Arnaldo Otegi, general coordinator of eh Bildu and former member of AND, reiterated last Wednesday, September 18, the declaration of Hey, that “he is greatly sorry for their suffering” and is committed to “mitigating it to the best of our ability.” A public gesture that for the president of the Association of Victims of Terrorism, Maite Araluce, It is nothing more than a “lip service statement”, without any value, after verifying Otegi’s alleged participation in crimes investigated by the Police when he was a member of ETA. Representatives of victims such as Araluce and Consuelo Ordóñez, president of the Collective of Victims of Terrorism (Covite), They demand that the Abertzale leader facilitate the “right to the truth” of the hundreds of people affected by ETA terrorism who still do not know who executed their relatives.
Consuelo Ordóñez and Maite Araluce, two Basque women victims of terrorist barbarity, remain firm in their commitment to prevent impunity for ETA’s crimes and put an end to the embers of support for violence that still manifests itself in the streets and squares of the Basque Country and of Navarra.
“It is Otegi himself who knows much more; he pays lip service to the fact that he is with the victims and has the opportunity to bring that peace to the family that until now we do not have. We have the right to know, even if the crime is prescribed, we want to know, we have the right to the truth,” claims Maite Araluce, daughter of Juan María Araluce, murdered by ETA on October 4, 1976. This “right to the truth” once again becomes a cry among the victims of ETA terrorism. Officially there are 379 murders without identified perpetrators, crimes that have gone unpunished even though there is police documentation and even judicial summaries that could help clarify them.
“What are you going to tell me that you are going to talk to Otegi and he is going to tell you what he knows? There are very few ETA members who have taken the step in that collaboration and in those I believe I regret it. I don’t even Urrusulo, Guisasola, Ibon, Pikabe… “That they have made public statements of denying ETA is a regret that is not complete because they lack collaboration and have not collaborated,” warns a skeptical Consuelo Ordóñez. The president of Covite keeps the memory of all the victims alive with tireless work on networks and in 2015 he managed to reopen the judicial investigation into the intellectual authorship of the murder of his brother Gregorio Ordóñez, on January 23, 1995. The National Court charged Mikel Albisu, Iñaki Gracia, José Javier Arizkuren, Julián Atxurra and Juan Luis Agirre but still three of them have not declared because a procedure is required from the French Justice.
The two former ETA members who have collaborated as protected witnesses before the National Court have made it possible to link former ETA leaders as intellectual authors of the murder of Ordóñez and to open other summaries such as the kidnapping and execution of Miguel Ángel Blanco, the murder of Judge Querol or the attack on T-4 in Barajas. A judicial reactivation of the clarification of ETA’s crimes that bothers the Abertzale left of Otegi and is promoted by associations such as Covite and the AVT.