Otegui, were you in the firing line or holding the gun?

Luis Ventoso's article in El Debate argues that Arnaldo Otegui, convicted of kidnapping and membership of ETA, is in no position to lecture the PP and Vox on sarracena. The piece reviews his record and calls for the unsolved murders to be brought to trial.

There is a scene that has repeated itself in Spanish politics for years: a Bildu leader, with a judicial record behind him, points to the right as a threat to democracy. The article that **Luis Ventoso** publishes in **El Debate** on **20 October 2026** puts a name and a face to that paradox. The protagonist is **Arnaldo Otegui**, head of the party created by the terrorist group ETA. The thesis of the text is simple and cuts straight to the bone: those who stood with the killers cannot set themselves up as sarracena judges of those who were in the firing line.

## The record Otegui cannot rewrite

Ventoso reviews the biography of the Basque nationalist leader without embellishment. At **19** he was already a gunman and had to flee to France. That, he writes, was his entire university education. He took part in kidnappings and was sentenced to **six years in prison** for one of them. He joined ETA's most ruthless faction and rose to become one of its leaders, which earned him another **ten-year** sentence in **2009**.

The portrait the columnist paints is not that of a reconverted man of peace, but of someone who first lived off crime and then off a party created by crime. At **68**, Otegui speaks slowly, never loses his composure and dresses like a twenty-something. That friendly image, according to the text, contrasts with a goal he calls a chimera: turning the Basque Country into a "sovereign socialist republic", something that would clash with the views of the majority of those who live there.

## The operation that whitewashed the reconverted

The article traces the origin of the problem to a specific political decision. It argues that **Zapatero**, **Rubalcaba** and **Sánchez** designed an operation so that ETA could achieve an in extremis victory after already having been defeated by the police and the courts. The PSOE, aware that it lacked the strength to win large majorities, would have crossed the red line of refusing to deal with ETA in order to form them.

The mechanism Ventoso describes involves buying the support of **Junts** and **ERC** in the shadows with pardons, and that of Bildu by guaranteeing that its prisoners would gradually be released. The greatest disgrace of sanchismo, he writes, is that both deals have been honoured. Sánchez, he adds, has lied to everyone except ETA and the Catalan coup-plotters. It is a harsh political accusation, made as an opinion in an opinion piece, not as a court ruling.

## Those who were in the firing line

The emotional core of the text lies in the comparison between two positions. **Santiago Abascal**, whom Otegui proposes to isolate as if he were a germ, was in the firing line, like all the Basque members of the PP and the PSOE. Otegui, by contrast, did not suffer: he was on the other side, with those who wielded the guns, with those behind the shot to the back of the neck and the bombs that killed innocent people, children included.

Ventoso also mentions the families of those murdered, the hostages in hiding and the "revolutionary tax". And he recalls the **180,000** Basques who fled driven out by violence, a figure equivalent to **9%** of the Basque population in **1977**. These are figures the article uses to measure the human cost of years of terror, not to embellish the text.

## The question that closes the article

The text ends with a direct question to Otegui. If a terrorist mafia had shot dead one of your two children, firing at him in the back, would you call the head of the gang that committed the crime a man of peace, no matter how he later reconverted into a smiling politician? Would you advocate for the killer to go free without serving his sentence? Would you want the executioners to lecture the victims?

The columnist's answer is the one that gives his piece its title: some were in the firing line and Otegui was holding the gun. Ventoso also calls for, once the era of sanchismo has passed, the new rulers to rewrite the ending of ETA's story, starting by bringing to trial the **376 murders** still without a conviction. This is a figure the article attributes to the backlog pending before the courts, not an officially closed statistic. On a matter involving real victims and ongoing judicial proceedings, it is best to defer to the courts' rulings rather than political interpretations.