At the time of the facts much was written in the Spanish Franco media, the case has subsequently appeared sporadically, but for decades it has gone quite unnoticed. It has reappeared these anniversary days. Today, Friday, in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the Institute for Memory, Coexistence and Human Rights and the Foundation for the Memory of the Victims of Terrorism will pay tribute to the disappeared. Quiroga, a customs agency worker in Irun, worked in a transport company Eskobedo, and García was unemployed.

In general it is not clear what happened and how. On March 24, 1973, the three traveled to San Juan de Luz to visit Last tango in Paris, a film banned in Spain by Francoist censorship. Upon their return, they entered a bar where some Basque refugees were considered Spanish, suffered some conflict and died.

They were taken, tortured and killed by potential policemen or cellors. That is what was disseminated at the time of events, and that is what is still considered good today in most media. They are also recognised as victims murdered by ETA, although the armed institution never assumed the disappearance and murder of young people.

The institutions consider them to be victims of ETA, but in the 2018 report of the Chair of Human Rights and Public Authorities of the UPV/EHU for the Government it is recognized that “Gathering judicial sources or newspaper archives, a very weak hypothesis is made about the story of the events (...) there were obvious contradictions between the information appearing in the press, and the cited.

Lost Objects (Lost Objects. In Txalaparta) the historian Iñaki Egaña has followed the case closely. And so does the historian Emilio López Adam Beltza, Armed Struggle in the Basque Country. 1967-2011 in the hard book.

Basically, and even though ETA has not taken over the killings, there are two main hypotheses, in which ETA or the Basque refugee environment are guilty. In one, ETA or their return mixed the three young men with the police, killed them and killed them. In the other, they were really policemen or jealousy, the armed agencies discovered them, killed them and made them disappear. General de la Guardia Civil, Saez de Santamaría, for example, publicly acknowledged that they were the coaches of the Spanish Police in their biography written by the Spanish journalist Diego Carcedo.

The point of view of ETA

Interview by the director of Gara, Iñaki Soto, to the address of ETA in 2018 – last interview with the address of ETA (Txalaparta). Gara)– asks the Etarras on this matter, and basically they say they have no data to say it was ETA, but they do not entirely close the possibilities for it. “ETA has not taken over. But we will not deny that such a dark and unfortunate event could happen.” In the words of ETA managers, in an honest peace process the organization could also make a greater research effort to explore ETA’s history, among other things, “finding dead bodies”. Because no one has questioned that they are dead.”

Allegations of torture

The issue has many knots but few contrasts. We speak of Spanish General Saez de Santamaría, but also of the stories of journalist Alfredo Semprún, who drank from sources of the Spanish police or secret services, some of them quite delirious (Carrero Blanco was murdered by a foreign revolutionary front or Federico Krutwig was police of the German SS). And there are also words by Mikel Lejarza, former Etarra Juan Manuel Soares Gamboa, who worked as a joint of the Spanish Police in ETA in the police programs or social reintegration of GAL, José Amedo.

It follows from these reports that before death the three Galicians were violently tortured, for example, that one of them received his eyes with a screwdriver. López Adam does not give credibility to these allegations of torture because at that time both ETA and other contemporary armed institutions were against torture. It should be noted that López was also an etarra and member of the management of the armed organization in the last decade of the events. The death of ETA was also mentioned because it was Galician and Spanish, both in the media and in the writings apparently scattered by the Spanish police forces.

Egaña believes that the young Galicians were eliminated by some group of refugees, but not by the strict order of ETA. López Adam says in his book that “in the age environment it may be credible that three people suspect that a group of militants work on their own, after killing one hot, killing the other two.” And as a conclusion on this concrete issue, “it is a fact without claiming and without material evidence. Potential victims were not involved in repression. On the part of the militants, in any case, it was an act of wrong self-defense, very badly carried out and very badly managed later communication”. He believes that families deserve to know the truth, but “in general, the Organization has chosen to support its entrepreneurs in the face of the damage that could be done to families of innocent victims or excessive acts.”

These days Marta Rodríguez Fouz, Humberto's niece, has appeared in various media outlets and does not believe that bodies will appear. His words in the interview in El Correo may be the same as those of relatives of other missing persons known in the Basque Country: “We are no longer talking about judicial harassment, we have the right to know what happened, namely the truth”.