Pamplona (EFE).- The Pamplona City Council has honored this Friday the memory of UPN councilor Tomás Caballero, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of his assassination by the terrorist group ETA, on May 6, 1998 in the Navarrese capital.
First of all, in the municipal cemetery of San José, an act of remembrance to the regionalist councilor took place with the traditional response and floral offering.
This act was attended by the family of the councilor and representatives of the most important institutions of the Foral Community: the mayor’s office of Pamplona, represented by the mayor, Enrique Maya; the President of the Government of Navarra, María Chivite; and the president of the Provincial Parliament, Unai Hualde.
Other members of the Corporation were present at the ceremony and the response was officiated by the parish priest of San Lorenzo, Javier Leoz.
An exhibition in memory of Caballero
At noon, in the Palacio del Constable, the mayor of Pamplona, Enrique Maya, and Tomás Caballero, son of the assassinated councilor and president of the Tomás Caballero Foundation, opened the exhibition “Tomás Caballero. Life and murder”, promoted by the Foundation.
The exhibition, which will be open to the public until June 11, covers the councilor’s biography and includes more than 1,200 letters, telegrams and cards that the family received in its day and had not been made public until now.
The exhibition contains more than 300 photographs, documents and newspaper pages from the General Archive and the Contemporary Archive of Navarra, the Municipal Archive of Tudela, the Diario de Navarra archive, the audiovisual collections of RTVE and the newspaper libraries of various newspapers, as well as from the personal archive of the Caballero family.
A very committed person
In this act, Tomás Caballero stated that his father was a person “very committed to society and to Pamplona, aware of the risks he was assuming in the face of ETA’s persecution, despite what he did not back down or change his speech in defense of freedoms and democracy”.
“His death left us broken, it changed our lives completely, but it is no less true that it made us stronger in the defense and practice of what his convictions were,” he stressed.
For his part, Mayor Enrique Maya explained that this exhibition is intended to “pay homage to Tomás so as not to forget, there are people who want to forget, but those hard years, those years of lead cannot be forgotten.”
A bust in memory of the murdered councilor
Finally, in the hall of the Town Hall, the mayor, accompanied by the first vice president, Minister of the Presidency, Equality, Public Function and Interior of the Government of Navarra, Javier Remírez, and a representative of the Corporation, has discovered a bust in homage to the councilor, made by the sculptor Martín Lagares.
The bust is an expressivist work, made from a good number of photographs and videos of the councilor who deliberately has an unfinished, sketchy appearance, which represents the truncation of Tomás Caballero Pastor’s life and professional career.
It is a realistic and at the same time contemporary work that will remain permanently in the hall of the Town Hall, placed at a height. The legend that accompanies it in Spanish and Basque is “The City Council and the City of Pamplona in memory and homage to Tomás Caballero Pastor, councilor of this city council assassinated by ETA on May 6, 1998 for remaining faithful to the defense of democratic values of Freedom, Justice and Peace”.
It also reproduces a fragment of a phrase from the murdered councilor: “I have always said: let’s argue and confront each other, but without hatred…”.