Neither the place chosen nor the motto are those that were planned a little over 24 hours ago, but the act “Let’s have memory: against the apology of ETA”, organized by the student associations S’ha Acabat! and Libertad Sin Ira, will be held this Friday afternoon, as scheduled, in the theater of the Galileo Cultural Center in Madrid. It will do so with the participation, among others, of the philosopher and writer Fernando Savater and the PP deputy in the Madrid Assembly Marimar Blanco, sister of the assassinated councilor Miguel Ángel Blanco.
And it will do so after the open controversy between these two entities and the Complutense University (UCM), in whose Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology was supposed to be held. S’ha Acabat! and Libertad Sin Ira yesterday accused the educational center of canceling their act, something that the university institution flatly denies.
What the two groups describe as “pressure and censorship” due to “the presence of politicians with an ideology different from that advocated by the Dean’s Office”, such as Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo (PP) or Iván Espinosa de los Monteros (Vox), the UCM It is part of the consequence of a breakdown in the water supply of the Somosaguas campus, which has forced the suspension of all activities on the campus until next Monday.
The vice dean of Economic Affairs and the Environment of the faculty, Fabio Lupato, explains to EL MUNDO that, after the decision to close all the faculties of the campus as they were unable to use running water or heating, the conveners were offered to “look for an alternative space or postpone the act until next week”. “There was no response,” he says. The students, for their part, say that yesterday afternoon they were offered the Marqués de Valdecilla Historical Library, whose capacity they considered insufficient for “the more than 200 people who had confirmed their attendance.”
But, in parallel to the failure that forced the event to be postponed or relocated since yesterday, another factor contributed from this same Wednesday to diminishing the possibilities of holding it at the Complutense: the loss of endorsement, that is, the approval of a teacher who is responsible for developing this type of event.
Rubén Díez, secretary of the Department of Applied Sociology, was the guarantor and explains that this whole story did not start off with a good start: “They assigned me to be a guarantor without having formally consulted me, but I did not give it much importance.” Speaking to this newspaper, he denies that the Dean’s Office has anything to do with his decision to withdraw support for the student initiative. “I agreed on the condition that it was an institutional act of recognition for the victims, without political demands, in which the entire university community felt comfortable and represented.”
To clear up suspicions, he clarifies that he connects “much more with civic constitutionalism than with other types of ideas”, such as those of the founding nucleus of Podemos that arose from his faculty. For this reason, he insists that the Vice Dean had approved the format of the act, but that, “out of responsibility”, he decided to get out due to all the differences he had with S’ha Acabat! and Freedom Without Anger during preparation.
These two organizations consider that they made “numerous transfers” with respect to their initial idea, such as the change of name of the act, which after agreeing with the guarantor was going to be: “Memory, dignity and justice: act in commemoration of the victims of ETA” . Nor did the professor give his approval to a promotional poster in which the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the general coordinator of EH Bildu, Arnaldo Otegi, appeared “with red eyes like zombies.” “I can understand his very combative attitude, but excessive daring and taking convictions to an extreme can lead to mistakes,” says Díez as a diagnosis of what happened.
Yesterday, in the framework of the security meeting prior to the act, Díez announced his resignation to continue endorsing it. He explains that the straw that broke the camel’s back was when one of the UCM security officials said that the organizers had contacted the Security Forces on his behalf. “I decided not to lend myself to being responsible for a new episode like that of Information Sciences,” he says in reference to all the incidents surrounding the designation of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, as an “illustrious student” of the Complutense at the end of January.
Last Thursday, S’ha Acabat organized an event similar to tomorrow’s at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, ??with the slogan “Let’s keep memory: against the apology of Terra Lliure”, which included the participation of the journalist Arcadi Espada, the former leader of the Catalan PP Alberto Fernández Díaz and the lawyer José María Fuster-Fabra. Just a year earlier, at the same university, the Spanish youth association was the object of a boycott by the Sindicat d’Estudiants dels Països Catalans, of independence ideology, during a fair of entities on the university campus.
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