Several hundred people, including leaders of the right, the extreme right and groups of victims of ETAhave gathered this Sunday before the command of the Civil Guard in Pamplona to show their rejection of the agreement between the Government and Eh Bildu to transfer to the community of Navarra the powers in matters of Traffic, which until now fell to the Benemérita.
The act had been convened by the Navarra Association of Victims of ETA Terrorism (ANVITE), Tomás Caballero Foundation, Neighbors of Peace, Pompaelo, Navarra Civil Society, Doble12, Libertad Ya, Recuperar Navarra, Ego Non and Association for Tolerance, to which have been joined by other groups such as the JUCIL association and parties such as UPN, PP, Ciudadanos and Vox.
With the intention of showing their support for the Armed Institute, around a thousand people have gathered, according to the Government Delegation, and among the attendees there have been no shortage of spokesmen for the parties that habitually criticize the government for agreeing on budgets and governance with what they consider “the heirs of ETA”. Thus, in the center of Pamplona the president of Vox, Santiago Abascal; the president of Citizens, Ines Arrimadas; the president of the Union el Pueblo Navarro (UPN), Javier Esparza; the Deputy Secretary for Regional and Local Policy of the Popular Party, Pedro Rollan, together with the president of the PP of Navarra, Javier García; the deputies suspended from UPN militancy Sergio Sayas and Carlos García Adanero; or even the former leader of the extinct UPyD, Rosa Diezamong others.
The agreement contemplates that it is the Foral Police of Navarra who will control traffic in the community before March 31, 2023, although according to the Government, this does not mean that the Benemérita will leave Navarra, since they will be able to continue exercising in the community all agents stationed there who so wish. In fact, this pact with Bildu is not new. It was already achieved in 2019, although then it was agreed with the PNV, and the transfer has been on the table from the Provincial Government of Utxue Barkos (Geroa Bai).
However, this change in powers has served the right to continue attacking the Executive for alleged concessions to the nationalist left that, according to them, weakens the Civil Guard in that territory. A thousand people attended the event with numerous Spanish and Navarrese flags, a main banner with the motto “Navarre with the Civil Guard”and several others scattered among the attendees with phrases such as “Nobody is superfluous here”, “Young people love you. Vthe Civil Guard goes“, “Today it is the Civil Guard, tomorrow it will be you. Marlaska, guilty“.
Many of them also held smaller signs that called for “No negotiation with national sovereignty,” “Enough of deliveries to the coup“, “Less ideology, more security” or “We want security in our streets”.
Chivite criticizes a demonstration “with lies”
The president of the regional government, the socialist María Chivite, has rejected the concentration because she understands that the conveners “They have mounted a demonstration about a falsehoodthat we are going to throw out the Civil Guard of Navarra, when it is a question that is false”.
She has told journalists in Argentina, where she is on an institutional visit, and where, when asked about it, Chivite has assured that with this call, “They instrumentalize Navarra and even the Civil Guard to attack the Government of Spain“, he has lamented to ask:” It is worth using Navarra with lies to attack the Government of Spain.
Thus, he recalled that the transfer of traffic has been claimed “by all the presidents of the Foral Community of Navarra, by the unanimity of the parliamentary forces, and Nobody is going to throw anyone out, this transfer is not against anyone.”but rather follows in the wake of other transfers such as healthcare in prisons or the management of the Minimum Vital Income (IMV).
“Unacceptable Humiliation”
However, María Pilar Ollo, niece of the captain of the Civil Guard assassinated by ETA in 1984, José Luis Ollo, has read the manifesto agreed by the organizing groups, which showed their “admiration and tribute” to the body, which suffered especially in Navarra and the Basque Country, the violence of ETA, with “more than 40 years of nightmare for our young democracy, in which the Civil Guard protected our freedom with their lives, paying a very expensive price for it.”
Thus, and despite admitting that there may be different opinions on the transfer of Traffic powers to Navarra, “we are not going to keep quiet in the face of the humiliation to which the Civil Guard is intended to be subjected after a shameful pact between the government of our country and the direct heirs of the terrorist group ETA”.
The conveners consider “inadmissible” a pact that, in exchange for EH Bildu supporting Pedro Sánchez’s budgets, “launders even more a party like Bildu that has not yet repented of the crimes of the terrorist group and that, in fact, it has in its ranks exetarras who have not asked for forgiveness”, and that the abertzale formation be considered as an interlocutor.
Thus, they have warned that the distribution of powers provided for in the State of Autonomies “must be managed in an institutional dialogue, between governments”, and not as “a bargaining chip in obscure negotiations with a party whose objective is to make us lose our identity and annex to another autonomous community”.
For this reason, they have urged the state government to “reconsider” the situation and not execute the transfer of traffic “in these unworthy circumstances”, in addition to ensuring that the Civil Guard “continues to be necessary in Navarra and throughout Spain”
