Juanlu: We’ve arrived. You can get off now. At Amara station.
Isabel: Very natural. It turned out great.
Do you remember when we went together to Amara station?
Bego: That was the station where they left the girl, my mother left the girl and went to buy her some little shoes to go to the village. So she left her here, and that’s when the bomb exploded in the luggage storage.
It was very early in our acquaintance, the second or third time we saw each other. You wanted to show me something.
Bego: And well, since it happened at this station, they decided to put up this plaque,
A plaque that the San Sebastián city council placed in this station in 2020.
Bego: It says, well, that. Begoña Urroz Ibarrola, victim of DRIL, written in Basque and Spanish, June 27, 1960.
Begoña Urroz. June 27, 1960. Victim of DRIL.
Bego: It’s impressive to see your name because, well, it’s my name. And every time I pass by here, I don’t step on it, you know? I walk around it, right? And a lot of people… you notice, sometimes when I stop and look, people don’t see it. They don’t look at it. They step on it and don’t realize. But I avoid it, right?
While I was there with you, I wondered what people passing through the station daily, seeing the plaque, might think. If they know what DRIL is, if they have ever thought about your sister, if that plaque has served that purpose—to preserve her memory.
It seemed you were wondering that too, so we started asking.
Bego: Look, this guy. This man coming behind us.
Isabel: Hi. Can I ask you a question? Do you know what this plaque is?
Man: No.
Man: No idea.
Isabel: No idea?
Woman: No, no, no, I don’t know.
Bego: These little girls are from here.
Woman: I have no idea.
Bego: These are foreigners.
Isabel: Do you know what this plaque is?
Woman: Yes, it’s about a girl who was killed by one of those explosions, by those DRIL guys.
For most people, this plaque doesn’t mean much: a name, a date, a piece of metal on the ground. But for you, that plaque means a lot. Because if marked dates are like monuments made of time, there are also physical, material monuments that give victims one of the most important things: public recognition of what happened.
Isabel: How do you know this?
Woman: Because I take the train here every day and wondered what that was. I had never heard of DRIL. So I looked it up on the internet.
Today, anyone can look it up online, like that woman did, and in seconds find out that your sister was killed by DRIL.
Isabel: Well, she’s her sister.
Woman: Oh, really? The girl’s sister? Wow, look at that…
But for that to become certain, for it to be written in stone—or metal—it took many years.
Bego: Yes, there is information.
Man: Yes, there is a lot of information. I think the topic wasn’t talked about for many years until historians and such started investigating and telling the truth.
Because questioning something that has become the official version has never been a quick or easy path. And it almost always ends up having unexpected consequences.
Woman: Nothing, nothing,
Welcome, Bego, welcome to all of you to Se llamaba como yo.
A documentary series about your family’s silence for years… and the noise that broke it.
A series by (De eso no se habla) co-produced with EITB Media and supported by the Ministry of Culture.
And this is episode 6: The Versions.
Juanlu: Well, it went well because you got an older person, some middle-aged ones, some from the town…
[Music]
To make this series, I spent a lot of time in libraries. One of the libraries where I spent the most time was Bidebarrieta, in Bilbao. There, I discovered a small hidden open war between the pages: in books that say your sister was killed by ETA, someone had been writing little messages in pencil. In one book, for example, under the text about your sister, someone wrote “a lie repeated a thousand times.” In another book, they wrote in the margin: “The ability of the ‘intelligentsia’ to make a fool of themselves with Begoña Urroz knows no limits.”
These are not the only messages in that library. Other people have intervened in other books about ETA: where it says gudari (soldier), they cross it out and write “soldier” (a different term); where it says “liberated,” they cross it out and write “paid”; where it says organization, they write “band.” Laugh at the metaphorical “battles over the narrative,” when you can see a literal one in the Bidebarrieta Library.
While I was reading those books — and I must confess, I was looking for little messages written from the past — I thought that was a good metaphor for this episode: the people who questioned the official version about your sister’s death by writing in the margins of official history.
[Euskara]
One of those people was journalist Ainhoa Oiartzabal.
