A month ago we told you on ABC the story of Bernard Oyarzábal Bidegorri and María Lourdes Cristóbal Elhorga. The vast majority of Spaniards did not know who we were talking about, because when they carried out the bloodiest attack in the history of ETA in Madrid, the second with the most victims in the history of Spain to this day, their names did not appear in the media. of communication or in the courts. Neither did their photographs, since the two terrorists managed to flee to France, go unnoticed, prosper in civilian life and live peacefully in anonymity as if they had never broken a plate in their lives. However, with the exception of the Hipercor massacre, no Another member of the Basque terrorist group has murdered so many people since September 13, 1974 in which Oyarzábal Bidegorri and Cristóbal Elhorga blew up the Rolando cafeteria in Madrid. The perpetrators wanted to cause as much damage as possible and there were few better places to achieve it than this establishment located on the central Calle del Correo, next to Puerta del Sol, one of the busiest points in the capital of Spain. The unusual thing about this case It’s not unique. According to a detailed study by Florencio Domínguez and María Jiménez Ramos, authors of ‘Sin Justicia’ (Espasa, 2023), of the 850 murders committed by ETA, the material authors of 376 of them have never been convicted. That is more than 40% of the gang’s crimes, establishing a difference between those to which the 1977 Amnesty Law was applied, as is the case of Oyarzábal and Elhorga, and those that were perpetrated after the time limits established during the Transition by that norm. Related News Standard confessions Yes ETA’s biggest hitman: “Before it ends, some minister has to fall” Israel Viana Kubati murdered 13 people and committed another 16 frustrated attacks for which he was sentenced to 1,210 years of prison, although he only served 26. He was released in 2013 without showing regret. The first section began on June 7, 1968, when ETA committed its first murder: that of the civil guard José Antonio Pardines. From that day until June 1977, the date that put a limit on the application of the aforementioned law, the gang killed 67 people. The murderers of 63 of them were never tried, so that 93% of the crimes of the terrorist group perpetrated in the final years of the Franco dictatorship and the beginning of the Transition went unpunished. Elhorga and Oyarzábal killed 13 fifty years ago. Civilian victimsThe couple entered the Rolando cafeteria on September 13, 1974 at 2:00 p.m. He sat at one of the tables in the main room, which at that moment was beginning to fill up. “They were a man and a woman of about twenty-five years old who were carrying packages, both with long hair and of average height,” one of the waiters declared to the Security Forces and Corps. The terrorists had first chosen the General Directorate of Security (DGS), as they wanted to kill as many police officers as possible, but they came to the conclusion that it was impossible to leave a bomb there without being intercepted. Next they chose the cafeteria across the street, as they assumed that many agents went there to eat. However, they only killed one National Police inspector: Félix, 46, who died two years later as a result of his injuries. The rest were a mechanic, a salesman, a telephone operator, a teacher, a baker and his wife, a railroad worker, an administrator from the DGS, a graphic arts employee, a 20-year-old student, and a cook and a waiter from the café. «It was an important qualitative leap, because ETA went from attacking individual and selected targets to killing indiscriminately, regardless of how many people it killed or who they were. “They began to imitate the attacks of terrorist groups such as the neo-fascists in Italy or the IRA in the pubs of London or Birmingham,” Gaizka Fernández, author with Ana Escauriaza of ‘Dinamita, nuts and lies: The attack on the cafeteria Rolando’ (Tecnos, 2024). A group of firefighters removes the first victims from the cafeteria Rolando after the ETA attack in 1974 ABCThe lawWithout any anonymous call warning of what was going to happen, the cafeteria was blown up with all clientele and staff inside at 2:30 p.m. The “package” from Oyarzábal and Elhorga contained 30 kilos of explosives and nuts 2 centimeters in diameter to cause the maximum possible damage. It was the first indiscriminate attack against civilians in the history of ETA. In addition to the 13 dead, there were 71 injured. At that time, a witness told ABC: “It was a dry and tremendous explosion. Suddenly, the light went out and a shower of rubble fell on us. At that moment, we didn’t even hear screams, just the impressive, deafening noise. The glass flew into the air and then everything was confusion.” At the nearby Ruano hostel, Fernández and Escauriaza say in their essay, a woman named Benilde was hanging clothes in the interior patio when she heard “a big explosion and felt, at the same time, “Once, a great sensation of heat, and he saw how the rubble was rising.” The gust threw her two meters into the establishment. Some customers picked her up from the ground and she went down to the street. The scene he saw there was Dantesque, as he acknowledged to the newspaper ‘Pueblo’: “I even tripped over a woman’s leg. It was separated from the trunk. It was horrible. Franco died just a year later, approving a series of laws to dismantle the legal assembly of the dictatorship. The objective was national reconciliation and amnesty for political prisoners, according to the demand of the anti-Franco opposition. Its approval achieved the support of centrist and right-wing political groups and the effects of the new law were imminent. In accordance with article 10, the competent judicial authority had to order the immediate release of people who were in prison, also nullifying the search and capture orders for those defendants declared in absentia. The amnestied Among those who benefited were workers sanctioned for defending democratic rights, such as strikes and unionization; representatives of clandestine political parties, such as the PCE and PSOE; public order officials and agents who had committed crimes during the Franco regime; soldiers and members of the security forces who had been imprisoned for refusing to participate in repressive actions against the population and, in others, those convicted or accused of crimes considered terrorist. «The criminal responsibilities of all of them were extinguished. The law also established that his criminal record and unfavorable notes in personal files must be eliminated, even if the sanctioned person had died,” Domínguez and Jiménez recall in their essay. This is not the case of Oyarzábal and Elhorga, whose massacre went unpunished and the Spanish ended up forgetting about them and what they did. «They are still alive! They were never arrested. There is a report from ‘El Mundo’ and a documentary from Telemadrid in which, ten years ago, they were found in a town in France. They had children and grandchildren and a happy and prosperous life. Bernard even went to work at the Basque Language Academy in France and became a relevant academic, without anyone reproaching him for the massacre,” Fernández commented to this newspaper. In total, 89 prisoners with blood crimes linked to gangs terrorists benefited from the Amnesty Law of 1977. The vast majority of them belonged to ETA, to which were added some from GRAPO. This means that almost none of the 67 murders committed by ETA members until the norm was applied in the middle of the Transition, 63 were not solved nor their perpetrators prosecuted. The 63 deaths were a consequence of 39 attacks carried out by the Basque terrorist organization. The most serious in terms of fatalities was the one mentioned in the Rolando cafeteria. If we analyze what happened after the Amnesty Law and in the half century of democracy that has passed, the statistics are not much better. According to the investigation published in ‘Sin Justicia’, 312 ETA murders committed in 240 attacks after 1977 have not seen a sentence in which any of the material authors who perpetrated them have been convicted. Pending unresolved cases have been considered. All of them represent almost 40% of all fatal crimes carried out by the terrorist group in this period of time. “The families of these victims have not had a resolution from the courts that gives them justice,” the authors conclude.
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