FACTS

- On September 29, 1980, three members of ETA Politico-Militar broke into his home and locked him, together with his mother and two sisters, in the kitchen. The terrorists kidnapped his father, an executive committee member of UCD (Unión de Centro Democrático) of Álava, José Ignacio Ustaran Ramirez, at gunpoint and killed him moments later.

CONSEQUENCES

“In 1978, when I was ten, the first winds of freedom had reached Spain. My parents went about their daily tasks with a special smile on their faces because they had been involved in politics from the beginning. You could see how happy they were about something that was coming and that I, at that age, was unable to perceive”.

“When they killed my father I was 13 years old. As that was a time in my life when I really needed the affection of a father, I found support in his character. I have always defined him as a good Basque person who loved hunting and who had a great group of friends. He loved to take me to football matches and sports”.

“From my point of view, we were a very close family. The Christmas Holidays were always a family holiday and we always lived all those family moments very intensely. I would say that, throughout my life, since my father was killed, I have always missed that family model that I had up to the age of 13. In short, we are a very close knit family and very typical of the times”.

“When they killed my father, my eldest sister was 15, I was 13 and my other sisters were nine and six. I clearly remember that night when I had to explain to a six year old girl what had happened to her daddy. I mean, how is a person who is 13 supposed to come to terms with his father’s death and explain it to his six year old sister. Those are images that remain for life”.

“It all happened in one night. My father was a professional office in Vitoria and, thinking they were two customers who had come to visit him, I heard some shouts. I looked and I saw, down the hall where his office was, two people shouting at him. I thought they were customers who were having some type of professional discussion and I closed the door. One of the terrorists saw me, came to my room, where I was studying, pointed a gun at me and said: What are you doing here? I said it was my house and I was studying. Then she told me to go to the kitchen with my family, with my mother. She followed behind with the gun and I passed the office; that was the last time I saw my father alive. They were making him read a document and it was clear that the situation was really tense”.

“I went to the kitchen with my sisters, except the eldest who hadn’t come home yet. My mother was obviously in hysterics because it was a very anxious situation. I also remember that my mother, a local councillor for the city of Vitoria, was telling them that they should be taking her, but they took no notice and didn’t even talk to her. Then, they told us they were going to cut off the phone and that we shouldn’t make any phone calls until 11 o’clock at night, about two hours later. We waited for about half an hour and then made our way down to see a neighbour to tell him what had happened and we started to get things moving in that extremely tense situation”.

“After a very short time, about an hour and a half later, the police and other people began to arrive and it all started to look bad. I’m an optimist by nature and so I thought it was a kidnapping and that it would all end well, but they murdered him about half an hour after taking him from the house. They drove him out of Vitoria in his own car and shot him twice in the back of the head. They left him inside the car, parked opposite the UCD headquarters at the time”.

“It would have been about midnight and someone from the UCD came home to tell my mother that he had been killed. I was in another part of the house, but my mother’s desperate cry has stayed with me all my life; something that comes back to me occasionally with sadness and emotion”.

“From that moment, that night, I had to bite the bullet and I had to explain to my six year old sister that her father had gone to heaven. It was a very tough experience. Those were days of drama, very momentous, very sad and stressful”.

“I had a special relationship with my father that was becoming very fluid, maybe due to my age. I was the only boy in the house and the feeling I had was that the light that guided me had gone out. I had the guidance of my mother, but my father’s light had faded, and in that sense, I can say that since then, it is not that I have a personal trauma, but there have been occasional moments in my life when I really noticed the absence of that guidance: when having to make certain decisions, asking for advice… moments of the day to day life where your father can tell you what to do”.

“We had to decide what to do; whether to stay in Vitoria or move to Seville. My mother was from Seville and she had eight magnificent brothers so we decided to leave. It was a tough to have to change friends, school and the environment in which I has grown up until I was 13. We children supported one another and with the support of my mother’s relatives from Seville, where we were made welcome and supported by society and friends, we soon made a place for ourselves in that wonderful city”.

“The first years were especially difficult. My mother suffered from a major depression as they had broken a family model that she missed at Christmas or at other certain times”.

“My father had gone but my mother was the anchor, the support that guided her children through all the difficult times, especially adolescence. It is really my mother’s merit that we are now gentle, quiet people who have positive thoughts instead of feelings of revenge. What my mother has tried to do over the years is to make us believe in values such as justice, believe in the system rather than become people who are thinking about revenge or other negative values. She has done a great job and I think the four of us have been successful thanks to her sacrifice”.

“Based on the memories I have of my father, if I had to describe him I would say he was a good guy. I remember him as a friendly and very quiet person. He was a very calm and steady type of person who set out his goals and achieved them. I also remember that was a close friend of his friends, with whom he enjoyed going out a lot. My mother always says I’m a true reflection of my father. In part it might be something genetic, but I think there is also a conscious or unconscious tendency to be like that because that is the way he taught me to see life and, as I like that way, that’s how I try to be”.

“Now that I have a seven and a half year old daughter, at times I realise that I project what I missed during all these years. I have discussed this with my sisters and they all agree with me: we have a special relationship with our children from an emotional point of view – I would say above average – that might be due to what we lacked. You see your daughter and want to give her what you have missed out on. It’s something that is easy to see at times and it’s part of the wound that all who go through such a situation end up having. We believe we have overcome it and, in fact, we have overcome it, but we have little issues that crop up through life”.

“Everything that has happened to my family can be concentrated in two values: one is related to freedom and the other to justice. I think everyone who has gone through this demands justice from the system, at least. There are many families who have seen that justice has been done in their cases, but in our case, this has not been so, unfortunately. It’s been 28 years and the people who murdered my father are still free. This doesn’t affect us in our daily lives but in one’s inner thoughts, when trying to uphold justice, it seems incorrect and it makes you wonder how it can be possible that, living in a state of law, justice has not been done in our case, which is all we are asking for after all”.

“Eventually I have come to understand that that smile, happiness and excitement that my parents felt in that period is due to what they were struggling to achieve at that time; a free state. My father is a victim who fell for freedom. He defended and died for that freedom”.