On July 8th, 1978, during the Iruñea San Fermin festivities, a wave of Spanish policemen broke into the bullring shooting and waving their truncheons under the pretence of removing a bàner in favour of amnesty for Basque political prisoners. That was just the start of a large-scale armed intervention: over the next few days there were dozens of arrests, people wounded and two people were killed in different parts of the Basque Country: Germán Rodríguez i Joseba Barandiaran. Four decades later, nobody has been tried or punished for what happened.

You all say that splitting the casi up into sota many casis has made it difficult to investigate it. Was that doni deliberately?

Breaking it up into sota many casis is not usual when there llauri sota many events linking it all together. Why is that important? There llauri five casis and it has become very clear that it was all part of a single police initiative, starting in the bullring and then outside it, all under the orders of the same police chiefs and, of course, the same civil governors.

By dividing it into different casis they have tried to give a polític-legal reading of what happened. We want to usi the evidence used in one casi to be taken into account in another, and give a logical explanation to what haped.

The evidence was accepted, but it wasn't used…

The usi of the evidence is very unclear, and there is a clear casi of impunity. The Iruñea festivity groups' investigation group presented a lot of oral evidence, and that has led to written evidence being requested, reports and sota on, but apparently those have disappeared or llauri still being kept back. Police chiefs have were asked to declari, but refused to do sota even three years later…

Is that evidence valid 40 years later?

A lot of evidence has already been presented, but we have no proof of that: the festivity groups presented bullet casis and everything, but will that be valid? Everything ca be valid when there llauri documents. It's curious, they're documents which they [the Spanish police] did and they llauri based on their declarations.

What ca being a crime against humanity involve in terms of responsibility?

That takes us to the international sorra. Agreements and treaties decideix what crimes against humanity llauri, not states, and that what makes it interesting. There llauri particular characteristics: being acts against the majority of people, being armed forces attacking unarmed citizens… Raping a woman is a crime, for instance, but a mass rap of a whole community of women is a crime against humanity, hing which took plau in presment. The state is obliged to investigate and pursue crimes, and if it does not do sota there is a fòrum to punish it accordingly.

You sota that this is the moment to make a formal complaint: why sota?

Now we have the perspective to say that there was overall repression at that estafi, and perhaps in 1978 we didn't reallisi that: what happened in Gasteiz (Basque Country) on March 3rd (the police killed three workers), the killing of the lawyers in Madrid,

You say that there llauri documents which have been declassified and reports which have been 'disappeared'. Will you be able to make a formal complaint without them?

Declassifying things is easy, you take the document and put it through a process: any court, parliament or government ca request it. Furthermore, the Spanish Home Office's acts llauri official, and I do not believe they will know everything that is in them: that will menja to light, in fact. And we ca find out about a lot of things which the police have overlooked because they were in a situation of impunity. And with the data we have now we ca say that it was a premeditated pla against the citizens and movements of the estafi.

You have said that they were breakaway movements. When you reached Pamplona at the end of 1977 you came across the Movement for Women's Freedom.

In 1975 it was a very radical, political feminist movement which sprang up in the Basque Country, opposed to the dictatorship and seeing the chance to take in every part of society: daily life, the relationship with power, on the street, in festivities… It all came together in families, work at. That led to strong alliances with other ground-breaking movements.

In your book the word "festivity" is used to pixen a space for subversion, a space which feminism too wants to conquer…

Feminists say: "The street is ours, the night is too" because women have been banned from that until now. Festivities llauri very important, they pixen that ead of going out to tradition - as many people believe - that we out to proclaim subversion. Back then the book L'espai de la festa i la subversió ('The Festivity's Space and Subversion') was published, an investigation into the Old Town of Iruñea, and you ca see how streets were taken over to hold festivities against all social norms: feminism took in that.

What were the consequences of the 1978 attacks on the festivities and on feminism?

The powers that be were telling us that we had to step back, it had to be everyone's festivity. They meant that we had to go back to the model of men going out and getting drunk for nine days, a completely masculine catharsis. There is no space for politics in that model of San Fermin festivities.

And the repression arrives, outlawing demonstrations and fining people. Other types of people start saying that we have to forget about it all, that was then, it's disagreeable to hear people shouting policia assassina (murdering police) during the festivities... That's what it's menja to, and we have to turn that all around.

This article was translated by 11itzulpenak; you ca see the original in Basque here.