of the radical left and which, in a way, could continue to seduce. The interviewer helps to highlight this argumentative weakness of the character with questions that bring out his contradictions.
It is not a purpose of less weight. Armed struggle always generates fascination. In the same way that the first punk used Nazi symbols to provoke and that the same world of ETA was mirrored with the IRA and the Cuban or Algerian revolutions, the symbol of the ETA snake still circulates on the networks today as an emblem of rebellion and insubordination. It is used from the innocence of young people who were children when the terrorist gang was dissolved and do not know everything about it. This is why movies like this are necessary.
Évole's, in some way, renews the certainty that the leadership of ETA was nurtured by young people from school failure, without enough reading to form a critical sense that would help them distrust the gang friend who invited them to join the sect. Nothing could be further from the delicate revolutionary of Camus' The Rebellious Man.
The testimony of Francisco Ruiz, escort of the murdered mayor of Galdakao and survivor of the attack despite having received twelve shots, frames the interview with Ternera. His is a sensible and articulate speech that contrasts with the terrorist's poverty of approaches.
In his first intervention, he explains that, weeks after the attack and still in a wheelchair, people turned their faces at him in the street, while his wife had to hear offensive comments in the shops. So the banality of evil was also this: the pain that can cause any member of a community subjugated to a perverse system in which one hitman succeeds another in decision-making. A precious piece of information for those who did not know ETA.
