Here is a summary of my work on the Lizarra-Garazi peace process. This process took place between 1998 and 2000 and to understand this chronological stage I have done two different tasks; the first has been to prepare a state of the peace process with the aim of knowing and contrasting the different historical and political interpretations that have been made, and the second has been a search by means of a written press to collect the most important facts and reactions that provoked the various media.
To elaborate the state of the subject, I have started with the thoughts of the journalist Antoni Batista because I think they are the most equidistant or critical, and from these I have been commenting on the look of other characters or authors who, because of their status as politicians, have a more partial vision: Juan María Ollora, Iñaki Anasagasti, Xabier Arzalluz, Gemma Zabaleta and Denis Itxaso, Ramón Jáuregui, and Arnaldo Otegi. On the other hand I also have taken into account the information of Sagrario Morán, especially in the search of specific data.
To understand Lizarra-Garazi I had to make reference to documents and previous political pacts such as the Ajuria-Enea Pact and the Ardanza Plan; In fact, all the politicians or scholars of the Basque topic that I have consulted refer to the previous stages, therefore, both the Ajuria-Enea pact and the Ardanza Plan have become important elements of my reflection and I have included them as a obligatory point and, for this reason, I pick them up in the annex.
On the other hand, the end of the stage that I study I have placed it in the first months of 2000 when ETA returns to kill, and I have not picked up the subsequent stage that goes from the government in the PNV minority until the regional elections of 13 May 2001.
For the second part of the work, I have placed the search between the months of June 1998 and March 2000, and I have focused on those print media that gather the different points of view of the parties in conflict. This second part consists of two sections; a first section where I collect generic information about the written press of this stage in relation to the Basque conflict and that I have extracted from the book Al filo de la (in)comunicación. Prensa y conflicto vasco written by professors Petxo Idoiaga and Txema Ramírez de la Piscina (from the Universidad del País Vasco), and a second section where I make the commentary compared between several newspapers.
Both the Lizarra-Garazi Declaration and the ETA ceasefire communiqué date from September 1998, but the political background of the process had to be collected and that’s why I started the search in June; I have placed the end of the process in March 2000 so that ETA causes two fatalities in the months of January and February, and this return to arms implies the end of the government agreement that the PNV had made with HB- HEY.
The newspapers consulted are La Vanguardia, El País, ABC, El Mundo, Deia y Egin-Euskadi Información-Gara. In order to organize the search, I made a selection of the most important facts, taking La Vanguardia as a reference newspaper, and once the facts were selected, I consulted the editorials of the other newspapers and compared them. This first selection of the most important facts is included in the annex
Personally I would like to continue studying the Basque conflict, and I think that the work I have done with this research work should be extended to other periods in which it has been negotiated with ETA. In addition to consulting various bibliographic sources, I think it would be interesting to be able to access this information by conducting interviews.
