FRANCISCO IGARTUA ROVIRA: LA TERCERA

«También la providencia fue bondadosa conmigo, al haberme permitido -poniendo a parte estos años que acabo de relatar- escribir siempre en periódicos de mi propiedad, sin atadura alguna, tomando los riesgos y las decisiones dictadas por mi conciencia en el tono en que se me iba la pluma, no siempre dentro de la mesura que tanto gusta a la gente limeña. Fundé Caretas y Oiga, aunque ésta tuvo un primer nacimiento en noviembre de 1948, ocasión en la que también conté con la ayuda decisiva de Doris Gibson, mi socia, mi colaboradora, mi compañera, mi sostén en Caretas, que apareció el año 50. Pero éste es asunto que he tocado ampliamente en un ensayo sobre la prensa revisteril que publiqué años atrás y que, quién sabe, reaparezca en esta edición con algunas enmiendas y añadiduras». FRANCISCO IGARTUA - «ANDANZAS DE UN PERIODISTA MÁS DE 50 AÑOS DE LUCHA EN EL PERÚ - OIGA 9 DE NOVIEMBRE DE 1992»

«Cierra Oiga para no prostituir sus banderas, o sea sus ideales que fueron y son de los peruanos amantes de las libertades cívicas, de la democracia y de la tolerancia, aunque seamos intolerantes contra la corrupción, con el juego sucio de los gobernantes y de sus autoridades. El pecado de la revista, su pecado mayor, fue quien sabe ser intransigente con su verdad» FRANCISCO IGARTUA – «ADIÓS CON LA SATISFACCIÓN DE NO HABER CLAUDICADO», EDITORIAL «ADIÓS AMIGOS Y ENEMIGOS», OIGA 5 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 1995

«Siendo la paz el más difícil y, a la vez, el supremo anhelo de los pueblos, las delegaciones presentes en este Segundo Congreso de las Colectividades Vascas, con la serena perspectiva que da la distancia, respaldan a la sociedad vasca, al Gobierno de Euskadi y a las demás instituciones vascas en su empeño por llevar adelante el proceso de paz ya iniciado y en el que todos estamos comprometidos.» FRANCISCO IGARTUA - TEXTO SOMETIDO A LA APROBACION DE LA ASAMBLEA Y QUE FUE APROBADO POR UNANIMIDAD - VITORIA-GASTEIZ, 27 DE OCTUBRE DE 1999.

«Muchos más ejemplos del particularismo vasco, de la identidad euskaldun, se pueden extraer de la lectura de estos ajados documentos americanos, pero el espacio, tirano del periodismo, me obliga a concluir y lo hago con un reclamo cara al futuro. Identidad significa afirmación de lo propio y no agresión a la otredad, afirmación actualizada-repito actualizada- de tradiciones que enriquecen la salud de los pueblos y naciones y las pluralidades del ser humano. No se hace patria odiando a los otros, cerrándonos, sino integrando al sentir, a la vivencia de la comunidad euskaldun, la pluralidad del ser vasco. Por ejemplo, asumiendo como propio -porque lo es- el pensamiento de las grandes personalidades vascas, incluido el de los que han sido reacios al Bizcaitarrismo como es el caso de Unamuno, Baroja, Maeztu, figuras universales y profundamente vascas, tanto que don Miguel se preciaba de serlo afirmando «y yo lo soy puro, por los dieciséis costados». Lo decía con el mismo espíritu con el que los vascos en 1612, comenzaban a reunirse en Euskaletxeak aquí en América» - FRANCISCO IGARTUA - AMERICA Y LAS EUSKALETXEAK - EUSKONEWS & MEDIA 72.ZBK 24-31 DE MARZO 2000

sábado, 20 de julio de 2013

LA TERCERA

Visionaries

The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ

William A. Christian Jr.

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PROLOGUE

On 29 June 1931 two young children in the Basque Country of northern Spain said they saw the Virgin Mary. That initial vision led to many others. Indeed, for many months visions took place on a nightly basis. In 1931 alone, about one million persons went to the apparitions on a hillside at Ezkioga and people began having visions in a score of other towns. The hundreds of seers at Ezkioga attracted the most observers for any visions in the Catholic world until the teenagers of Medjugorje in the 1980s.

This book is about two kinds of visionaries and their interrelations: the seers (videntes in Spanish, ikusleak in Basque) who had visions of Mary and the saints and the believers and promoters who had a vision for the future which they hoped Mary and the saints would confirm. Almost all are now dead, but they left behind words on paper, images in photographs, and memories in people who believed them. The protagonists included nuns, friars and priests, writers and photographers, military officers and civil servants, housemaids and aristocrats, farmers and textile manufacturers, and

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many, many children. Starting in 1931, they made a long, concerted attempt to convince a skeptical world that heavenly beings were appearing on the Iberian peninsula.

I have immersed myself in their lives, retraced their steps, hunted down their papers, attempted to reconstitute their world. When I began to write, the pleasure of telling their story mingled with regret that my time with them would soon be over. I am not one of them, as I never failed to tell their present-day survivors and successors. But while their efforts to arouse the world failed, the efforts of others like them in the past did not fail and most certainly have affected our world. How visions occur and who believes in them is everybody's business.

At this moment I am watching from my window exotic birds called hoopoes, sandy with black and white stripes, their crests flaring as they clash and play in the red-brown field of young, blue-green cabbages. They swerve, chatter in the air around each other, then separate to bob and feed in the shallow furrows. I have told stories of lives that begin before the visions, loop into them, intersect, and then loop out, each to a separate destination. In the first half of the book I tell the tales separately, building the picture of events layer on layer from the perspective of the different protagonists. For the people would not let me go. Through my immersion in this unusual world, their story has also become mine. This is not earthshaking history. It is small, intense, poignant, sometimes fierce, often funny. Its lasting lessons, I think, are about human nature itself. Like a novel, this book has a cast of characters, here listed as a separate index of persons at the end of the book. Unlike a novel, the story is a true one—at least as true as I can make it. For me, as I entered the story, Benita Aguirre, Padre Burguera, María Recalde, Mateo Múgica, and their contemporaries became quite familiar, a little larger than life. I hope readers too will get to know and enjoy them.

Readers seeking a narrative of the events can turn to four chapters: "Mary, the Republic, and the Basques," "Suppression by Church and State," "The Proliferation of Visions," and "Aftermath." Three other chapters about promoters and seers cover the events at Ezkioga through the lives of the principals.

The second part of the book uses the visions to detail the often secret ways that seers and clergy connected, the landscape seers imagined and constructed, and the trancelike states seers entered. The visions linked women with priests, the rural poor with the industrial wealthy, and the living with the dead. The events at Ezkioga show how much people welcome the chance to go beyond the world around them, see what the gods see, and know what only the gods can know.

José Donoso suggested that I stick with a few key characters and tell the events through them. But by then I knew too much about too many people. I had to tell

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what I knew to resolve my story as well as theirs. I regretted starting to write, but I have no regrets at coming to the end. The hoopoes have gone. Men are outside sending shafts of water curling down the furrows of cabbages, shouting instructions, opening and closing passages of dirt.

TAFIRA BAJA, GRAN CANARIA

1 SEPTEMBER 1994