On Saturday was the public presentation of the network. The Kursaal Palace has brought together 900 people who have been tortured in the period from the “darkest times” of Franco’s regime until recently. Agurtzane Juanena and Iker Moreno spoke on behalf of the participants.

The aim of the network is to develop a “useful tool” for people who have suffered torture, and they called on citizens who have not yet exposed the torture they suffered to join the network. The network wants to be “the loudspeaker of thousands of silenced and denied voices” and socialize the reality of the tortured.

Alustiza explained that the study carried out by the Basque Institute of Criminology has verified more than 5,000 cases of torture, “although we know there are many more”. Alustiza and Moreno have asked the Basque Government and the Government of Navarre to develop “mechanisms for official recognition and reparation”, as they have done with their specific cases, and they have asked that all the cases received between 1960 and 2014 be analyzed in order to “end once and for all the denial of decades of torture”.

A shared responsibility

On the other hand, it has been declared that it is time to assume public responsibilities and that those responsible are beyond the Spanish State Security forces. The systematic torture in the Basque Country has been denounced and carried out “under the auspices of a whole structure”: judges, forensic doctors, the media and various political forces, among others, have been signaled for their shared responsibility. They consider it essential to assume public responsibility in the application of torture to advance the path of recognition and reparation of tortured people.

They stress that “the magnitude, density and intensity of torture in the Basque Country are not yet fully known.” They had not confined torture to those who had suffered it and called for its political, social, cultural and human consequences to be made known. To do this, they claim to have a feminist outlook.

They claim that what happened is due to be told to future generations, claim that they were tortured and that the reasons for the political context must be explained. This exercise has been considered as the most effective guarantee against the recurrence of torture.

They want to use what made them suffer for collective empowerment: “The most important thing is not what they did to us, but what we are able to do with it.”

Appointment of Agurtzane Alustiza in Ahotsa.info:

For further information, the awarded documentary Blue Files can be seen in Youtube in English.