Durango Pays Tribute to ETA Victims

Pedro comments: 'I didn't want him to come.' This woman who greeted me, her husband was the first victim here in Durango, she knew my father. 'My mother and uncles had spoken to me about him,' Pedro comments about Epifanio Benito Vidal. 'It's incredible to imagine what happened right here, and also over there and there…,' says one of the attendees next to the plaque of Popular Party councilor Jesús María Pedrosa. About Damaso Sánchez Soto, the local jeweler, Pedro knows that his mother had bought his wedding rings before they also assassinated him: 'A year after killing my father, as a snitch, ETA said he was one because my uncle worked here as a Civil Guard, they killed him,' he conveys with contained emotion: 'That's why every time you see a person who is a victim of terrorism, it's like a family member or a friend.' 'I am a victim of terrorism and then I am Pedro,' asserts the son of both, displaced from Zamora to attend the tribute that the City Council paid this Thursday to the victims of ETA in the locality. 'She didn't know and when she found out, she couldn't give him the good news. She died on the spot.' 'We have all gone through the same. It's hard for me, when I arrived this morning it was weird, I felt watched.' He had emigrated from Jaén three years earlier and here he soon met his wife Sara, who was pregnant at that time. 'At first I didn't feel like it, but talking to my wife and friends I was encouraged.' Among the families of the victims of Durango, only that of José María Urquizu has dissociated itself, in protest against the 'deficit of justice' and the lack of 'truth' in the Basque Country. Those who are there know each other, at least by hearsay, and remember past times before saying goodbye. 'In the end I told her and she got very nervous.' 'I removed the symbols of the Spanish flag that I had in the car,' says Pedro, who today works as a Civil Guard at the Police and Customs Cooperation Center (CCPA) of Quintanilha/Alcañices: 'I am very grateful to Carlos for today's event.' 'It didn't matter if he was a guard, a politician… Even if I don't know the people, if I know that a person is a victim of ETA for me they are someone close.' 'Not the subsequent walk, where there were members of the rest of the local corporations. As if someone in the family was dying.' The three, members of the National Police, were machine-gunned with light weapons on the same day, October 3, 1980, when they were traveling in the same car to the City Hall to process their ID. The group makes a last stop to deposit a last white rose in front of the plaque of Pedro Ballesteros. The brother of the historic journalist, Fernando Ónega, was key for the widow to be able to have a pension to get ahead. The other three names that from today Durango also honors, 45 years later, are those of Sergio Canal Canal, José Antonio Merenciano and Jesús Hernando. 'Look what a silly thing. ETA knew it, because the visit was announced.' Nationalist politics heads the delegation (of about thirty people between relatives and friends of the victims), who one by one visit the points where they perished, after carrying out a 'discreet' act in the plenary hall, without press call and to which the representatives of EH Bildu have attended. From today, both the name and the tragic story of his father, like that of eight other people, can be read on different plaques with a QR code, distributed in the exact places where they were murdered by the terrorist band. 'Today she stayed taking care of her two granddaughters.' 'When you know you have done something wrong, you don't like to be reminded of it.' On April 28, 1979, the local police officer of Durango, Pedro Ruiz Rodríguez, was directing traffic on one of the streets of this Biscayan municipality when three etarras machine-gunned him from a car. 'Long live Spain and the Civil Guard!' is heard, while some comment on the 'clandestine' atmosphere surrounding the event. Figures such as Daniel Portero, son of the Andalusia chief prosecutor assassinated by ETA and president of Dignity and Justice, or Nerea Barrios, daughter of José Luis Barrios, representing the Collective of Victims of Terrorism (Covite), have attended. The attack also remains unsolved. Source ABC 'I had returned here for a friend's wedding a few years ago. 'It still surprises how few people have come.' Sara returned to her native Zamora after her husband's death, where the local Police sponsored the newborn thanks to the collaboration of who was the civil governor of the city between 1979 and 19882, José Ramón Ónega, who died in 2021 from COVID-19. An initiative by Carlos García, the only councilor of the Popular Party in the city council, whose vote was decisive to oust EH Bildu from the mayorship and grant it to Mireia Elkoroiribe (PNV) after the last municipal elections of May 2023, and he celebrates that he has fulfilled one of his priority objectives this legislature. 'It's beautiful, better late than never.' 'I hadn't planned to tell my mother. 'In my house every time there was an attack it was a mourning.' It is a bond that arises unintentionally.