The Basque Government is studying how to "incorporate the memory" of ETA's campaign against the Lemoiz/Lemóniz nuclear power plant (Vizcaya) into the future aquaculture plant that will be established on the grounds where the facility, which never operated, was built.
The Minister of Food, Rural Development, Agriculture and Fisheries, Amaia Barredo, detailed in the Basque Parliament's control session, in response to an interpellation from Vox, that the regional Executive is collaborating with the Institute for Memory, Coexistence and Human Rights-Gogora to define how to integrate the memory of what happened around Lemoiz into the new aquaculture facilities.
Between 1977 and 1982, ETA carried out an intense campaign of sabotage, kidnappings, and murders against the Lemoiz plant (Vizcaya), which resulted in three workers killed by explosions and two chief engineers murdered. The combination of terrorist violence and social opposition to the plant was key to the definitive paralysis of the nuclear project.
The Vox parliamentarian, Amaia Martínez, stated that Lemoiz "represents the worst of ETA terrorism" and insisted that any initiative developed at this site must preserve the memory of what happened.
Barredo reiterated that the Basque Government is analyzing how the memory linked to this nuclear project will be incorporated into the aquaculture plant that will be established on these grounds, in close coordination with Gogora and "listening to institutions, the community, victims, and those responsible for public memory policies."
A place with a strong symbolic charge
The minister emphasized the "symbolic value" of Lemoiz, stating that "Lemoiz has symbolic value, a very important value in the history of Euskadi; and its recovery cannot be approached solely as the recovery of an infrastructure or a disused space, but must take into account what this place represents in our collective memory."
In this regard, she stressed that "it is not just about deciding a specific use," but about "thinking carefully about how memory should be incorporated into a space that has such a profound historical and symbolic charge."