Josu Ternera, in Paris in 2020. JOEL SAGET (AFP)
On May 12, 1989, a judicial commission formed by the then judge of the National Court Baltasar Garzón, the prosecutor Carmen Tagle and a commissioner of the National Police went to the Palace of Justice in Paris, to the office of the French judge Michel Legrand. They wanted to interrogate for the first time José Antonio Urrutikoetxea Bengoetxea and Josu Ternera, who was then considered the head of ETA and had been imprisoned in Bayonne four months earlier. Legrand asked the first questions, but the ETA member limited himself to the answer “je n’ai rien à dire” (I have nothing to say, in French) and a political plea for Euskadi’s independence.
According to Garzón, in a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS, both the French judge and the Spanish commission asked the ETA member whether his way of fighting for the independence of the Basque Country was to murder children (in November of the previous year there was a car bomb given). killed a man and a two-year-old baby). Urrutikoetxea simply said: “If we talk about the torture they are practicing against us in Spanish prisons, then we will talk about it.” The prosecutor couldn’t help but make a quiet comment: “Brave son of a bitch.” Kalb seemed to hear her and asked the French judge who she was. “He looked at us with contempt,” Garzón remembers. Tagle was assassinated by ETA four months later.
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Now, 34 years later, the documentary “Don’t Call Me Veal” by journalist Jordi Évole, whose premiere on September 22nd at the San Sebastián Film Festival caused enormous controversy with requests not to be shown, puts Urrutikoetxea and in front of the camera everything that it represents. At 72, Josu Ternera’s biography is a symbol of a now-defunct ETA, both for those who were in it and for those who suffered from its violence, and it is confused with the history of the terrorist organization itself. He joined the gang in 1968, the year the murders began, and was its top leader during one of its bloodiest times, the 1980s. He was also responsible for the political apparatus and represented the gang in negotiations with the government. He was also one of the two ETA members – the other was Soledad Iparraguirre, Anboto, now imprisoned in Spain – who read the dissolution statement in 2018.
Urrutikoetxea made his symbiosis with the terrorist organization clear in the trial against him in Paris in October 1990: “I was, am and will be a member of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna and I am proud of it,” he said. The journalist Florencio Domínguez, in his book Josu Ternera: a life in ETA (The Sphere of Books), explains this long, unique career of the band, in which “in every separation, in every break, Urrutikoetxea always sided with those who were do.” maintained their loyalty to independence nationalism and violence.” Other ETA leaders of his generation – such as José Miguel Beñarán, Argala, or Domingo Iturbe, Txomín – died, left the gang or were forced to do so after their arrest.
Ternera, who has never been brought to justice in Spain, admits in the Évole documentary his involvement in the theft of the dynamite that the gang used to murder then government president Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973. He also acknowledges his indirect involvement in the bombing that claimed the life of the mayor of Galdakao (Bizkaia), Víctor Legorburu, in 1976. In both cases, the 1977 amnesty exempted him from any criminal responsibility.
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The same cannot be said for his involvement as a suspected instigator in the attack on the Zaragoza barracks in 1987, in which eleven people, including six minors, died. He will be prosecuted for this circumstance. He is under investigation in Spain for three other reasons: financing of ETA through the Herriko taverns; the murder of Luis María Hergueta, director of the Michelin company, in Vitoria in 1980; and a crime of all crimes against humanity. In addition, in January 2022, the National Court admitted a lawsuit against him for planting the car bomb in the T-4 at Madrid-Barajas airport that killed two people and ended ETA’s last ceasefire. In these five cases investigated in Spain, Josu Ternera denies his involvement.
In his book, Domínguez emphasizes that Urrutikoetxea “lived in the shadows most of the time, trying to hide from public scrutiny and, in some scenarios, trying not to leave traces of his time.” In fact, no ideological documents are even attributed to him . The only text known to him is the book Giltzapeko sukaldaritza (The Kitchen Between the Bars, published by Hiru Argitaletxea), which contains the recipes he prepared during his ten years in prison in France for belonging to a terrorist group.
But its relevance to ETA was obvious. Urrutikoetxea appears to be linked to the talks in Algiers in 1989, in which the gang demanded his participation despite his imprisonment in France; and to the meeting in 2004 with the then head of the ERC Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira. But above all it is linked to the contacts with the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in Switzerland and Norway in 2006, which, although they did not materialize, paved the way that led to the cessation of violence in 2011 and later to the dissolution of the Tape.
The government then took the view that Josu Ternera’s presence at these meetings was not a guarantee of anything, but that he had to be there for them to be fruitful. Jesús Egiguren, the Basque socialist leader who sat before him at that dialogue table, recalled in El Correo in 2015 how that process went wrong, precisely when Urrutikoetxea had defected from another ETA leader. “That’s when it showed up [Francisco Javier López Peña] “Thierry, who was the one who spoke while Ternera was in the corner,” Eguiguren recalled, interpreting this substitution as a prelude to the T-4 attack that ended the negotiations.
Urrutikoetxea assures that he left the organization after this failure. Nevertheless, he continued to be involved in important ETA movements. In November 2011, he traveled to Oslo to join the delegation that unsuccessfully sought a meeting with the government of Mariano Rajoy (PP) following the announcement of the “final end to violence” a month earlier. His next appearance on stage was reading the band’s dissolution statement in 2018. A year later, he was arrested in France while going to a hospital for cancer treatment.
His arrest ended a record 17-year run. Police sources emphasize that he was able to stay off their radar for so long because he did not use the gang’s structures, which had already been destroyed by police operations, to hide. He relied on a parallel network of friends. His way of living secretly, almost like a hermit, also helped. After negotiations collapsed in 2006, he lived for seven years in a house near Durban-sur-Arize, a small town of 100 people in the French Pyrenees. According to what his neighbors told EL PAÍS in May 2022, Josu Ternera lived alone, only spoke to a few locals, received no visits other than those from his partner, and did not leave the area. Six years later, in 2019, he was arrested and also living in a lonely hut in a community of 250 people near Mont Blanc.
Following his arrest in France – where he remains on supervised release in the town of Anglet along with his partner and daughter – Urrutikoetxea has focused his efforts on preventing his extradition to Spain through legal means. So far he has succeeded: he has yet to be charged with another case in France, and until he is convicted there and serves his sentence, he will not be extradited. In July, the national court set to try him over the Zaragoza attack agreed to postpone the hearing scheduled for next January after confirming that he would not have been extradited by France by that date. Now the premiere of Évole’s documentary once again puts the spotlight on Josu Ternera and the story of ETA that he embodies.
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