25 years without Miguel Ángel Blanco
‘Txapote’ and ‘Amaya’ have been critical of the nationalist left. Geresta, alias ‘Ttotto’, committed suicide in 1999
Miguel Ángel Blanco was assassinated by three people: Javier García Gaztelu, ‘Txapote’, Irantzu Gallastegi, ‘Amaya’ and José Luis Geresta Mujika, ‘Ttotto’. ‘Txapote’ shot the young man while ‘Ttotto’ held him down and ‘Amaya’ waited in a car. A quarter of a century later, the history of these terrorists is a reflection of the defeat of terrorism and those who practiced it. ‘Ttotto’ committed suicide on March 20, 1999 after a strange delirium in which he seemed to confuse reality with his fantasies. His two companions are serving sentences in prison, without showing any remorse and privately criticizing ETA’s decision to disappear, but without having the courage to publicly show his dissidence. “The nationalist left does the same thing that we criticized the PNV: it acts like a herd,” they complained five years ago, when they expected a reaction against the Sortu leadership that did not occur.
The terrorist career of both prisoners is a paradigm of ETA members who managed to rise in the organization thanks to their willingness to apply maximum violence without any scruple. The murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco catapulted them into the band but their journey was very short because ETA was already trapped in a vicious circle of weakness and was only capable of undertaking self-destructive escapes forward. And the dissolution of ETA became a movement that crushed them because they thought they were going to be the leaders of the liberation but they ended up being embittered prisoners that nobody takes into account. It is significant that the last known message from ‘Amaya’ is a letter to Etxerat, the gang’s prisoner support association, in which she asks the leaders of that group to stop contacting her or her family and He reproaches them for “the forms and the political line of action shown”.
stopped on the beach
‘Txapote’, 56 years old, was arrested in an elegant beach bar in Anglet, in the French Basque Country on February 22, 2001. At that time he was the military leader of ETA and all his reflections were summed up in one sentence : “Hit until the state is brought to its knees.” In the bar where he was arrested he tried to destroy an agenda that contained the names of twenty commandos that he himself had created to fulfill his dream. He had looked for young people with his history: from kale borroka to terrorism. From ‘Molotov cocktails’ to pistols. Because that’s the whole story of him. In 1984 he was arrested for the first time for his relationship with street violence but his lawyer, Jone Goiricelaia, reached an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office so that he would not go to prison.
In 1994 he was enrolled in the ‘Donosti command’ and was the battering ram of the so-called ‘Oldartzen doctrine’, with which ETA intended to “socialize suffering” so that they would end up agreeing with the accumulation of horror. He was behind the murders of political officials such as Gregorio Ordóñez, José Luis Caso or Manuel Zamarreño, from the PP, and the historic socialist Fernando Múgica, crimes for which he is sentenced to more than 300 years in prison. In 1998, during the Lizarra truce, he fled to France and rose to the leadership of ETA there.
Txapote and Amaya, during a trial at the National High Court. /
His partner, with whom he has two children conceived in prison, is Irantzu Gallastegi. His terrorist history is not as extensive as that of his partner, but he has a ‘pedigree’ that he lacks. His grandfather was Eli Gallastegi, a radical nationalist leader at the beginning of the 20th century who, within the PNV, rejected any agreement with the Spanish government. His uncle, Iker Gallastegui, was convicted in 2006 for stating in a documentary about Miguel Ángel Blanco that those who killed the young man did so “because it is a patriotic duty.” “They don’t have to apologize for anything.” She was arrested in 1999 in a hotel in Paris, when she participated, with other members of ETA such as former parliamentarian Mikel Zubimendi, in the purchase of surplus material from the IRA, the Northern Irish terrorist group that had already signed peace with the British Government and wanted make cash with their arsenals.
