Yesterday ETA, today Putin: the same rubbish to support giving in to criminals

They resort to the same infamies that we had to endure 15 years ago

Yesterday ETA, today Putin: the same rubbish to support giving in to criminals

@ElentirENG Esp 2·27·2025 · 18:00 0

I have been writing this blog for 20 years, so many of its current readers were probably children 15 years ago.

Negotiating with terrorists: the infamy that has been repeated with ETA, Hitler and Putin
How to know if someone supports peace in Ukraine or making war profitable for Russia

A secret negotiation between the socialists and ETA

At the time, one of the hot topics in Spain was the political negotiations between the socialist government of Zapatero and the ETA terrorists. Contacts between this criminal gang and the socialists began in 2002, when the PSOE was in the opposition, according to the socialist newspaper El País in June 2007.

The Zapatero government lied again and again about these contacts, which finally culminated in October 2011 in an announcement by ETA saying that it was stopping killing. An announcement that many presented as a success, but which had as a prior concession the legalization of Bildu, whose participation in the elections was banned by the Supreme Court in May 2011 for being a formation "sponsored by ETA itself". An illegalisation overturned in 2012 by the Constitutional Court, then controlled by the socialists.

To date, the minutes of the negotiations between the Zapatero government and ETA have not yet been published. They were not published by that government, nor by Mariano Rajoy's (of the Popular Party) nor by Pedro Sánchez's government. What is there to hide? What is so dishonourable that we are prevented from knowing what was conceded to ETA?

ETA could have profited from having driven 180,000 Basques from their land

The price for abandoning terrorism is not hard to imagine: ETA's political arm was legalised without having to condemn terrorism. In fact, even today it continues to call ETA terrorists in prison "political prisoners", and pays tribute to them as if they were heroes, a humiliation of the victims consented to by the Sánchez government. Thanks to that negotiation between the socialists and ETA, today the political arm of the terrorist group has more power than ever and already dreams of controlling the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre. It is also one of the allies of the Sánchez government, which dances to the tune set by the heirs of ETA.

Meanwhile, 180,000 Basques who had to leave their land because of ETA terrorism never returned, giving rise to an electoral roll that favours the separatist parties, granting them more representation than they would have had if all these exiles continued to live in their land. It is a success for ETA, a way of making its crimes profitable, which include the murder of 853 people (among them 22 children), more than 2,600 people injured and mutilated and almost 90 people kidnapped, in addition to thousands extorted.

The infamies that the left launched against those of us who rejected that negotiation

During the years of that perverse negotiation, the Spanish left frequently made the most infamous accusations against those of us who rejected any concession to terrorism. One of these accusations claimed that we wanted ETA to continue killing, thereby shifting the responsibility for these crimes from the terrorists to those of us who opposed them. Another very common lie was to claim that it was impossible to defeat ETA by police means, since every time a terrorist was arrested, another took his place.

They used these lies to make the rule of law bow down to these criminals, paying the enormous price of humiliation for the victims. There are still 379 unsolved ETA crimes today, because after the criminal gang's announcement in 2011, the left lost all interest in continuing to pursue ETA to make it pay for its crimes. An example of this attitude and the infamies used by the left in those years was seen in 2022, when Sánchez criticized the fact that people continue to talk about ETA terrorism in a response to Inés Arrimadas in which he used these words:

"It has disappeared. ETA no longer exists, Your Honor. I have bad news for you and the right-wing faction: ETA no longer exists."

Several ETA victims were sitting on that bench, and Sánchez was accusing them of wanting this criminal gang to exist. Words typical of an unscrupulous and shameless politician.

The same infamies against those of us who reject the idea that invading Ukraine is profitable for Putin

It was a sad surprise for me to see that today, in the face of another negotiation with another criminal, Vladimir Putin, these infamies are being repeated, in which those of us who support Ukraine are accused of wanting people to continue dying for refusing to accept that the invasion is profitable for the invader and for asking for military aid for the invaded, who wish to continue fighting for the independence and freedom of their Homeland.

Once again, the law is being trampled on and replaced by the law of the strongest, in order to enter into negotiations with a gun on the table and to which the victims have not even been invited, just as happened 15 years ago in Spain. Once again, the intention is to compensate criminals in some way for having committed crimes, a compensation at the expense of the victims and which means sending the dangerous message that crime is profitable for those who commit it.

The great novelty of what we see today is that some who years ago rejected this capitulation to ETA, who denounced it as an intolerable surrender of a democratic country to a band of totalitarian murderers, today are using the same infamies that the left launched at us then, to justify giving in to Putin, simply because some people see Putin in a good light. I never imagined that I would see something like this. If someone had told me 15 years ago that this would happen, I would be unable to believe it. How did we get to this point?

---

Photo: Mikhail Svetlov.

Share this post!