AP News, March 7th, 2007
The prime minister on Wednesday denied suggestions his government had bowed to terrorists by allowing a hunger-striking Basque separatist to serve out his jail term under house arrest.
In a stormy session before the Senate, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said opposition conservatives had also shown leniency toward such inmates while in power.
Zapatero accused the Popular Party of hypocrisy and said that while the conservatives were in power between 1996-2004, they ordered early releases for 306 jailed members of the armed group ETA, including one who went on to kill a Socialist party member two years later.
The Popular Party has reacted furiously to the government's decision last week to move Jose Ignacio De Juana Chaos from a hospital in Madrid to one in the Basque region as a first step toward moving him home under police custody.
De Juana Chaos, convicted of killing 25 people in a series of ETA attacks, went on a hunger strike in November after being convicted on new charges of making terrorist threats in newspaper articles he wrote from prison. The 51-year-old prisoner has been force fed via a tube inserted into his nose for several months.
The new charges came just as he was about to be released after serving 18 years of a sentence of 3,129 years for the slayings. Under Spanish law, the maximum he could have served in prison was 30 years, and his sentence had been reduced for good behavior.
The government said it acted to keep him from dying, and insisted the transfer was legal because the inmate had served more than half the time in the new conviction and was eligible for leniency arrangements.
De Juana Chaos ended the hunger strike as soon as he reached the Basque hospital.
The conservatives said Zapatero was trying to salvage a peace process with ETA that was derailed by an ETA bombing on Dec. 30 that killed two people and ended the group's nine-month cease-fire.
ETA has killed more than 800 people since 1968 in its drive for Basque independence.
"You have offended a society which was proud of never having ceded to terrorists' blackmail," Popular Party Senate leader Pio Garcia Escudero told Zapatero.
Amid constant jeering and heckling, Zapatero charged that it was "the first time that a democratic, responsible opposition party has dared to accuse a government of ceding to blackmail from ETA." He accused the conservatives of betraying a parliamentary tradition of supporting the government in anti-terrorism policies.
Zapatero said the decision "was backed by the judge in charge of prison affairs."
He pointed out that it was the Popular Party that had actually reduced De Juana Chaos' murder sentence by nearly two years for writing a book in jail that was considered evidence of good behavior but which, in fact, defended terrorism.
Every parliamentary party has backed the government's decision except for the Popular Party, which has called for nationwide protests this weekend.
