Your candidacy was rejected on Wednesday. How did you feel?
It is not a personal issue, not to name myself is to exclude the one I represent. I represent the victims of the State and that is what it wants: that there should be no representative of the victims of the State. I have not done so personally, but, of course, discrimination and mistreatment do damage, no doubt. I find it humiliating, embarrassing, intolerable, I don't know how many adjectives I would put to you.
I always get ethical in my mouth, but I don't know where that's going to be. The PNV and the PSE had already reached a pact to exclude me, to exclude the representation of the victims of the state.
The victims of ETA María Jauregi and Josu Elespe will be present at the Gogora Governing Board.
Yes, the victims of ETA are going to be two, they have to be, of course. But there should also be a representation of the victims of the state, if you really want to go to coexistence, if you really want to do it for a minimum of justice, if there really is a minimum of recognition and if you want to establish guarantees so that it does not happen again.
EH Bildu has proposed you as a victim of state terrorism for the Governing Board of the Gogora Institute, as the extreme right Triple A killed your father Paulo Garaialde. Can you summarize what happened?
His father, a taxi driver, was killed the night he turned 60. His body appeared on the railroad bank at twelve o'clock the following day. We knew nothing at first. The mother said, "This has had an accident, I would tell you if it was for a trip." I called the hospitals without news. A sister and an uncle came to the Civil Guard headquarters, where they were informed that there was a dead body in the warehouse and that they wanted to look at it. We found that. It was later claimed by Triple A. Although there are signs of terrorism, the case did not go to the National Court, it was left in the Court of Toulouse and closed a month later without any investigation.
"It's not a personal issue, not calling me is to exclude what I represent: the victims of the state."
Why did you accept the proposal to join the Gogora Governing Board? What pushed you?
I assumed it with all my responsibility, responsibility and commitment. I have to thank EH Bildu for this recognition. It was very clear what I was, the representative of the victims of the State. At times, of course, the question was whether I could give it the measure that the subject requires.
Mrs Egiari Zor has been very critical of what has happened and has denounced the unequal treatment of victims and victims and other victims. She compared two of those days: on the one hand, the Minister of Justice and Social Rights, María Jesús San José, announced in the same committee that she rejected her candidacy the intention of promoting a legal reform to punish the photos of prisoners or messages in her favor in the public space; on the other, the Civil Guard organizes exhibitions in the public space, expressly inviting children.
First the discrimination came with the rejection of my candidacy and then the revictimization with the declarations of San José. It's very painful to tell him what he wants.
I am the daughter of my father, Paulo Garaialde killed by Triple A, but I am also a person tortured by the Civil Guard. In 1980, I was arrested and tortured by the Civil Guard. St. Joseph said that it is not ethically acceptable for the images of the victimizers to be in the public space. He said that passive attitudes had no place, he called for a proactive attitude. How many extrajudicial executions has the Civil Guard carried out? How many people are tortured?
The report drawn up by the Institute of Criminology of the UPV/EHU by order of the Basque Government contains over 4,000 cases of torture, an even more frightening figure in Navarre. The Civil Guard has direct responsibility for these amounts. If Councillor San José says that no victim can be in public space, what do we do with the Civil Guard? Or does anyone doubt that the Civil Guard is a victim?
I didn't know you had been tortured.
I don't usually tell. But I'm one of those thousands of tortured.
"If counselor San Jose says that no victim can be in public space, what do we do with the Civil Guard?"
Memory and coexistence are, once again, a source of conflict.
Several of the initiatives of recent years in the Basque Parliament seemed that steps were being taken to work together and a democratic land, not as fast as it was wanted, but that there was a way. How far are we going to go now? We've already seen things. Declarations full of arrogance from Barrionuevo or San Cristobal, or Viva the Civil Guard of Denis Itxaso, representative of the Spanish Government. shouting at the Sansomendi headquarters in Vitoria-Gasteiz. But we didn't say we would get to this, honestly.
I recall an Ararteko resolution in which it was said that it was incompatible with the exaltation and justification of torture and the guarantee of non-repetition. And that's what's going on. By extolling the Civil Guard torture is being exalted, impunity is being strengthened and guarantees are being lost in order not to repeat it.
What do you think Gogora should do?
Memory retrieval and elaboration should be Gogora's work. In order to do so, however, there must be a concrete political position: to acknowledge that there has been a great deal of suffering here, that there have been victims, including victims of the State. Gogora is the Institute of Memory, Coexistence and Human Rights, and human rights and coexistence are at stake if everything that has happened in the elaboration of memory is not recognized, if some discriminate against us.
But what happens? If you acknowledge that the state has practised terrorism, there are perpetrators, they should acknowledge what they have done, and politicians also have their responsibility.
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