[Euskara]
At the end of 2010, that is, after the first victims’ day was celebrated in Congress, Oiartzabal began investigating your sister’s story. I went to see her in Andoain, at the newsroom of her newspaper, Berria.
Oiartzabal: Well, Berria is, as I explain to my ten-year-old son who is amazed, the only newspaper in Basque. He says, “Here, really?” Here, here and in the world.
When she started investigating your sister’s case, she thought it would be easy, something that would take a month at most.
Oiartzabal: I started in October and there was a story, to see if by November I could publish it, about Begoña Urroz, who was said to be the first victim of ETA and all that, but there were signs that she wasn’t, that she wasn’t. And also, journalistically, things didn’t fit, so it seemed very easy, it seemed very easy…
As we talked, I realized that, without knowing it, I had been following the same steps she had taken a few years before. Looking at how your sister appeared in the lists from the Basque government…
Oiartzabal: “Unknown authorship.”
Checking the Ministry of the Interior’s lists…
Oiartzabal: I couldn’t find her name on the official pages.
And seeing how the media had covered the news.
Oiartzabal: The copy-paste that’s there. In any medium, like… right? It said “The first victim of ETA,” that tagline that repeated and repeated and repeated, right?
Oiartzabal went over the sources that repeated and repeated and repeated. She also reviewed the press archives from the time of the attack and even found a news article from ABC in 1962, two years later, which said that the DRIL was responsible for “the death of a girl from Guipuzkoa.”
She didn’t even have to go to any archive.
Oiartzabal: This from the newsroom computer, I mean, they have the entire press archive online.
She also spoke with those who might know, like members of the first ETA.
Oiartzabal: And of course, nobody remembered that attack.
And that’s how Oiartzabal became obsessed with this story.
Oiartzabal: It was like yes, it’s very obvious, it’s very obvious. And the more you dug, the more came out, right?
What was I going to tell you?
Oiartzabal: Then you get the urge like “this has to be told.”
In the end, it took her five months to publish it. She released it in February 2011. And it was rock solid, as we say in journalism: she had checked all the sources, talked to all the possible people, even spoke with Vicar Pagola about his footnote. In total, it was an 11-page report titled “Nork hil zuen Begoña Urroz?” — “Who killed Begoña Urroz.” For her work, she won the Rikardo Arregi award, one of the most prestigious journalism prizes in Basque. But neither her investigation nor the award stopped the momentum of what had already become the official version.
Man: Good afternoon.
Just three months later…
Man: A solemn session will begin in memory and tribute to the victims of terrorism.
José Bono repeated this in Congress.
Bono: Because it was on June 27, 1960, when ETA killed its first victim.
It was 2011, the second year the victims of terrorism day was celebrated.
Bono: … Begoña Urroz.
[Music]
That year, 2011, was very important for your family. It was also an important year for the recognition of terrorism victims. That year, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s government approved a new victims’ law. The previous law recognized victims starting from 1968, the date of the death of José Antonio Pardines, the Civil Guard who until then was considered ETA’s first victim. But now, with that change in law, cases would be recognized starting from 1960. And this was done to include your sister.
Bego: And of course, they sent it by mail. If you notice, look how it has…
Less than a month had passed since the law was approved when a form arrived at your home, which one day we started looking at in your kitchen.
Juanlu: That’s your mother’s, right, Bego?
Bego: No, this one… No, this one is mine. That handwriting is mine.
The form was sent directly by the Ministry of the Interior and it came almost pre-filled. In fact, your handwriting appears only once:
Juanlu: Yes. Instead of an 8, a 7.
Isabel: It said 6, 26.
Bego: 26. Right.
To correct, once again, a mistaken date.
Bego: See? Here, where she appears, dead… The birth and the ID of my mother.
What struck me the most about that form was that most of the boxes were left blank.
Bego: And of course, you see that then there was nothing else to fill out.
The box that says “brief description of the circumstances of death,” for example, is empty.
Juanlu: Brief description.
Bego: Nothing.
As if, after so much time in silence, after so much time without recognition, now everything was easy.
Bego: And we only had to sign. It says the date when we sent it, October 17. See? Just in time.
