“I went down to the Semi-Basement to prepare dinner and found an unbearable smell of gas. I went down in a hurry, knowing that in this situation you don't have to turn on the light or the flashlight. The four controls of the kitchen gas were completely open, I closed them, opened the windows and went up... Gas controls don't open up on their own. What explanations did the Civil Guard provide for the safety of the building? None. That was ready to make us disappear.”

Dirty war and abuses of power to be published in January. The failure of moral imperatives (dirty war and abuses of power. The rupture of moral prescriptions) is a passage in the book. It is a book written by historian Luis Castells and the professor of Sociology and Political Sciences, Izaskun Sáez, and edited by the Center of Applied Ethics of the University of Deusto for use in teaching in the context of memory.

The book analyzes the evolution of the dirty war of the Spanish State against ETA and analyzes the abuses and torture of the security forces, according to the journalist of El Diario Vasco Alberto Surio in a news article on Wednesday. The first part of the book analyzes the activity of the Basque Spanish and Triple A parapolice groups, and the second analyzes the relationship between the GAL and the state apparatus.

According to Surio, the book describes how the State moved from Franco to democracy, but in reality without breaking with Franco, especially in the Army and the police. At the head of the PSOE came to the Government of Spain Juan Alberto Belloch as Minister of Interior and Justice, who appointed Margarita Robles as Secretary of State for the Interior, Juan Luis Ibarra as Secretary of the Ministry and Juan Mari Jauregi as Civil Governor of Gipuzkoa.

In the opinion of the authors of the book, these designations sought to “clean” the state apparatus associated with security and bring the light to the ground in which until then darkness reigned. Another sector of the State, on the contrary, sought to keep this illegal anti-terrorist fight against ETA secret and there was a dispute between the two sectors. It is in this context that the passage referred to by Maixabel Lasa is located.

Threats against GAL researchers

According to the book, the new authorities in the Spanish Government had already made it clear that they were going to encourage the investigation of the LAGs, and they did so. On the contrary, the State’s sewerage sector made it clear from the outset that research would be hampered by any means: “Threats to witnesses were common and sometimes there was also aggression or bribery, which offered 50 million pesetas to a protected witness.”

The book describes that the head of the Judicial Police who commissioned the investigation of the case Lasa and Zabala, Enrique de Federico, asked for measures to protect his family; one of his daughters received threats and attempted to enter his home. The authors have also collected the testimony of the police chief: “I suffered from strong pressure from the Ministry of the Interior and threats from members of the security forces (...) I realized that in the Civil Guard I would not receive any help and so I told my authorities. Those of us who tried to investigate what happened were getting stuck, that was how it was. Not only that, we were in danger.”

Juan Mari Jauregi, appointed Civil Governor of Gipuzkoa in 1994, was dismissed in 1996, after the pp won the elections. After his passing through Chile with the work of the Spanish Government, in 2000 he was killed by ETA in Tolosa, returning from a visit to his people, Legorreta. Her wife, Maixabel Lasa, was Director of Care for Victims of Terrorism of the Basque Government and President of the Basque Government. Juan Mari Jauregi was a member of ETA during the Franco regime, so he was also in jail, then he became a member of the PCE and in the late 1980s he went to the PSE-EE.