Arnaldo Otegi recounts the torture he suffered at the Intxaurrondo barracks

BarcelonaThe Intxaurrondo barracks, headquarters of the Guipúzcoa Civil Guard Command, was known by the nickname the discotheque. And not because before the armed body was installed it was a leisure centre, but because the neighbours explained that they played music at full blast to avoid hearing the screams of the people being tortured.

Epicentre of the anti-terrorist fight, some of the practices carried out in the barracks were denounced as torture by people detained for their links to ETA. The 71-year prison sentence for its top official, Enrique Rodríguez Galindo, for the Lasa and Zabala case, confirms this. The fact that a hundred civil guards assigned to Intxaurrondo were murdered by ETA over the years also shows that it was one of the main objectives of the organisation.

Taking advantage of the fact that February 13 is the Day Against Torture in the Basque Country, following the death on that same day in 1981 of Joxe Arregi due to the torture inflicted on him by the Spanish police at the General Directorate of Security in Madrid, the general secretary of EH Bildu, Arnaldo. has done so through a thread on the social network X in which he explains the ordeal that occurred since he was arrested.

Otegi explains that on the first day they put him in a straitjacket and submerged his head again and again in the bathtub until he lost consciousness. A practice that the Civil Guard maintained on the second day, adding electric shocks. On the third day they began to beat him while uttering death threats towards him and his family while he was being interrogated. The next day, the torture continued, although by law he could only be detained for three days. "On this fourth day, they left a gun on the table and encouraged me to take it and escape," he explains to X.

Otegi, who is convinced that he was arrested in Intxaurrondo, but cannot confirm it 100% because he was blindfolded the whole time he was there without being able to see anything, explains that on the fifth day he made a statement to a person who was supposedly his lawyer. "I don't know if he's a lawyer or a Civil Guard. They tell me to sign everything or that we'll start again later. I deny everything and I don't sign," he explains. Once he was in prison the next day, Otegi denounced the torture he had suffered. A complaint that reached the United Nations, but that would not prosper.

The complaint against torture in Otamendi

Many years later, other tortures that indirectly affected him did prosper. In 2011, Strasbourg forced the State to pay 20,000 euros in compensation to the leader of the Basque left for insulting the Crown. The events date back to February 2003. The king inaugurated an electric power station in Vizcaya with the then lehendakari, Juan José Ibarretxe. In a press conference, Otegi asked Ibarretxe how he could be photographed with the "supreme commander of the Spanish army and responsible for the torturers" following the torture suffered by the journalist Martxelo Otamendi, director ofEgunkaria.

The Public Prosecutor's Office filed a complaint against the Basque leader, and the Spanish Supreme Court sentenced Otegi to one year in prison for serious insults to the king. "A prison sentence imposed for an offence committed in the field of political discourse is not compatible with the freedom of expression guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights," the European Court of Human Rights said in its ruling. A court that would also force the State to compensate Otamendi with 24,000 euros for not having investigated his complaints.