You know I really like dates. The poetry of dates.
You sent the application on October 17 of that year, 2011.
Three days later…
Man: Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Socialist Revolutionary National Liberation Organization, wishes through this declaration to announce its decision.
ETA announced the definitive end of its armed activity.
Man: The agreed resolution contains the ingredients for a comprehensive solution to the conflict and has the support of wide sectors of Basque society…
A few days after ETA’s announcement, you received the affirmative response to your request. And so, more than 50 years later, your sister’s name was added to the list of compensated victims of the Ministry of the Interior. The only official list, as you know. Her name appeared first, opening the list. At least, for the moment.
And less than two years later, in 2013, the news broke:
Presenter: Begoña Urroz was only 22 months old when a bomb sent to the Amara train station in San Sebastián took her life. Now, Catalan journalist Xavier Montanyá has accessed declassified documents from the time, drafted by the Francoist political-social brigade, concluding that it was the DRIL who killed Begoña Urroz and also sent other suitcase bombs…
That journalist, Xavier Montanyá, was the Catalan journalist I spoke about in the first episode. The one who had a box full of documents about your sister. The one who had written a book in 2004 saying that your sister was killed by the DRIL. In that book, Montanyá had relied on many sources to support it — I told you about them in that first episode — but he knew there could be more documents to which he had not yet had access.
Montanyà: And then, as the lie kept growing, the snowball, I told myself “Well, years have passed already. Maybe I can start declassifying, right?”
When Montanyà says declassifying, he means requesting documents that until then had been secret by law. And Montanyà kept doing that: declassifying, requesting access to documents that could convince those who still believed ETA was responsible.
Montanyà: The definitive paper had to be from the police, from the Francoist Political-Social Brigade.
The Political-Social Brigade: the police group responsible for repressing actions that the regime considered subversive, extremist, or, yes, terrorist. In other words, the Francoist police.
Montanyà: So, they had the maximum information.
And, in 2013, he finally found what he was looking for.
Montanyà: And here’s this document, the definitive proof, although…
It’s a 4-page report from 1961.
Montanyà: The document is titled “The terrorists of the DRIL.”
A document in which the Francoist police themselves already named the DRIL as responsible for the attack.
Montanyà: And I’ll read you a bit if you want. “The first act of terrorism to which we now want to refer was registered at the Norte and Amara stations in the capital of Donostia. Two suitcases placed there exploded, resulting in five people wounded and the death of an 18-month-old girl. The DRIL is responsible for the events.” Well, clearer than water, right?
Isabel: And when you found this document, what did you think?
Montanyà: When I found it, I was sitting here, at this table, and what I thought was “Finally.” And I remember getting up and showing it to my wife, and she even got emotional. I thought “Damn, we have it now. This is the proof, right? That’s it.”
Montanyá published the document in two newspapers: Vilaweb, a Catalan media outlet, and also in Berria, the newspaper where Ainhoa Oiartzabal works.
Montanyà: There were two days when it was like a pressure cooker had been opened. I appeared on several news broadcasts on Euskal Telebista, people from the Basque Country called me, well, anyway. It was boom! There was a lot of tension and hidden stuff, and it exploded there. And I thought, “mission accomplished.”
But if you notice, Montanyá says it was people from the Basque Country who called him: the news came out in Euskal Telebista, in Berria, in Gara, in Naiz, in Deia… But it hardly had any impact in the press outside of Euskadi.
Although some things started to change. A few months later, Luis Aizpeolea wrote an article in El País about the victims’ law. He ended his text with an explicit mention of your sister’s attack. He said some victims’ associations had attributed her death to ETA, but “historians who have researched the police archives of the time attributed it to the DRIL.”
And the following year, in 2014, in Congress,
Man: The solemn act in memory and tribute to the victims…
The Popular Party was already governing with Mariano Rajoy as president. And Mari Mar Blanco…
Man: … president of the Foundation for Victims of Terrorism.
She said this:
Blanco: Since 1960, when the first attack with a mortal victim took place, ETA has murdered more than 800 innocent people and injured many more.
