Against oblivion, the alteration of history and the whitewashing of the ETA dictatorship of terror. Firm in her convictions and tireless in battle, Maite Pagaza (Hernani, 1965) keeps alive the flame of a fight that cost her brother Joxeba and many others their lives. The MEP, after fulfilling her obligations in the European Parliament, returned yesterday afternoon to her home in Logroño to participate this morning in the tribute to the former chief sergeant of the Andoain Local Police, riddled with shots by terrorists twenty years ago today, on February 8, 2003. The co-founder in 1999 of the citizen initiative ¡Basta Ya! will attend the inauguration of the exhibition ‘Joxeba Pagaza. A cry for freedom’, which will remain open at the Memorial Center for the Victims of Terrorism until March 26.
– They say that twenty years is nothing, but it can be an eternity. Forgetting is impossible. And forgiveness?
– Forgetting is impossible because there are people who deserve not to be forgotten. The only thing left for us is to fight against oblivion, against the impunity they want to establish and against their whitening operation. And with respect to forgiveness, it is that to transfer forgiveness someone has to ask for forgiveness and the rest is to consider a rather toxic emotional relationship. The first element of forgiveness is that the other party feels moral shame and very few individually have felt it and collectively not at all, because what was a very productive industry of terror has become a very productive industry of whitewashing. That is why we have to continue working against oblivion and against the cynicism of the heirs or front men of the world of ETA.
– His family had to leave the Basque Country and settled in this land. Have you felt the support and affection of the people of La Rioja?
– Every day, all of us have gathered here in La Rioja, we have put down new roots, we have been able to breathe and we have felt the warmth of the people, the respect and affection. Here in La Rioja we have healed the wounds as far as possible, I am delighted and we already say, What a life!
Greed and historical error
– ETA dissolved, but the influence of your world is currently greater than ever in national politics, where these agreements with EH-Bildu have been normalized. How is that digested?
– Well, the first thing to say is that there are two phases. In this first one they are laundering the brand and trying to achieve impunity for the ETA prisoners, to whom they continue to perform acts of homage every day, also using children. The second phase will begin when they have released the last prisoner and then they will show their teeth politically, when they have achieved a good alliance with all those who are against the 1978 Constitution. They need this to achieve their political objectives, which always were, and secondly, to be able to rewrite history and defend that they were right when they did not join democracy. This is the operation and those who consent to it out of political greed are making a historic mistake.
“Here we have healed as much as possible the wounds and we have felt the warmth of the people and the affection”
– Have they won by achieving this whitening?
– They have lost because operationally they have been defeated and in these years they have not achieved all the impunity they would have wanted because there has been a part of society that has been vigilant. However, without a doubt, they have achieved much more impunity and whitening than they deserve. It is time to analyze that we are generating some toxic blocs, one in particular that is tremendously toxic against Spanish democracy.
revictimization
– Do the victims and their families feel defeated?
– Since that world does not have any type of moral shame and they do politics taking advantage of all the blood they have shed and the extraordinary cynicism that they have, what we have is a lot of re-victimization, our wounds open many times.
– More than 900 dead, almost half of the murders unresolved, and yet, many adolescents and young people do not know what ETA was. Something has gone wrong, hasn’t it?
– Parents still do not tell their children what happened and there is a generational gap in knowledge because, make no mistake, the authorities have not done many things either. We have gone from that silence out of fear to another that is also due to those consequences of accumulated terror. It is very important that families convey what happened, what they experienced, what they felt; but only those who were in favor are transmitting things, with which we once again have a very unbalanced situation and that could potentially be a problem, because the radicalization of children starts first from lies and that can generate problems in the future.
“It is very important that families transmit to their children what happened, what they experienced and felt”
– Have you ever thought that your brother’s fight was useless?
– No, because the history of humanity is that of totalitarian groups or states that become totalitarian and of people who fight for freedom of conscience and ideological progress. The Sakharov Prize is not awarded every year by chance, there are very good candidates. What Joxeba did or what we did in ¡Basta Ya! It was knowing that they were not invincible and convincing many public powers of this, as well as that when they were outlawed the end of ETA began.
– This work of Joxeba and that it does not fall into oblivion is what the exhibition that opens today intends, right?
– Yes, we know that it is very important to know what happened and how it happened so that the page can be turned over and all wounds can be properly closed, with the demands that are still necessary. Remembering is good, because it is an example for other fights, other places and other times. We must remember the people who were fair, those who thought of others and made a commitment. Memory is a vaccine, if we forget we can find the same intolerance with a small mutation that can do a lot of damage again.