In a conversation that both hold in prison, they lament the end of ETA and hope that “in time” a similar movement will emerge to fill “the void” left by the gang. His rancor increased in 2016, when the Sortu management announced that he was no longer demanding amnesty and was proposing that the inmates seek individual exits. In their communications they considered that the violence was being delegitimized and they fantasized about what the response of the Catalan people should be in the event that the military “occupied” Catalonia. His megalomania has also led him to complain that too much attention is paid to the ‘eight of Alsasua’, the young people who were convicted of beating a couple of civil guards and their partners in a bar. “It seems that everything is Alsasua now,” he laments.
The third terrorist who took part in Blanco’s murder is José Luis Geresta Mujika, ‘Ttotto’. His terrorist history is very brief. In 1996 he joined the ‘Donosti commando’ and three years later he committed suicide by shooting himself in the temple in Rentería. He was obsessed with the fact that they had placed a microphone in his molars, something physically and technologically impossible and that can only happen in science fiction movies. He tried to pull out his teeth in life and, after the autopsy, an unknown person sawed the teeth in which Geresta suspected that there was a microphone in his own. The nationalist left came to request discreet information from the Ertzaintza about whether it was possible to place such a device in a person’s teeth. The agents explained that if someone had placed a microphone, complete with battery and wiring, in his mouth, he would not have been able to close it.
Ibon Muñoa, the collaborator
The kidnapping and murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco was possible thanks to the fact that Ibon Muñoa, an HB mayor from Eibar, helped the ‘Donosti commando’ to commit the crime. This councilman, who lent his house and car to the murderers, served twenty years in prison for his collaboration in the crime and, after being released from prison two years ago, is now feted as a poet with interviews at the Durango Book Fair, His works are prefaced by renowned figures of bertsolaritza and he receives invitations to speak at public events.
Ibon Muñoa was born in 1958 in Eibar, where he became a councilor for HB while running a spare parts store for his family in the Ardanza neighborhood of the town. In 1995, Muñoa began to collaborate with ETA when Mikel Zubimendi, a former parliamentarian from his own party, asked him to do so, and in a short time he became a key player in the ‘Donosti command’ made up of Francisco Javier García Gaztelu ‘Txapote’ and Irantzu Gallastegi Varela, ‘amaya’. The two murderers used their apartment to stay and the councilor of the nationalist left provided them with false information and license plates.
Miguel Ángel Blanco was then working at the Eibar company ‘Eman Consulting’, located just 150 meters from the establishment where Muñoa had his spare parts store.
On July 10, Miguel Ángel Blanco traveled by train from Ermua to Eibar and the ETA members who were hiding in Muñoa’s house kidnapped him next to the halt. The previous day they had tried to capture him but the young man had traveled in his father’s car and they did not locate him. The next day they had no problem kidnapping him and starting the macabre countdown that would end in the young man’s murder two days later.
Ibon Muñoa was arrested in October 2000 after a lengthy investigation that had focused on the traces that the license plates he manufactured for the ‘Donosti commando’ had left in different attacks. He entered prison, was sentenced to 33 years in prison, and in October 2020 he was released, after serving 20 years in prison.
The gang’s collaborator had started writing poetry books in prison. His rhymes were collected in six volumes that were published by the Ataramiñe publishing house, a label created by former members of the band and dedicated to publishing literary works by former ETA members. In Ataramiñe he publishes, among others, the former head of ETA Mikel Albizu, ‘Mikel Antza’. The terrorist leader signs with the alias that he already used in his incipient literary career in the 1980s and that he kept as a nom de guerre while he was in charge of the gang.
As soon as he was released from prison, Muñoa presented what is to date his last book ‘Gure Ama-lur feminista da’ -Our mother earth is a feminist- which is prefaced by the history of bertsolaritza Xabier Amuriza. The text was presented at the Durango Fair as well as other Basque towns, supported by local poets. In some of her verses, for example, Muñoa laments that Obama had celebrated Bin Laden’s death. In his prologue to the last book, Amuriza highlights a poem by Muñoa in which the ETA collaborator laments not having had “the courage” to combine his life with “militancy.”
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