On May 12, 1989, a judicial commission formed by the then judge of the National Court Baltasar Garzón, the prosecutor Carmen Tagle and a commissioner from the National Police went to the Palace of Justice in Paris, to the office of the French magistrate Michel Legrand. They wanted to interrogate José Antonio Urrutikoetxea Bengoetxea for the first time, Josu Ternera, at that time considered head of ETA and arrested four months earlier in Bayonne. Legrand asked the first questions, but the ETA member limited himself to answering “je n’ai rien à dire” (I have nothing to say, in French) and to make a political plea about the independence of Euskadi.
According to Garzón in a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS, both the French judge and the Spanish commission asked the ETA member if his way of fighting for the independence of the Basque Country was by murdering children (in November of the previous year a car bomb had killed a man and a two-year-old baby). Urrutikoetxea simply said: “When we talk about the torture they practice against us in Spanish prisons, then we will talk about that.” The prosecutor couldn’t help but comment in a low voice: “Brave son of a bitch.” Veal seemed to hear her and asked the French judge who she was. “She looked at us with contempt,” remembers Garzón. Tagle was murdered by ETA four months later.
Now, 34 years later, the documentary Don’t call me Veal by journalist Jordi Évole, whose premiere on September 22 at the San Sebastián Film Festival has caused enormous controversy with requests that it not be screened, puts Urrutikoetxea and everything he represents in front of the camera. At 72 years old, a symbol of a now dissolved ETA, both for those who were inside and for those who suffered its violence, the biography of Josu Ternera is confused with the history of the terrorist organization itself. He joined the gang in 1968, the year the murders began, and was its top leader in one of the bloodiest times, the 1980s, in addition to being responsible for the political apparatus and representative of the band in negotiations with the Government. He was also one of the two ETA members – the other was Soledad Iparraguirre, Anbotonow imprisoned in Spain—who read the dissolution statement in 2018.
Urrutikoetxea made clear his symbiosis with the terrorist organization in the trial held against him in Paris in October 1990: “I have been, am and will be a member of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna and I am proud of it,” he said. The journalist Florencio Domínguez, in his book Josu Ternera: a life in ETA (The sphere of books), explains this long career, unique in the band, in which “in every split, in every breakup, Urrutikoetxea always aligned himself with those who maintained his fidelity to independence nationalism and violence.” Other ETA leaders of his generation died – such as José Miguel Beñarán, Argalaor Domingo Iturbe, Txomin―, they left the gang or were forced to do so after being arrested.
Ternera, who has never been tried in Spain, admits in the Évole documentary his participation in the theft of the dynamite with which the gang murdered the then President of the Government, Luis Carrero Blanco, in 1973. He also recognizes his indirect involvement in the strafing that cost the life, in 1976, of the mayor of Galdakao (Bizkaia), Víctor Legorburu. In both cases, the 1977 amnesty exempts him from any criminal responsibility.
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The same does not occur with his involvement, as an alleged instigator, in the attack against the Zaragoza barracks in 1987, which caused the death of 11 people, six of them minors. For this fact he is being prosecuted. He is also being investigated in Spain for three other causes: the financing of ETA through the herriko taverns; the murder in Vitoria, in 1980, of Luis María Hergueta, director of the Michelin company; and a crime of crimes against humanity. Furthermore, in January 2022, the National Court admitted a complaint against him for placing the car bomb in T-4 of the Madrid-Barajas airport that killed two people and put an end to ETA’s last truce. In these five cases investigated in Spain, Josu Ternera denies his participation.
In his book, Domínguez highlights that Urrutikoetxea “has lived most of the time in the shadows, trying to hide from public scrutiny and trying not to leave traces of his time in some scenarios.” In fact, ideological documents are not even attributed to him. The only known text is the book Giltzapeko sukaldaritza (The kitchen behind barsHiru Argitaletxea publishing house), in which he collects the recipes he made during the ten years he was imprisoned in France for belonging to a terrorist group.
But its relevance in ETA has been evident. Urrutikoetxea appears linked to the Algiers talks in 1989, to which the gang demanded that he join despite being imprisoned in France; and to the meeting in 2004 with the then leader of ERC Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira. But, above all, it is linked to the contacts with the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in Switzerland and Norway in 2006, which, although they did not come to fruition, served to pave the way that led, in 2011, to the abandonment of violence and, later, in the dissolution of the band.
The Government then considered that the presence of Josu Ternera in those meetings was not a guarantee of anything, but that, for them to be fruitful, he had to be there. Jesús Egiguren, the Basque socialist leader who sat in front of him at that dialogue table, recalled in 2015 in The mail how that process went awry, precisely, when Urrutikoetxea was relegated by another ETA leader. “There it appeared [Francisco Javier López Peña] Thierrywho was the one who spoke while Ternera was in a corner,” Eguiguren recalled, interpreting that substitution as a prelude to the T-4 attack that ended the negotiation.
Urrutikoetxea assures that, after that failure, he left the organization. Despite this, he continued to be involved in key ETA movements. In November 2011 he went to Oslo to join the delegation that, after the announcement of the “definitive cessation of violence” a month earlier, unsuccessfully aspired to meet with the Government of Mariano Rajoy (PP). His next appearance on stage was the reading of the band’s dissolution statement in 2018. A year later he was arrested in France when he went to a hospital to be treated for cancer.
His arrest ended a 17-year escape, a record time. Police sources highlight that she managed to remain off their radar for so long because she did not use the gang’s structures, already eaten away by police action, to hide. He relied on a parallel network of friends. His way of living clandestinely, almost like a hermit, also helped. For seven years after the failure of the 2006 negotiations, he lived in a house near Durban-sur-Arize, a small town of 100 inhabitants in the French Pyrenees. According to what his neighbors told EL PAÍS in May 2022, Josu Ternera lived alone, without speaking except with a couple of locals, without receiving visits other than those from his partner and without leaving the surrounding area. Arrested six years later in 2019, he similarly lived in a lonely cabin in a township of 250 residents near Mont Blanc.
After his arrest in France – where he remains under supervised release in the town of Anglet with his partner and daughter – Urrutikoetxea has focused his efforts on avoiding his surrender to Spain through judicial means. So far he has succeeded: in France he must still be tried for another case, and until he is convicted there and serves his sentence, he will not be handed over. In July, the National Court that was going to try him for the Zaragoza attack agreed to postpone the hearing scheduled for next January after confirming that he will not have been extradited by France by those dates. Now, the premiere of Évole’s documentary once again draws the spotlight on Josu Ternera and the history of ETA that he embodies.
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