TOWN and city halls across the country have been staging tributes to PP councillor Miguel Ángel Blanco to mark the 20th anniversary of his assassination by Basque terrorists ETA.
Some local councils have declined to do so as they consider it an insult to all other terror victims who have not been given the same homage.
One of these was Madrid, although mayoress Manuela Carmena has relented and agreed to hang banners in memory of 'all victims of terrorism', including Blanco.
Miguel Ángel Blanco Garrido's 20-year anniversary is in fact tomorrow (Thursday, July 13), but Monday this week was the day he was kidnapped by ETA as leverage, in an attempt to force the central government to move all prisoners of the separatist cell to jails in the Basque Country so they could be nearer their families.
The kidnap was televised live, and millions of Spaniards watched with fast-beating hearts, praying for his release.
But suddenly, the screen went black, and minutes later the news came on TV and it was announced Blanco had been shot and was fighting for his life.
Early the next morning, Spain awoke to hear that the scapegoat councillor had passed away in hospital.
Blanco became councillor in his birth town of Ermua, in the province of Vizcaya, two weeks after his 27th birthday in 1995.
Less than a fortnight before he was kidnapped, prison warden José Antonio Ortega Lara was freed by the Guardia Civil after 532 days held hostage by ETA, and the four terrorists who kept him held against his will were arrested.
This sparked reprisals that led to Blanco's being abducted on July 10, 1997 at 15.30 as he got off the train to head for the office he worked at as a financial advisor, Eman Consulting, for the afternoon shift.
He was bundled into a blacked-out car and, three hours later, ETA formally demanded the government – then led by PP president José María Aznar – move the organisation's prisoners back to the Basque Country.
The terrorists said if the government did not ensure the inmates were physically moved by 16.00 on Saturday, July 12, Blanco would be 'executed'.
Blanco was held in a location which remains unknown to this day, but was seen on TV screens nationwide because of ETA's broadcasting its ultimatum with the young councillor tied up in the background.
Just 50 minutes after the government's deadline, Blanco had been transported in the boot of a car to a piece of wasteland near the town of Lasarte-Oria in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa and shot twice in the head, having been forced onto his knees with his hands tied behind his back.
He survived, and was found by two men out walking, who called emergency services.
Blanco was rushed to hospital, but died 12 hours after being shot, at 05.00 on July 13, 1997, aged exactly 29 years and two months.
Monuments have been set up for him in Madrid, and in Junquera de Espadañedo in the province of Ourense, Galicia, where his father – also called Miguel Blanco – was born.
Two of the three terrorists behind Blanco's abduction and murder – Francisco Javier García Gaztelu, alias 'Txapote' and Irantzu Gallastegui Sodupe, known as 'Nora' - were sentenced to 50 years each in jail at the end of June 2006, but the third, José Luis Geresta Mujika, who went by the nicknames of 'Oker' and 'Ttotto', had committed suicide in 1999.
Blanco's body was moved to a cemetery in the province of Ourense 10 years after his death because of ETA sympathisers vandalising his grave in Ermua.
