FACTS:

 - In 1979 he made his first public stance against ETA terrorism at a time when very few people spoke out against the band. 

- He began to participate in organisations in favour of peace and freedom in the Basque Country. He has been part of “Gesto por la Paz” since its inception in the eighties. 

- Given his public stance and participation in such organisations, he was threatened and insulted on many occasions. 

- In September 2000, he was told that the police had found information on him among papers seized when some members of ETA’s Buruntza commando were arrested. 

- At that time he decided to take self-protective measures. 

- In 2004, based on the recommendations of experts, he decided to accept an escort service. Since then he has been assigned bodyguards. 

CONSEQUENCES:

“My first public stance against ETA terrorism was in 1979. I wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper, Deia, which was read at my parents’ home, who were nationalists, criticising the campaign that the nationalist left was orchestrating against the Statute of Gernika. Since my teens I have defended the same views and, since then, I stated my views in many letters to editors, articles…”. 

“Later I joined Gesto por la Paz. During the years I was involved in Gesto, I was insulted and threatened many times. The headquarters of Gesto por la Paz were in the Old Quarters of Bilbao, and it was very difficult to move around that area. These were the years when J.M. Aldaya, Ortega Lara… were kidnapped, when there ware demonstrations and counter-demonstrations every week”. 

“In those days, I was also involved in a programme on ETB that was quite successful, “Rifi-rafe”. It was 1992, Elkarri had just emerged, and a programme was launched with the participation of Gesto por la Paz, Elkarri, Pro-amnesty Groups… That was widely viewed in the media and I must say that since I have been involved in all this I have had lots of clashes, insults…. However, although it sounds paradoxical, we lived all this as if it were very normal. Meanwhile, ETA continued to murder people, but they killed policemen, soldiers, civil guards; they assassinated informants or people who were identified as drug dealers [1]“. 

“The paradox was that everything else was abnormal; the fact that they murdered people, threatened people, that you had to be careful where you went, the loss of freedom was all seen as something normal. I, for example, since1994 have not gone to the festivities in Bilbao, because it was crazy; we had lost our freedom, it was an exceptional situation, but we saw it as something normal”. 

“Things changed when, in September 2000, the then Chancellor of the Basque Country University (UPV), Manual Montero, called me to tell me that the police had found documents about me in the hands of an ETA commando and that they had been following me. It didn’t catch me by surprise, it was something I had been expecting for some time. I just had one question: Why now and not before?  It was the time of the strategy based on the socialization of ETA suffering, they had just killed Ernest Lluch, it is also the time when they put a bomb here at college… They had started to attack people who had opinions, thinkers, teachers…. I was not surprised that I had been followed. Objectively, I, who had been writing a weekly column in El País since 1997, was clearly a candidate for this”. 

“I appeared in the year 2000 in the Buruntza commando papers, and the first thing I did was go to the police station. They showed me a video on self-protection, horrible, which always ended with the person being killed. It becomes a very strange situation. They offer you bodyguards. I really thought the bodyguard idea was crazy, because my daughter had just been born. I had to stop bringing the child to the faculty crèche, as I had done before. It was unbearable to go looking for bombs under the car and then tie the girl into her chair in the back seat”. 

“The first option, prior to the escort, was counter-surveillance; which consisted in calling a police telephone number one hour before leaving home. They then sent a patrol to the house to have a look around. They would tell you when you could leave. At the same time, you informed the security services at university that were on your way, and they would look for a safe place to park your car. All this with your own car. It’s more bearable, but it still implies having to accept a way of doing things that takes away your autonomy and freedom, and above all places you in a mindset of fear and paranoia”. 

“As an anecdote, one Christmas morning or Christmas Eve, I can’t remember, I was in Alonsotegi, a small town, with my daughter in the park. She was on her tricycle, she would have been two, while I was reading the newspaper. I saw a car arrive. Two young men with long hair and sports bags got out. One was looking at me while the other came up. I am very fond of mountaineering and I carry my keys in a climbing carabiner. My first reaction was to put my hand through the carabiner. When he was about five feet from me, I got up and was about to punch him in the face. It turned out they were only looking for the town’s fronton court. In that moment I thought: this is crazy”. 

On the one hand, counter-surveillance systems allow you to have a certain degree of freedom. On the other hand, I had doubts whether I was doing it correctly. Every so often I had to review the safety conditions with the police, in case they had something new about you. They told me whether I still appeared in ETA papers, a fact that they also told me was not necessarily indicative of anything, because today, in this digital world, the same papers could be changing hands constantly”. 

“In 2000 I was offered an escort and I didn’t want it. I took self-protective measures. I dropped self-protection after some time. Then I took it up again, and finally, in January 2004, just before the general election, an acquaintance, who was a policeman and was working at the Government Delegation, told me that it could not be that I did not have any protection. He said that ETA was trying to organise something against people who had opinions and defended them. Then, I decided to give in and accept a bodyguard service. Later, when I ran for the Senate on the lists of the Socialist Party and I was elected, they offered to reinforce my escort service, but I decided that what I had was enough.” 

“The family environment situation is the hardest. In my case, my family background, including my wife, is linked to nationalism. Their first reaction was very negative, even worse than mine. They even argued that it was not worthwhile staying in the Basque Country and that we should leave. But, what does appearing on a piece of paper change? On second thoughts, it is a kind of safety guarantee, because until then, precisely because I didn’t appear anywhere and no commandos had papers on me, I thought I wasn’t a target for ETA. Indeed, the latter is very interesting: if you appear on a piece of paper you are a target and if you don’t you are not. But it turns out that the vast majority of the people that ETA has killed had not been found on any document. It was a little irrational, but this is an irrational world”. 

“The first reaction was to leave the Basque Country. We had a newborn girl. I even looked for options to apply for a place at another university. We were looking for possible destinations. But in the end we decided not to. We had been living there all our lives, we are part of this, of the struggle for peace and we had to stay here”. 

“What we did was look for a place of respite to go at weekends, on holidays … we looked for an area in Castilla y Leon, a mountain village. It’s a kind of stopgap; when we are a bit saturated with the situation here in the Basque Country, we take a break there”. 

“Our greatest concern was how our child was going to take it. But you realise, at least in my daughter’s case, that they assume it as normal. I remember one day she said: Patxi (one of the guards we had at that time) told me that before starting you have to look under the car so as not to run over a cat, but I know it’s to see if there’s a bomb. This disturbs you. But then you realize that they see the situation quite normally and think about it quite a lot. Moreover, we have been bringing a Ukrainian girl in summer for the last five years. At first we were worried about what a girl from outside would think when she came to a family and found that there are two guys standing around all day… How could I explain? But she has taken it as natural”. 

“Professionally, this situation has not affected me. It is a bit shocking and uncomfortable to go into college, into class, while there are two guys standing outside the door, or having to look before you go in. I was worried how my students and colleagues would take it, but the truth is that they have taken it quite well and I have received lots of support. In fact, when we to the faculty’s refectory I join several other teachers and my escorts come along too and there’s no problem”.