El eco de los disparos

When the witness of the abuse and violence looks the other way, when he prefers not to see or know, when he argues that "something will have been done", when once the violence has passed, he demands oblivion, and when this witness represents a majority, we find ourselves before a sick society. We have seen it in our country with the wounds of the civil war, also in other European conflicts, such as the Balkan war, or the Ireland of the IRA. And history repeats itself. When the first edition of El echo de los disparos was published, five years had passed since ETA announced the definitive cessation of the armed struggle. From then until now, seven years later, a part of Spanish and Basque society seems to be willing to turn the page, as if the last decades of violence had been just a nightmare, as if the violence that affected so many people within and Outside the Basque territories it could be circumscribed to a closed past. But history, the responsibility towards the past, does not disappear by prescription, especially when we broaden our gaze and consider not only the victims and perpetrators as part of the conflict, but also the society that witnessed it -sometimes an accomplice witness, sometimes sometimes a frightened witness, sometimes an indifferent witness. Edurne Portela offers in this book a series of intimate memories of violence and defends, through reflections on current literature and cinema, a culture for the present that helps to face the wounds of the past.