The death of Noelia Castillo Ramos, a 25-year-old girl who suffered gang rape while under state guardianship and who died on March 26 after a euthanasia procedure authorized by Justice, rekindled a profound debate in Spanish public opinion. Many citizens and political leaders question the government of Pedro Sánchez because of what they consider to be a moral contradiction of the State: whereas in the past all resources were deployed to prevent an ETA terrorist from dying during a hunger strike, today, as they report, the system allowed a victim of one of the worst atrocities
to end up dying.In Spain, a comparison was established that directly hits the current government and the institutional system. For years, the Spanish State did everything possible to prevent the terrorist Ignacio de Juana Chaos, convicted of multiple crimes and linked to the terrorist organization ETA, from dying after starting a hunger strike as a form of political pressure against institutions. However, the recent case of Noelia Castillo once again opened the wound in the public debate: many wonder why the system acted with such determination to preserve the life of a terrorist while, according to critical sectors, it failed to protect a victim who had suffered extreme violence
.
The story of Ignacio de Juana Chaos was one of the most controversial episodes in the fight against terrorism in Spain. On February 5, 2007, the British media outlet The Times published extensive coverage of the hunger strike of the prisoner Etarra, who was hospitalized while protesting a sentence handed down by judges of the National High Court after having committed a crime of threats. The image that accompanied the report occupied the entire width of a page of the newspaper and showed the terrorist in a hospital bed, apparently weakened, with the headline: “Chained and emaciated, the ETA murderer cries out for peace from his deathbed
”.However, what appeared to be a scene of suffering concealed a key fact: the State had ordered that the prisoner be immobilized and fed through a tube to prevent him from dying. The restraints that appeared in the photograph were not “chains”, but devices used by health personnel to prevent the terrorist from removing the probe that allowed him to remain alive and the sensors that controlled his vital signs. In other words, the Spanish judicial and health system acted to prevent his death even against his own will, considering that the State could not allow the political blackmail of a hunger strike to end with a death that put pressure
on democratic institutions.The controversy was amplified because the coverage of The Times, signed by journalist Thomas Catan, was harshly criticized for presenting the terrorist with language that many considered misleading. Instead of describing ETA as a terrorist organization, the report used the expression “Basque separatist group”, a semantic choice that raised strong questions in Spain. For many analysts, this type of language could contribute to distorting the reality of terrorism and favoring the propaganda of those who sought to delegitimize the
democratic State.
At the time, the prisoner Etarra was trying to project an image of a victim while putting political pressure on Spanish institutions. His communication strategy, according to various academic analyses, sought to transform an action of extortion —the hunger strike—into an emotional story capable of generating international empathy. And the truth is that the State responded by preventing him from dying, even when the terrorist himself intended to use his body as an instrument of political pressure