- The new date repeated every year on Victims’ Day. 1960. The date chosen as the new temporal limit to start speaking about terrorism in the new victims’ law. 1960. But sometimes, drawing a date is not like a clean cut. I want to tell you something, Bego. Something that does not speak directly about your sister’s story but is directly related to that change of date in the law made because of your sister’s history.
And when the new law was approved, your family was not the only one that requested recognition as a victim. There was a daughter who also requested recognition for her father.
And I want us to pause here because I want to tell you her story, Bego. And it might seem like a detour, but it is not.
[Music]
That father’s name was Francisco de Fuentes Fuentes y Castilla Portugal. He had died in January 1960, six months before your sister. He was a Civil Guard. On the night of January 3, 1960, he was in a farmhouse in Girona, waiting: he and other Civil Guards had set an ambush for a group of maquis, anti-Franco guerrillas. When the maquis arrived at the farmhouse, there was a shootout. Four of them died, and also one Civil Guard, Lieutenant Fuentes. Another maqui was wounded but managed to escape: his name was Quico Sabaté. Maybe his name does not sound familiar to you, but he was very well known at the time: the Franco regime considered him its “public enemy number one.” Sabaté managed to flee, but the Civil Guard killed him in a nearby town two days later. And so died Quico Sabaté, considered “the last maqui of Catalonia.” And with him, in a way, the resistance to Francoism that had started during the Civil War also faded—those guerrillas of militiamen who had literally taken to the mountains to keep resisting the dictatorship.
In 2015, Mariano Rajoy’s government accepted the request for recognition as a victim of terrorism submitted by Lieutenant Fuentes’s daughter.
And that is why, today, if you look at the list of compensated victims of the Ministry of the Interior, the first name on the list is not Urroz Ibarrola, Begoña, but Fuentes Fuentes y Castilla Portugal, Francisco.
I was so impressed when I discovered this, Bego… Seeing your sister in second place, after so much time hearing she was the first victim. But I was also impressed for another reason: that Fuentes being recognized as a victim means that Quico Sabaté, the last maqui of Catalonia, automatically became the first author of a terrorist attack. Something that—since we’re talking about laws—contradicts another law: because the Historical Memory Law, in its article 3, says that people who participated in the anti-Franco guerrilla are actually victims.
I was surprised this has hardly been talked about: on the internet there are barely a couple of articles on the subject. And I was surprised for one more reason. Because, in a way, it confirmed something I already knew: that battles for the narrative are fought with things that seem so small as approving a victim recognition request, or changing a date in a law. Or like two laws that don’t agree. And just like that, with things that seem so small, history is rewritten.
[Music and ambient sounds from Congress]
Man: Good morning to all. As you will understand, for me it is a true and special honor to receive in Congress…
- Once again, it’s June 27 in Congress. Mari Mar Blanco speaks again.
Blanco: Now that ETA has stopped killing but has not stopped existing, we demand to be allowed to create a true narrative.
That year, neither Blanco nor anyone else in the tribute mentions your sister. They also do not mention Lieutenant Fuentes, who by then was recognized as the first victim of terrorism, and whom nobody mentions, neither in that act nor—let me tell you in advance, Bego—in later ones.
Blanco: We will never allow anyone to rewrite the narrative.
That year your mother died.
Bego: On December 6, 2016. We were all there, around her bed, and we sang to her. We sang the song… My mother always loved María Virginia. So my mother always, that song was her song, and the only thing she always asked was that the song be sung at her funeral. It’s a song that every time I hear it, it breaks me. So there we all were, gathered in a room, surrounded by all who loved her. We all were there. We sang the song. Very beautiful, very beautiful. It was…
Isabel: Did she say anything about your sister?
Bego: No, no, no. Not at the end. I think she always had that there.
Isabel: Yes.
Bego: And since she never finished her mourning…
You buried her in her favorite clothes: a black coat, with fur on the collar. The same one she had worn at that first tribute in Lasarte.
Bego: And it was a coat she loved. Her coat… And that’s how we laid her down, with that coat, we combed her… And that’s how she left, beautiful.
Isabel: Beautiful as she wanted you all to be.
Bego: Exactly. That’s it. She left beautiful as she was.
