• Felipe González "Mistakes were made but democracy won"
  • The 44 candidates of Bildu A crack in the coalition

If the history of the dirty war of the State in Spain, the history of the GAL, the Basque-Spanish battalions, the Amedos, Domínguez and Barrionuevos, had not been the work of some botched and brutalized sapphies, if the dirty war had been relatively neat ... Would we see it with different eyes?

"It's a delicate question but it's true: we have a Nobel Peace Prize winner who used to order something called extrajudicial killings, in many cases, with very powerful means, drones, missiles and so on, which carried certain collateral damage. Not only did he order the killing of a person without trial, but he accepted the death of the people around him," replies writer Lorenzo Silva. "When the UK executed three IRA members in Gibraltar, Margaret Thatcher said in public: 'It was me; Don't look for the military who pulled the trigger because the decision was mine.' And those soldiers were not prosecuted. Does this political gallantry relativize action?"

That is one of the questions posed by Púa (Destino), Lorenzo Silva's new novel. In its 456 pages, a man nicknamed Barb, a former police officer with no known real name, who was once infiltrated into an unnamed terrorist organization, in an unnamed country, receives the call from a former comrade-in-arms, dying in a hospital. The sick man, nicknamed Mazo, explains that his daughter, with whom he has a tormented relationship partly because of his former job in the secret police, is a prostitute and is enslaved by a pimp of the worst kind. Mazo asks Púa to save her. Barb accepts out of loyalty, takes the girl and gives the pimp a good scare. But then he discovers that the pimp is not a simple macarra: he is a terminal of a very obscure conspiracy that can only be understood through the past of Púa and Mazo in the dirty war. Barb is serious, morally self-deprecating and narrates the world in the voice of a basically good man. Does this gallantry relativize his actions? The book's answer, in short, is no.

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The final interview.

Lorenzo Silva: "The Civil Guard was about to die of Francoism"

  • Writing: LUIS ALEMANY Madrid

Lorenzo Silva: "The Civil Guard was about to die of Francoism"

History.

Heroin in the Basque Country in the 80s: artificial paradises in post-industrial hell

  • Writing: LUIS ALEMANY

Heroin in the Basque Country in the 80s: artificial paradises in post-industrial hellThink of all your crime-crime books as a whole. I would say that there is a common theme that is everywhere with its infinite variations. In the police and in the war novels the same. Yes, they all have in common that someone appears who has done a lot of harm to someone. And he always does it believing he has a good reason. That is what challenges me. The psychopath, the madman, the sadist... Actually, what else do they give, if their story ends in themselves. The person who tortures, humiliates and murders and who thinks he is doing what he should do is the one who piques my interest. Above all, because there will be a moment when you will have to confront the other side, the victim. That happens a little to his inspector Bevilacqua and, here, to Púa, in a more claustrophobic version. They have to question themselves and they're going to have to do it forever. I have no interest in talking to one of these ETA members who come out and laugh in the trials because they are people who clearly have a broken moral structure. But I have been interested in talking to people who have been in murders and who have to remember what they did in their day absolutely convinced. The temptation is to project that awareness of the damage done by the individual case to the collective level. What do we do as a country with the certainty that there was a thing called a dirty war in our name? That depends on the purpose we give ourselves as a society. If the purpose is "hey, let's move on anyway," it's simple: the past is past. The extreme case is that of radical Basque nationalism with respect to its very dark past of support for an organization that committed almost a thousand murders, killed children and bystanders and intimidated millions of people. It does not matter: in their purpose nothing encourages them to review their past and that is why they put 44 terrorists on the electoral lists. It's an option. But I think that if we aspire to have a slightly more complete idea of who we are and why things happen to us, we must be rigorous, go to the bottom of things and our past. Spanish society, regarding its dirty war, still has a little poor knowledge, doesn't it? We have a couple of judicial summaries, that of the kidnapping of Segundo Marey that ended with prison for an allegedly foolish minister and for a secretary of state and for a couple of policemen, and that of Lasa and Zabala. I have read the sentences, they are very precarious stories.Are you talking about the fact that we lack a truth commission on terrorism and the dirty war that would set a complete story? There is no and it would be healthy, among other things, to put an end to the permanent equivalence made by some of the illegal and reprehensible acts carried out by some officials in a specific period and the indiscriminate violence of ETA for half a century. You work with direct sources, always based on very good information. Do you know much more about the Dirty War than what appears in this book? I know more than I write but what I don't put is because I think it has nothing to do with the essence of what I want to tell. Be gossip. In return, I do not know how much the sources distort their stories by their biases and by their desire to improve their image.Is it more or less possible to marry the story of a former terrorist with that of a policeman? Do they have more or less the same scenes with variations or are they incompatible voices?? They tell stories that would be easy to marry... if we had access to documents that are classified for eternity. Well, we can interpret the stories, we can imagine where someone might be most tempted to forget or exaggerate things. At this point, I have a clear idea of how far the dirty war went. And it is a less pious story than the one given by the State and less satanic than the one given by the Abertzale left, which will say until the last minute that the Francoist and tortuator system survived with its police that was like the Gestapo. In reality, the Francoist police was never the Gestapo.We wish the dirty war had been a thing of the dictatorship. The inertia of Francoism existed and lasted. They gradually disappeared between 1977 and 1990 as Spain needed to receive acceptance from Europe. There was a time when the doctors who treated the ETA detainees did not leave a scratch unwritten in their reports because if they did not, some gentlemen from Strasbourg were going to appear with a Charter of Human Rights that asked them to be responsible. But the big crack in ETA's argument is not that normalization, democratic, which could have been problematic, nor the Constitution nor the idea of democracy that is not something that came to us overnight. The crack is the amnesty of 1977, in which the state told them: "We do not care about crimes, we bet on a new era and we trust you." ETA's response was to kill 100 people a year. And the only way to justify himself was to project Francoism, if possible, until 2023.In the novel also appears, albeit in the background, police corruption. The dirty war, in the end, tends to corruption. I once interviewed a Civil Guard officer who gave me a very detailed and very complex theory of why police corruption exists. And a year later, he was arrested with garbage bags full of 500-euro bills at his home. I was amazed, really. Well, police corruption exists where there is a framework of corruption. If regional councillors keep money in the Porsche Cayanne and there is a weak judicial system, there is police corruption. In that sense, I am pessimistic, but only in part, because there are structures that are strengthened and function. The Police and Civil Guard have very powerful internal affairs services. We have a division general of the Civil Guard in jail after four years of investigation in which he did the impossible to assert his hierarchy. In the end, all the stories of infiltrators are always about the same thing, about the crack that opens when the infiltrator falls in love and how that disturbs his mission. It happens to Púa. It is what all the people who have worked with infiltrators say, The great risk of their work is in the emotional dimension of the people. Suddenly, the infiltrator begins to miss his family or his house too much, or he falls in love and has to insert that infatuation into the fiction they are telling. The infiltrator does a very cerebral exercise of manipulation. Often, the awareness of manipulating the loved one is what discovers the damage done.

  • ETA
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  • Civil Guard
  • Articles Luis Alemany

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