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Sofía Caravelos,
Lawyer, La Plata, Argentina

When I arrived at the Audiencia Nacional, on 18th April, everything seemed to suggest a trial was taking place there. A prepared courtroom, lawyers wearing gowns, towers of sealed boxes containing papers in the middle of the room, dismantled computers, defendants, security guards, upright judges and a public prosecutor about to begin his final report.

However, as I listened to the report, I began to understand that this was not a legal procedure as I had imagined when I was in my country; rather, I became aware that I was in the presence of something completely different.

I was in the presence of a state, the Spanish state (as I had learned to call it during my visits to Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia) which, through its prosecutor, was trying to fit a social conflict into a legal corset. Furthermore, using a number of paralegal mechanisms, he was attempting to “solve the conflict” by asking the tribunal to pass a sentence imposing a certain truth, which he presented as the only valid and acceptable version of history, of politics and of relationships between human beings.

From that moment on, I began to understand the implications of the use of the figure of terrorism as a way to subdue political dissidence, turning everything this dissidence touches into a crime and turning the dissidents into criminals.

The language used was Spanish.

This may seem obvious, when talking about a trial in Madrid, but it is a significant fact because all the defendants speak another mother tongue, which is not Spanish, and what was on trial, the behaviour and the actions in the dock, were mostly expressed in that other language.

Nevertheless, the language imposition was not limited to the distance caused by the fact that the authorities used a different language to the one the defendants best understood (which is not a minor issue, let us bring to mind an analogy with the trials against native peoples in Latin America) but also, in many parts of the report by the prosecutor, there was a clear and violent attempt by the State to penetrate the meaning and the uses of language.

I witnessed a true trial against words.

“Having a go”, “to struggle”, “to condemn”, “social persecution” (“Dar caña”, “luchar”, “condenar”, “persecución social”) were some of the terms the prosecutor used to argue that, used by the young Basque defendants, they proved their membership of the organisation ETA.

It was an attempt to give a “Madrid explanation” to sentences, slogans or chants that had been extracted from stickers or recorded telephone conversations (i.e. from the political and colloquial language of young people from a different culture) without even bearing in mind the symbolic distance implied by these expressions having been used in another language and in a very specific context. As if the people using these expressions were not young people, as if these words had not been said in the street, during political work, or as if the defendants were not part of a certain generation, of another people, taking part in specific political practices, holders of their own codes for communication within the group to whom the discourse was directed.

In order to explain all this, the prosecutor needed not have resorted to a diabolical explanation.

He simply should have accepted the fact that law is not able to take on language, as a complex form of communication and that in order to draw conclusions from the use of language, help from other disciplines devoted to the study of language is required.

It is only possible to extract meaning from a complete analysis.

Otherwise, the analyst becomes a butcher who does not want to see and can only find what he wishes to find, from his own logic, which is nothing but to say that he needed to confirm what he thought he knew, using pseudo-semantics as the best excuse to prove it.

This kind of domineering extended to other fields of social sciences.

And I say domineering because he who forces the meaning of things is domineering.

In the report presented by the state prosecutor I not only witnessed the state attempting to modify the shape of language, but also trying to penetrate the ways individuals relate to each other, determining which ways are “correct” and which are not, and turning the former into a crime.

Several times, the prosecutor mentioned the fact that the witnesses (many of whom were members of ETA) said hello or waved and expressed affection or sympathy to the defendants and that this was “evidence” of the relationship which in his view existed and still exists between the two organisations.

A wave, an expression of sympathy, became questioned modes of behaviour, and were used as something to support the charges.

If we add this to what we said above about language, we can conclude that in the final report, anything that accounted for or expressed national identity was turned into evidence of being in the presence of “something” dangerous.

And this is not a coincidence.

Because in the Audiencia Nacional they talk about terrorism.

And talking about terrorism implies saying that “evil” exists and that the powers of the good (the State) must confront evil with all its weapons and resources in order to defeat it.

However, this is to say nothing.

The figure of terrorism can be as malleable and ductile as any given judge at any given time may require in order to adapt the figure to the circumstances of the time. It is a kind of meaningless signifier, a wild card. Whatever the State says terrorism is at any given time, will be terrorism.

Words, gestures, looks, composure, a wave, the use of language, clothes, links to other people, it was all terrorism; everything except the actual facts and events.

Indeed, contrary to what the law demands, the charges for membership or involvement in a terrorist group at no point referred to specific events and deeds.

And, of course, in this context, it was not going to be possible to listen to a report containing a clear, precise, circumstantiated, and specific account of the deeds and events each one of the defendants were charged with.

Because terrorism is, in terms of the law, an open definition, which is as much as to say that we shall never know exactly what it is.

What the prosecutor did was to list verbs and events, which could be attributed to all or none of the defendants, without amounting to any specific crimes, but extracting from that group of accounts a kind of vivid fantasy to equate these young Basques to warriors at the service of evil.

And if they are evil, the State must become a saviour and confront its enemy.

Enmity conceived in such terms generates panic (a mix of individual fear and social terror) that enables and legitimises state intervention in every aspect of life.

Therefore, it is possible to understand the obsessive interference I mentioned above.

But what the prosecutor had before him was not a monster; it was a political organisation. The behaviour seen in passing, which the prosecutor referred to as constituting terrorism, was no more and no less than forms of action that were absolutely distant to the kind of events that can be included in the penal system.

These were actions where the main motive was conscience, deliberated political decisions, public and altruistic declarations by a group of individuals who, at a time when individualism and social de-structuring reign in the midst of neo-liberalism and a homogeneous culture, chose to organise and demand social and political rights.

Many of the words contained in the case files show a deep social conflict. They show a people that recognises itself as such and wishes to live in independence and socialism.

Denying this phenomenon or ascribing negative connotations to it, to the point of attempting to criminalise it, amounts, to a certain extent, to missing the chance to get to know that reality, to get to know its main actors, listen to their voices and build the path to resolve the conflict with them.