She left beautiful, as you say, but also without certainty about what had marked her whole life.
Bego: She received the tributes she had received… Although she always said it was ETA, it always lingered. But I think it was little, too little, after hearing it so much and so much and so much.
[Music and ambient sounds from Congress]
Pastor: Good morning. Mr. President of the Government. Madam President of the Foundation for Victims of Terrorism. Authorities…
The following year, in 2017, on Victims’ Day, the new president of Congress, Ana Pastor,
Pastor: The Congress of Deputies hosts today the tribute to the victims of terrorism…
She said it again:
Pastor: … This date, June 27th, as a remembrance of the first person murdered by the terrorist group ETA, the little girl Begoña Urroz.
And even the president of the government, Mariano Rajoy, wrote an article in ABC saying they chose June 27th because that day ETA committed its first murder.
By then, the version that DRIL was the perpetrator had been gradually making its way into academic congresses and printed history books. For example, the Foronda Report, a 2014 book about the effects of terrorism on Basque society, already identifies your sister as a victim of DRIL. Or two years later, Manuel Aguilar, a documentary filmmaker from RTVE, gave a talk at an academic conference titled “Begoña Urroz: victim of terrorism but not of ETA.”
Two years later, in 2018, your sister’s case reached where cases become public domain: the virtual town square, meaning Twitter.
And it didn’t reach just any Twitter user. Albert Rivera, who at the time was leader of the political party Ciudadanos, replied to a tweet by Arnaldo Otegi, leader of the Basque left-wing nationalist movement, saying: “The first fatal victim of ETA was a 22-month-old baby, and since then you have killed 60 women and girls. Apologize for your bloody history and stop trying to give lessons to all Spaniards.”
That tweet from Rivera had a big impact. And you know how Twitter is — people reply to each other and it spreads. One of the people who responded to Albert Rivera was a journalist who had written extensively about ETA.
Ventura: Hello, I’m Borja Ventura, I’m a journalist and university professor.
Ventura told me he was very surprised by the tweet. He had been following your sister’s story for some time and knew that, a few months earlier, something important had happened.
Ventura: What happens is that then 2018 arrives, the Popular Party, Rajoy’s government, in a note presenting a didactic unit being launched to teach recent Spanish history in secondary schools… And it talks about Begoña Urroz as the first victim of terrorism but clearly says she is a victim of DRIL, which is another terrorist organization unrelated to ETA…
There, finally, a narrative change from a government institution. It wasn’t an official declaration or a rectification, but it was something that showed that the Spanish government definitely accepted that your sister was a victim of DRIL. And that is what Ventura tweeted in response to Albert Rivera.
Ventura: I told him, look, this is not the case. It’s not the case. Not because they say it from the Basque Country, but because the Ministry of the Interior of a Popular Party government had already denied this.
Two days later, Maldita.es, a media outlet specialized in debunking hoaxes, picked up Ventura’s tweet and published an article titled:
Clara: (in a question format) “Was baby Begoña Urroz the first victim of ETA?”
This is Clara Jiménez, the director of Maldita.es. She told me that after analyzing both the statements and documents, they came to this conclusion:
Clara: It wasn’t. It was DRIL.
In fact, they published it in the section called “Maldito bulo” (Damned Hoax). I’m excited for you to hear Clara, Bego, because in recent months I’ve worked a lot with Maldita. They are the ones doing the fact-checking on this whole story:
Clara: Basically, we are trying to reconstruct the whole path that you have already taken with different sources to understand who remembers what, but above all, who has proof to support what they say.
Isabel: Thank you very much, has it been easy?
Clara: Well, I’d say it’s been interesting, above all.
[Music]
But despite many response tweets and despite the fact-checking from a specialized outlet, Albert Rivera never seemed to take notice.
Ventura: He never deleted that tweet, never replied, never clarified anything.
And he wasn’t the only one. A few days later…
Pastor: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
It was again Victims’ Day in Congress. And again Ana Pastor, member of the PP, who at that time was in the government that had produced the didactic unit mentioning your sister as a DRIL victim, said it again.
