MADRID — Basque terrorist group ETA ceased operations more than a decade ago but in the lead-up to Spain’s July 23 election the group has made a surprising comeback in the rhetoric of the country’s right-wing parties.
Throughout the campaign, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the center-right Popular Party, has sought to link socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to the terrorist group by pointing out that his government has sometimes relied on parliamentary support from the Basque political party EH Bildu.
Although the Spanish judiciary repeatedly has found EH Bildu is a democratic political group that is allowed to legally exist, Feijóo and other members of his party routinely equate it to ETA, which was responsible for the murder of over 850 people between 1968 and 2010.
During Monday’s one-on-one debate with Sánchez, Feijóo accused the prime minister of making deals with “the political arm” of a terrorist organization.
He also rejected calls to denounce members of his party who repeat the phrase “¡Qué te vote Taxapote!” — a slogan that sarcastically urges Sánchez to get votes from Francisco Javier García Gaztelu — a.k.a Txapote — one of ETA’s most notorious assassins.
Fed up with what they characterize as a “trivialization of terrorism,” the Collective of Victims of Terrorism (COVITE), a non-partisan group that represents victims and family members of all acts of terrorism, on Tuesday released an open letter calling on all political parties stop using the slogan.
“‘Txapote’ murdered dozens of people and it is unfair and cruel to force the families of his victims to listen to his name in a slogan that is repeated over and over again,” reads the letter from the organization, the only one in Spain to be granted special status by the United Nations for its work. “Memory, Truth, Dignity and Justice has no political ideology and should not be co-opted for partisan purposes.”
“We’ve been having to tolerate this idiotic slogan for months,” said COVITE President Consuelo Ordoñez, whose brother Gregorio was murdered by García Gaztelu in 1995. “This constant talk of ETA banalizes what they did and consequently makes it easier for some people to justify those killings.”
Ordoñez said the slogan was popularized by Madrid’s regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who used it in a meeting of the capital’s parliament in February.
“I denounced it then and told her that using it disrespected the dead, but rather than stop it’s gotten worse,” Ordoñez said. “The Popular Party, the party to which my brother belonged, not only chants it at rallies; their youth wing has even used it on merchandising … Enough is enough.”
Resisting the right-wing
Ordoñez said Spain’s right wing had spent decades trying to appropriate the suffering of ETA’s victims and use it as a political weapon, with little interest in how the strategy affected the family members of people killed by the separatist organization.
Former Popular Party politician María San Gil — herself a witness to the murder of Ordoñez’s brother — recently admitted as much in an interview in which she admitted that constantly mentioning the defunct terrorist group angered victims but that it was worth doing “because it gives us votes.”
In response to the open letter, Ordoñez said her organization was overwhelmed with furious messages from right-wing militants accusing her of betraying her brother’s memory and being a terrorist sympathizer.
“I’ve spent years being attacked by Basque separatists and none of that has compared to the aggressions I’ve faced with this,” she said. “They’re trying to force all victims, the majority of whom are fiercely non-partisan, to be part of their party and support their campaign.”
In response to COVITE’s open letter, María del Mar Blanco, a Popular Party MP in Madrid’s regional parliament and the sister of Miguel Ángel Blanco, a town councillor murdered by ETA in 1997, released a counter statement vindicating the use of the slogan. The text argues that the slogan is a fair assessment of Sánchez’s policies and can’t be suppressed because it is a product of “free speech” that comes from “the people.”
Pablo Romero, a journalist whose father, Juan Romero Álvarez, was assassinated by ETA in 1993, lamented the Popular Party had sought to divide the victims’ groups “to stir up anger and try to grab a few more votes.”
“Freedom of speech is no justification for doing something as repugnant as making political use of our dead,” he said.
Romero pointed out that back when ETA was operational and still orchestrating bombings throughout Spain, conservative politicians had regularly met with their representatives and even authorized concessions such as the transfer of hundreds of imprisoned terrorists to jails closer to their homes in the Basque Country.
“It’s disgusting to see right-wing politicians use cheap slogans to try and link the left with the darkest period in our democratic history,” Romero said. “No politician has the right to instrumentalize our suffering for political gain: ETA wasn’t defeated by politicians, it was defeated by the people.”
