The civic demands made on the victims are inversely proportional to the political demands made on the perpetrators and their entourage.

A terrorist organization may disappear, but a victim of terrorism never ceases to be one. More than a decade after the end of ETA's violence, its acronym only functions as a historical artifact, but the aftermath of the evil it caused and the pending tasks it has left in its wake continue to be conjugated in the present. Hence, despite some painstaking attempts, the victims continue to have space in the public discussion . It is here where they seek a new place in the time of post-terrorism. There is one thing, however, that has not changed: they continue to be uncomfortable. If during the existence of ETA the victims were cumbersome, now there are those who perceive them as an obstacle to achieve an idealized coexistence that comes before, if not replaces, the delegitimization of violence. To achieve this coexistence, they are required to be "generous" and contribute to social peace, overlooking the fact that this achievement is already to their credit: they did not respond to violence with violence, they respected the rule of law, they tolerated the fact that crimes were not solved, they left their homes through the back door or shared neighborhood or city with their executioners and their relatives.

In spite of everything, as Martín Alonso summarizes, they must "resign themselves to play the role assigned in the script that they have to live and do politics as if ETA had not existed". Not as if it no longer existed, but as if it had never existed. Forgiveness, an individual and private matter, has become an object of public discussion , although only a handful of ETA prisoners have formulated it. Public tributes to terrorists released from prison have been held for years under the alibi of freedom of expression and the understandable manifestation of joy, leaving in the background the fact that these are uncivil acts that perpetuate the heroic aura of the terrorists. The presence of the perpetrators in the public space in the form of graffiti, banners or posters, which are multiplying now that the holidays are approaching, has continued to be admitted as a lesser evil in the urban landscape. The prolonged context of violence has created a threshold of normality in Basque and Navarre society that tolerated the intolerable and which, more than a decade after the end of terrorism, fortunately shows cracks, although in some areas it has not yet risen sufficiently to reach a minimum of civility.

With ETA off the board, the civic demands addressed to the victims are inversely proportional to the political demands required of the executioners and their entourage. Their distancing from a violence that is rejected by most of society, including the historical electorate of the nationalist left, coexists with the fact that the historical narrative on which the terrorist organization was built continues to accumulate significant social and electoral support. Constructions such as the anti-Franco myth surrounding ETA or the cult of the gudari continue to be deeply rooted. The theory of the conflict or the theory of the standoff overflow the limits of the nationalist left and cross the nationalist world harangued by a tailor-made report . The lowering of demands to the perpetrators is also appreciated in the judicial field: their repentance is not "at all" a legal requirement to grant a penitentiary permit. Although the index of acceptability in society has decreased in matters such as tributes to prisoners, which are now carried out privately -although they continue to be held-, the same has not happened with other rites of identity underpinning that still enjoy conformity or, at least, widespread condescension: mass demonstrations demanding amnesty, festivals and popular races that keep a place of honor for those convicted of terrorism or banners and graffiti bearing the faces of imprisoned terrorists. The victims that have public relevance -which are few, it is convenient not to forget it- are sometimes encouraged and others, they allow themselves to be encouraged, by partisan interests. In the conchabanza with the parties, they tend to lose themselves and their image: in the eyes of the rest of society, their symbolic strength appears contaminated by the electoral mud and their prestige suffers. Fortunately, there are still lighthouses. The problem lies in the fact that they are precisely that: lights, however scattered, exceptional. The book El tiempo del testimonio. Las víctimas y el relato de ETA (Comares, 2023) addresses a question asked by Marta Buesa, daughter of the murdered socialist politician Fernando Buesa: "And now, what shall we do with all this? One of the proposals of this work has to do with the victims, their voices in first person and their pedagogical power. The pedagogy of the victims applied to those who have not lived through terrorism has an incomparable force. Their testimonies act as a link with history: they make the past cease to be an abstraction and turn it into something staff, even tangible. More importantly, they allow young people to take it on as their own. They cannot remember what they have not lived through, but they can assume as part of their history a suffering that, if we look at it head on and give it pedagogical meaning, will not have been in vain.