The policy of rapprochement turned the center of Rioja into the largest refuge for ETA members

The policy of approaching prisoners of the terrorist group ETA had its lights and shadows in La Rioja. On the one hand, it turned this penitentiary center into the largest refuge for this type of prisoners in the entire country. More than twenty ETA members came to live within its walls. Among them, Arkaitz Goikoetxea, sentenced to 133 years in prison for the attack on the Calahorra Civil Guard barracks; and Ainhoa ​​Múgica, who was serving 18 years in prison for the attack on the Torre de Logroño that caused no personal injury. but there was enormous damage in the center of the capital valued at nearly two million euros. José Javier Arizcuren Ruiz ‘Kantauri’ was about to be transferred, but Penitentiary Institutions backed down and sent him to Pamplona.

A decision that was taken after the unrest generated among the workers of the Riojan centre by the transfer of the ETA member convicted of the kidnapping of José Antonio Ortega Lara, an official at the same prison to which his kidnapper was sent. But at the same time that the ETA inmates arrived, before they were taken to Basque prisons in 2022, the total number of inmates decreased, which resulted in a drop in conflict. “There were fewer inmates and the profile of those who were there was lower,” they say at Acaip.

«Here – they remember – a prison was made to order for the ETA prisoners, so that they were comfortable, so that they were not in modules where there was conflict or anything at all. Once the transfer to the prisons of the neighboring Basque Country was completed, Things changed and the prison population rose until it currently reached the highest number in the last decade. In fact, there are double cells, even though the regulations state that there should be only one inmate per cell. The four residential modules, they explain, have 186 cells, to which must be added the 25 places in nursing and the 12 in the FIES module, intended for security forces and corps and other inmates with special monitoring. The result is that many of these cells are occupied by two prisoners.