Pastor: Once again, June 27th, the date on which little Begoña Urroz became the first fatal victim of the terrorist group ETA, the democrats…
[Music]
Isabel: What’s going on?
Juanlu: But why? Why do they insist?
Begoña: Look… How horrible! Seriously, what a nightmare. It’s just that you don’t need to add the caveat, just say victim of terrorism. Period. No need to say…
Honestly, even while making this episode, I was aware that this sequence of dates is exhausting for anyone who listens. Especially for you.
Bego: But it’s incomprehensible that after all these years they keep saying the same thing. It’s just not understandable, really it’s not.
Juanlu: Was this in ’17?
Isabel and Bego: ’18.
Juanlu: ’18?
Isabel: When do you think this will stop?
Bego: When will it stop? Has it stopped? Because honestly…
And that was the big question: If the claim by DRIL itself in 1960 wasn’t enough, why weren’t all the articles disproving the sources that supported that version enough?
Juanlu: Well, maybe it will be the last time.
Bego: I don’t know. I don’t know.
And if that wasn’t enough, wasn’t a report from the Franco police saying it was DRIL enough? And if that wasn’t enough, wasn’t a change in a government-published textbook enough?
Bego: I mean, the only thing missing was for me to call them out. “Shame on you. Shame on you,” right?
Juanlu: No, they must have paid the price. They’ve stopped now.
To stop the official version from being repeated, we had to wait until 2019.
Presenter: The attack at San Sebastián train station that caused the death on June 27, 1960, of Begoña Urroz, only 20 months old, was the work of the Iberian Revolutionary Directorate for Liberation, better known as DRIL, and not ETA.
Presenter: The first victim, little girl Begoña Urroz, in an attack today attributed to DRIL and not ETA as was initially thought.
The news that appeared that year was based on a report: a report published by an institution linked to the Ministry of the Interior, the Center for the Memorial of Victims of Terrorism. The authors were the historian Gaizka Fernández de Soldevilla and Manuel Aguilar, the RTVE documentary filmmaker I mentioned earlier. In the report, they analyzed many sources, had visited many archives, and concluded that “there is not a single clue suggesting ETA’s involvement in the attack on Begoña Urroz.”
And so the case seemed to be closed.
But to me, Bego, one question always remained: why then, in 2019? Why not earlier? I have talked about this with many people over the years, and almost everyone agrees on the same reasons: the first is that the report was very well documented, its authors had taken years to complete it; they had even discovered the name of the DRIL member who planted the bomb — his name was Guillermo Santoro; the second reason is that it didn’t come from just anywhere. That report was published by one of the most important institutions dealing with terrorism, and one, moreover, linked to the Ministry of the Interior.
But there was something about that report that always caught my attention, and that is that the Memorial of Victims of Terrorism is directed by Florencio Domínguez: one of the people who knows the most about ETA… and also an important figure in your sister’s story.
He was one of the first to publish, in a book, that your sister was a victim of ETA, back in 1998, and he was also one of the authors of Vidas rotas: the encyclopedia of ETA victims published by the Foundation of Victims of Terrorism.
It has always surprised me that it was precisely this institution that released a report saying there was no proof of ETA’s responsibility. I wanted to talk to the Memorial about all this. Criticizing without giving space for responses is not the journalism I believe in. But the Memorial declined to participate in this series.
[Music]
I must tell you, Bego, that of all the stories I’ve worked on in my life, this has been by far the hardest one to get interviews for. I had to explain much more, send many more emails, ask for many more favors: it felt as if a certain distrust weighed on me. Or at least that’s how I felt: when I requested interviews, it seemed the only reason for wanting to make this series was to try to “clean” ETA’s history. And this happened on both sides of the political spectrum: on one side, they sometimes treated me as suspicious, as an enemy. On the other, as an ally, as if I were making this story as some sort of activism.
