FACTS:

- He became a council member for the first time in the Durango City Council in 1997.

- In October 1998, the PSE-EE “people’s house” in Durango was attacked for the first time. Some radicals cause a fire.

- On New Year’s Eve 1999, the “people’s house” was attacked a second time.

- During the following municipal elections, in 1999, Fernando Castillo is the PSE-EE candidate for mayor of Durango.

- On February 28th, 2000, while at work, somebody set his car on fire.

- On June 4 of that year, ETA killed the Popular Party spokesman in the city of Durango, Jesus Maria Pedrosa.

- In 2001, the situation became unbearable for his family. He resigned from his position as council member for Durango.

- In December of that year, some people attacked the PSE-EE “people’s house” in Durango again. This was the third attack in two years. Ten petrol bombs were thrown against the façade of the building.

- In 2003, he stood for the municipal elections, this time in Abadiño.

- In the 2007 municipal elections, he once again stood for the lists of Durango. He was elected town council member, a position he holds today.

- In 2009, ETA planted a bomb at the PSE-EE’s new headquarters in Durango. The office was completely destroyed.

CONSEQUENCES:

“My daughters are the ones that suffer most from this situation. I was assigned bodyguards in 2000. My oldest daughter, who was born in 1998, does not know what it is like to live without a bodyguard. The same can be said of my younger daughter, who was born later. My oldest daughter told me: “Dad, let’s go to La Rioja where we are normal”. Such phrases affect you a lot. We, after all, do not realise what we are going through. I think this is something that our children will analyse”.

“I became a council member for the first time in Durango in 1997 when the person ahead of me on the list dropped out. I spent those two years and, then, in the 1999 elections, I ran for mayor in Durango. Then the typical target pictures and drawings appeared”.

“The most serious attack that I suffered was on February 28, 2000. They set my car on fire when it was parked outside the place where I worked. I had been working in that company for four months.  I was using a fork-lift to transfer some material from the street into the factory when I realised that there was a plume of smoke behind the building. I heard sirens. I remembered that I thought my car was right in the area where the smoke was. When I went down, the fire brigade and the police were already there. They had already put out the fire. As soon as they saw me they knew it was mine, because they knew me. It was an emotional day. Party colleagues, both from the town and from the management, came to see me. They mayor of Durango also came”.

“In those days I thought about my wife, my family a lot. I thought a lot about my little daughter’s car seat. I saw it had been totally burned inside the car. That makes you think… It was a really bad day”.

“Just look what things are like; to go to a demonstration that had been called that day at the Town Hall at eight o’clock in the evening I had to leave work early. When I arrived, I met some of the partners from the company where I worked.  One, who had been the mayor of Durango for the PNV, had owned the factory where I was worked asked me how I was. I told him that I was all right but that I had to leave to finish my shift, because I was on the evening shift. The wife of one of the partners was there. She asked me how I could it be that I had to go back to work at a time like that. She couldn’t understand how a person whose car had just be set alight had to go to work, leaving the demonstration called against such an act”.

“Well, that’s in the past. Before the fire, they had already broken the car windows. I had the option to report it as a terrorist act. I didn’t consider it so important. Today, seen from a distance, I think I should have considered those warnings I had received before they set the car on fire”.

“At one point, around 2001, my wife told me she couldn’t take it anymore, that I had to choose, that this could not be. The tension was unbearable in Durango. In the end I resigned from my position as council member. By the way, there were unable to appoint a replacement because at that time none of my colleagues on the list wanted to join the city council. We spent two years without a seat in that term.

“Later, in 2003, when I stood for council member in Abadiño, the campaign became more personal. As Batasuna was not allowed to take part in those elections, there was an intense campaign against those of us who had won a seat, arguing that we were occupying the seats of those who had not been able to run”.

“Some things are absurd, they are symbolic acts that hurt you, like one night a person comes along and leave en empty water bottle at your door” (This is a symbolic threat with the terrorists represent “the loneliness and hardships endured by prisoners in these times when families gather and enjoy meals together, in an attempt to make the person threatened feel guilty”).

“But there are also more explicit things. For example, the first months of the term that began in 2003, the radicals gathered in front of my house. About 15 to 20 people gathered there. My wife phoned me and told me. I arrived, they whistled a bit and nothing else happened. This was repeated several times. There was a time when they gathered and we found out when we got home because a neighbour told us. They don’t cared whether you’re at home or not. I think they are getting tired and that they also realise that this type of pressure doesn’t work. On another occasion, they climbed up the façade of the town hall and got in through a balcony. It was a symbolic act.

“Despite everything that has happened in previous years, the pressure on me was harder in 2003 than during the previous term”.

“In 1998 they threw Molotov cocktails at our headquarters. They broke some windows.  It wasn’t a very determined attack. They damaged the façade and we had to have it cleaned, and they broke some windows. As a first step, we installed shutters”.

