It’s been a year since the City of Antzuola called citizens for an information meeting on 7 November 2023. In it, the municipal representatives explained the recent presence in the City Hall of representatives of the company CILDA Energy, belonging to the Capital Energy group, and informed us of the results we met in Torresoro.

At the end of the meeting, a group of citizens decided to work for the defence of Meaka and Irimo. That's how the popular Meaka-Irimo platform kicked off this ultra-high marathon. We say an ultra-sympathetic marathon, because we know that it is a very long-term struggle and that hard times are going to come.

We understood this in the first few months, just start. With the interventions of Aitziber Sarobe and Alvaro Campos, we were able to see that we had a lot to learn to understand the dimension of what was going on. At the same time, we realized that the giant before us was not just anyone and had all the resources at its disposal, not like us: money, time and knowledge of decision-making centers and the operation of the business.

The City Council initially helped us and, as far as possible, supported those first steps: talks, information panels, communication, meeting rooms...

On the road to date, the deadline for the claims of the project presented by the company in the Basque Government was an important milestone. These were intense months when we didn't know how to make an allegation document, what it meant ... And with the help of many of us, we also did. Then you came up, we put the table, the countrymen who would come to sign in those days, and the signatures came from outside, many of them digitally. Over 4,000 in total.

When it comes to writing this, we still have no response from the Basque Government; therefore, officially, we do not know what the future of Meaka and Irimo will be. However, according to information in the media, we have learned that the company has taken a deadline until the end of the year to decide what to do with the project called Trekutz, to know if the project “is viable or not”.

We cannot deny that the newcomer surprised us. How can we start making big investments – jobs and reports to be made, monthly salaries and other resources – without knowing whether the project is viable?

Did it start to benefit from the start-up of Capital Energy? Because it is known that when companies make investment predictions, their contributions – and therefore their profits – increase. What is more, the Next Generation funds appear when they report. Because public money is always attractive and perfect to feed the bubble. Until the bubble bursts. According to experts, there is not much left; as the contributions of public money are reduced, the risk of the bubble bursting increases.

We continue to work on the popular Meaka-Irimo platform for speculation. Not just intention, but force. Because time does not go by in vain, this group, along the way, has created opportunities to explore the edges of energy, and in the knowledge acquired, besides raising new doubts, we have found strength. We have heard this during the first few months and it has been ratified by the rapporteurs and by the papers we have had in our hands.

Now we really live that the world doesn't start or end here. In fact, the destruction they intend to do in our mountains is directly related to many forms of violence that occur at the other end of the world. We have learned that the route of minerals and rare earths that ends here is the source of the oppression that the rural inhabitants of other countries experience, and that they will not recover by painting the loss of biodiversity and life green. We have realised that, after all, we have only to recognise that the planet and life have their limits, because we are eco-dependent and interdependent. In other words, before it is too late we will have to accept that the world does not start or end in our navel.

Even if that is the case, to the extent that we can, we will continue to try to invite people to make interesting contributions to Antzuola in the coming months. Without forgetting, of course, the presence of this threat on the street.

We can say that the people we decided to form the Meaka-Irimo popular platform on November 7, 2023 have changed, the people we learned and the people we didn't study in a year have turned the collective of people into a working group, and that's good news, very good news.

We would like to expand the group, because that would bring wealth to the group and to the people. We would like a living and plural movement in the people, around the Meaka and Irimo Mountains, knowing that we have to guess another way of being in the world and getting back to the measure of our smaller, fragile bodies, which is the limit of the planet. And yes, we have to believe it's possible.