<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the eyes that refuse to see close their gaze and their conscience. Until an explosion shatters the afternoon and the steady rhythm of footsteps. Two beautiful bodies are thrown into the air beneath ancient trees that embrace them, and eyes that refuse to see them…<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 “Assassination in February,” El\u00edas Querejeta<\/em><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Between January 21 and February 22, 2000, thirty-one ominous days passed. Between Madrid and Vitoria-Gasteiz, there is a distance of 340 kilometers of Castilian plateau. Between those dates and those cities lies the tragic beginning of the long and bloody winter of twenty-five years ago.<\/p>\n
That year, ETA decided to break the deceptive truce of 1998 with the assassination of Colonel Pedro Antonio Blanco in Madrid. Weeks later, on February 22, at precisely 16:38, ETA blew up the innocent bodies of Socialist leader Fernando Buesa and his escort, Jorge D\u00edez, as they walked toward the Vitoria headquarters of the PSE-EE. That explosion, those flames, that cold, that thunderous silence in the heart of the Basque self-government institutions would be forever etched into the ears of a society that had already endured ETA\u2019s violence for far too long.<\/p>\n
The atmosphere of those months resembled a stormy nebula of bombs and bullets, of division and tension. Everything that the “years of lead” had not been\u2014marked by an unbearable number of murders\u2014was present then in a Basque society walking a fine line between exhaustion and division. Years earlier, society had finally begun to wake up, triggered by the group’s strategy of “socializing suffering” and the cruel assassinations of figures like Gregorio Ord\u00f3\u00f1ez and Miguel \u00c1ngel Blanco. But now, it faced the precipice of fragmentation. In Buesa\u2019s biography, written by Antonio Rivera and Eduardo Mateo, the authors describe the atmosphere of a community “on the verge of rupture, where all Basques lived dangerously.” At that time, the nationalist alignment under the Lizarra Pact created an almost insurmountable rift, leaving a society split in two.<\/p>\n
Fernando Buesa had been almost everything in Basque politics: councilor in Vitoria, representative in the General Assemblies of \u00c1lava, Deputy General of \u00c1lava, Minister of Education, Universities, and Research, and Vice President of the Basque Government. His time in institutions left behind an extraordinary legacy of eloquence and unwavering conviction. Many of the debates he initiated remain just as relevant in Basque politics today\u2014on the Basque education system, social services, the importance of citizenship, civic culture, and more.<\/p>\n
The Fernando Buesa Blanco Foundation, which will soon mark a quarter-century, is dedicated to preserving and disseminating the thoughts and ideas of the Socialist leader. His biography, published in 2020, along with speeches delivered at the General Assemblies of \u00c1lava and audiovisual records of his interventions in the Basque Parliament, constitute the foundation’s most treasured legacy. The traveling exhibition \u201cBuesa, the Power of Words\u201d, which has toured various cities in Euskadi, seeks to ensure that his memory is not lost.<\/p>\n
Those early months of the year 2000 were only the beginning of a year shrouded in the nightmare of terror: 23 people murdered by ETA and 66 attacks that once again shook both Basque and Spanish society. But no death was in vain. The painful absence of the victims reminds us, twenty-five years later, that no healthy society can be built without solid moral foundations\u2014respect, tolerance, and memory.<\/p>\n
Today, we must ask ourselves whether we are turning the page too quickly. Scholars of violence-ridden societies note that communities experiencing traumatic processes tend to normalize the past in order to live in the present and, hypocritically, in the future. The answer is perhaps simpler than we think: those who actively participated in that bloody nightmare now feel legitimized to refer to murderers as “political prisoners.” Meanwhile, those who turned a blind eye\u2014moral tourists in their own country\u2014resist acknowledging that their indifference was, in large part, what allowed the tragedy to persist for decades. And those who suffered violence and terror, directly or indirectly, now find themselves an inconvenience\u2014unwelcome in their persistent effort to ensure that the memory of those winters is never lost.<\/p>\n
This year, as every February 22, the song “Ausencia” by singer-songwriter Imanol will play in the Gardens of Liberty in Vitoria\u2014right next to where Fernando Buesa and Jorge D\u00edez were murdered twenty-five years ago. Back then, there were still eleven more years to go, and dozens more deaths, before the nightmare of terror would finally end. Today, the memory of their absence remains essential. More than ever.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And this is what the world calls absence<\/em>
\nFire in the soul, and in life, an inferno<\/em>
\nAnd what is temporary, they call eternal<\/em>
\nThis is what the world calls absence<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 “Ausencia,” by Imanol<\/em><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n
Por Javier S\u00e1nchez-Somoza<\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meanwhile, the eyes that refuse to see close their gaze and their conscience. Until an explosion shatters the afternoon and the steady rhythm of footsteps. Two beautiful bodies are thrown into the air beneath ancient trees that embrace them, and eyes that refuse to see them… \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 “Assassination…","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":4794,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-la-pecera"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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