I’m not the only one who has experienced this, of course. Those who have worked for years on ETA’s subject know about this tension. Borja Ventura, for example, the journalist who responded to Albert Rivera’s tweet, calls it “miscommunication”:
Ventura: When one side says one thing, the other rejects it outright because it’s said by the others. And this works both ways. The leftist abertzale saying this implied that from the State’s perspective it wasn’t so. The case of Begoña Urroz is probably the most symptomatic because it is also the starting point, but the entire 50-year history of ETA is full of this kind of misunderstandings that basically come from miscommunication and from the fact that everything the other side says is always wrong.
So unfortunately, or maybe due to this miscommunication, Bego, the Memorial of Victims of Terrorism will not be part of this series.
We are left with their report.
And, along the way, we are left with a reflection on how we tell our history, about which sources we consider reliable and which we use to build our narratives; about which documents history is constructed.
[Music and ambient sound from Congress]
Batet: Good morning to all.
That year, 2019, the Socialist Party was back in power, with Pedro Sánchez as president. And neither Meritxell Batet, the new President of Congress
Blanco: Thank you very much.
Nor Mari Mar Blanco said your sister was a victim of ETA.
Blanco: …The little Begoña Urroz, at the Amara station in San Sebastián, the first mortal victim of terrorism in Spain,
[Applause]
It remained “the first victim of terrorism.” But you know, Bego, that at that time your sister was no longer recognized as the first victim of terrorism by the Ministry of the Interior.
[Music]
In these years that I have been working on your story many things have happened. Complicated things, emotional things, things that scared me. And also beautiful things.
One of the most beautiful things for me is that we have spent a lot of time together and we have gotten to know each other more and more.
During this time, as I was untangling this battle of versions, some people told me that the authorship didn’t matter. And I understand what they mean, of course. Your sister is not here, your parents lived that infinite pain, you were raised in silence and fear.
But there were moments when precisely the people who said authorship doesn’t matter talked about the error as a lesser evil, even as a kind of luck: thanks to the error the law was changed, thanks to the error your family came out of silence, thanks to the error so many people today know your sister’s name, thanks to the error you have been recognized, compensated, repaired?
But does it really not matter? I don’t think so. History does care who killed your sister: the proof is those 20 years of disputes about authorship. The proof is that I wanted to make a small, human episode about a woman who carries her sister’s name, and I ended up making a whole series in which I researched as much as for my thesis, for which I had to speak even with a prime minister.
So no, I think history does care who killed your sister.
And you, Bego, do you care who killed your sister?
Bego: I don’t care if it was ETA or if it was the DRIL… I always say the same thing. My sister was killed, I never got to know my sister. I don’t care who planted the bomb. I don’t care. I only know my sister died. From there, what else matters to me?
I’ve heard you say this many times. You yourself say it in that very sentence: “I always say the same thing,” as if it had become an automatic answer. But, over time, and with the trust we now have, one day I dared to ask you beyond that answer.
Isabel: And do you really not care?
Bego: I really do, no, I don’t not care. If it really wasn’t ETA, as everything seems well documented. Then… then I think I felt relieved in the sense… I don’t know if the word is relief, but I felt calmer, right? I said “Well, so many years thinking it was them… It wasn’t those from here, who killed my sister.” “They weren’t my neighbors,” right?
[Music]
One Saturday, I was at home reading on the sofa, and my phone started ringing. It was José Bono. When I answered, he spoke to me as if we had known each other forever. He told me they were going to publish a book with his speeches, and that after talking to me, he wanted to correct the speech he gave on June 27, 2010, in Congress. He asked me if I could help him. And you know what I did? I sent him the Memorial of Victims of Terrorism report.
Later, Bono sent me the text he was going to put in his book.
He said it would go in a footnote.
Like that footnote that started it all: the footnote of Vicar Pagola.
With whom, by the way, I still had to talk.
Or rather, we still had to talk.
Bego: We enter and I give him a kiss, we enter, I give him a kiss, whatever, I give him a hug… I don’t know if he’s perceptive enough to get a kiss or a hug.
Juanlu: You’ll see when you start to get close.
Although Pagola wouldn’t be the last person we would talk to for this series. Because maybe he wasn’t really the first link in this chain; but the second.
That, in the next and final episode.
Juanlu: Maybe “Can I give him a hug?”
Bego: “Can I give him a hug?” Or… yes, a hug, because a kiss…
