Spain’s bloody history of terrorism continues to generate divisions and tensions, despite the dismantling of ETA in 2011. On Wednesday, Consuelo Ordóñez, president of the Collective of Victims of Terrorism (Covite), publicly rebuked Isabel Díaz Ayuso for speaking as if the armed gang that killed more than 800 people was still active.
Ordóñez is the sister of the leader of the PP of Gipuzkoa and deputy mayor of the municipality of San Sebastián, Gregorio Ordóñez, murdered by the gang in 1995. Hers is one of the deaths that caused the most shock in a Spain that experienced very bloody years. Consuelo believes that the president of the Community of Madrid trivializes the issue by speaking about the terrorist group in the present tense, as he did two days ago.
Ayuso referred to the meeting that Pedro Sánchez and the former secretary of the PSOE Organization, Santos Cerdán, would have with Arnaldo Otegi, leader of the EH-Bildu, to negotiate the motion of censure against the then president Mariano Rajoy, in 2018. (The former Minister of Transport and one-time right-hand man of Sánchez, José Luis Ábalos, assured today that this meeting is existed; Sánchez and Otegi deny it).
The only one who intends to divide us into sides and compare us #Memories it’s you @IdiazAyuso. The victims of Historical Memory are victims of very serious violations of human rights, just like the victims of ETA. We all have the same right to repair.
ETA cannot provide anything… pic.twitter.com/h40FwptLVt
— Consuelo Ordóñez (@ConsuorF) November 25, 2025
“It is clear that ETA handed over the legislature to Pedro Sánchez. Hence Bildu’s obsession with Historical Memory, to divide us Spaniards into sides, to go against our democracy. Everything was in that pact, and I believe that there is nothing more miserable than owing the government of the nation to Bildu,” the president said during an event where she presented her government’s winter emergency plan.
Ayuso has once again done what Ordóñez reproaches him for, that is, according to the president of the victims’ association, to contrast the victims of ETA with those of the Franco regime. For this reason she declared on more than one occasion that she felt betrayed by her brother’s party. This time too the reaction was very strong on social networks. “The only one who intends to divide us and confront us is you, Díaz Ayuso. The victims of Historical Memory are victims of very serious violations of human rights just like the victims of ETA. We all have the same right to reparation. ETA cannot give anything because fortunately it does not exist, the difference that does not exist in my case is called #GregorioOrdoñez. Do you understand better?”
It’s not the first time the two have clashed in public. They did it in 2023, when Ordóñez made the same request, that is, not to talk about ETA as if it still existed. Ayuso then despised her: “You… I don’t know if you’ve had personal problems with the PP for years.” This caused a great stir, touching the environment of a symbol of the party, a myth of the right in Spain. That of Gregorio Ordóñez was one of his murders that mobilized Spanish society and created a union that later proved essential, together with that of the state security apparatus and negotiation, to put an end to domestic terrorism.
Ordóñez continues to be a very important activist. Also in 2023, he denounced the inclusion in the lists of EH Bildu candidates in the Basque Country and Navarra of 40 ETA convicts, seven of them for murder. The warning had no judicial repercussions, but served to let citizens know who they would vote for at the polls. And last year he even convinced Ayuso to rectify and reform the law that provides for compensation for victims of terrorism, as requested by Ordóñez.