“But then there was another attack. They broke the door. They threw Molotov cocktails inside and burned the staircase. You must remember that people were living on the third floor of the building where we have our headquarters. The police didn’t know this and they didn’t realise there were people upstairs until I arrived and told them. It was a big shock, because they were elderly and had difficulty walking”.

“But the harshest attacks were in 2001 and 2009. On December 9th, 2001. On that occasion the staircase in the building where we had our headquarters was completely destroyed. The wooden staircase caught fire and the three floors were blackened by the fire. Then we replaced the front door, which was wooden and had been damaged, for an iron gate. We also had to redo the whole staircase. Every time you are attacked you implement measures to prevent it from happening again. First the windows, then the door …”.

“After the last attack at the old headquarters in 2001, we had to find another place. When looking for a new head office, we had to look for premises with certain basic safety measures: it had to have two entrances, we had to install a whole set of safety measures, in spite of the cost… we reached a situation where we had armoured doors and windows, at great cost, before we even had a heating system. The person we hired for the job told us that if he included all the safety measures in the budget, there would not be enough money for other things. We have thrown away large amounts of money and time in building and re-building the headquarters and other buildings attacked in the Basque Country”.

“This new head office, which opened in 2005, was the one where they planted a bomb in 2009. It was strange, because in this attack ETA didn’t warn beforehand that they had planted a bomb. The bomb was placed at the back. A neighbour who, by chance, had gone downstairs to take out the rubbish saw a person wearing a hood leave a box behind. This neighbour gave the warning”.

“The greatest cause for concern was the fact that the explosion broke a gas pipe, which leaked for a while, so we all the neighbours had to be evacuated until the experts arrived and disconnected the gas”.

“We had problems with the neighbours. After the 2009 bomb, they put up posters asking us to leave. When we re-opened the headquarters after the latest attack, the residents wanted to get us out of there. They offered to purchase the premises. They didn’t want to live above the PSE-EE headquarters. Some, with good manners, other with bad manners, told us that we had to find a place on the outskirts of town “where we wouldn’t place other people in danger”. They didn’t blame the perpetrators of the attacks for what had happened. For them, we were to blame for their discomfort, we were putting them in danger, we were responsible. We had tried, from the beginning, to have a good relationship with the neighbours. We wanted the situation to be as normal as possible; I offered them the conference room at the headquarters to hold meetings of the owners’ association… small details to prevent traumatic situations”.

“But the situation became tense. When they planted the bomb in 2009, we immediately started to work on re-opening the office. Due to the experience we had from the previous occasions, we were familiar with the insurance and other procedures we had to go through. We offered to assist the residents with the repair work. We offered to cover the holes caused by the bomb. The administrator was not exactly very polite to us and he created lots of obstacles… We managed to finish the office by mid September. Meanwhile, work on the neighbours’ flats was delayed and that stressed them even more”.

“The Book Fair (Durangoko Azoka) was held in December. People from the party and the Basque Government arrived. There was a lot of noise, and the neighbours thought we were re-opening. But that was not the case. What happened was that they had come to the fair. And that was when the posters against our headquarters, which caused so much controversy, appeared”.

“I have to say that, as a parent, I can understand the neighbours to a certain extent. I do not agree with their approach, but you think about the shock their children have had, that they had to get them out of bed at night…. you understand their displeasure. I don’t understand their hostility towards us but not towards those who planted the bomb. Today our relationship with the neighbours is cold, but I think that now the general situation, the way things are going, is quieter”.

“We must remember that Durango is in an enclave that is home ground to radical nationalism. Durango is the capital of a region where, from Amorebieta to Elorrio on one hand, including Ermua and Otxandiano, there are lots of towns governed by Batasuna”.

“That was a tricky term. On June 4, 2000, they killed Jesus Maria Pedrosa, PP council member for Durango. A little later, in August, a car bomb exploded with several ETA operatives inside. One of them was the one who had killed Pedrosa”.

“I was on the board of spokesmen in which the PNV tried to equate the death of Pedrosa with that of the ETA operatives whose car had exploded. That was the result of the cowardice of the moment. It was a tense legislature. Later, there has been less tension”.

“Socially, there comes a time when you find yourself confined and limited to interact with your friends and family and with people from the party. We are completely inbred.

“I’ve been to all the demonstrations called when there have been assassinations; I remember the one called when they killed Pedrosa; we couldn’t fill Durango, even though most people came from outside. I was disappointed. Support is minimal in the village. There has never been any popular response to violence in Durango. The people, in general, are lukewarm. We did not see any special support or response even when the bomb exploded in 2009. They had just destroyed our headquarters, which we had opened four years before”.

“Those who support you are your own people, nobody else. I have missed the solidarity of the people. There are many who make gestures but their actions do not match”.

Relative documents:

EL PAÍS

ABC

EL CORREO