When I spoke to him, I asked “Did the Socialist Party ever admit it to you” he said “Well, no they never admitted it to me” but he said “Frankly, from their body language I had no doubt that they were involved”, which is a very strong thing to say about his friends. Throughout the period, one of the things I think Basque nationalists do not accept – which I think they are demonstrably wrong about – is that writers such as Javier Praderas from El Pais always said, this is wrong, this has got to stop. People seemed to be thinking that “maybe this is something that needs to be done” but when they saw that it was being done badly and that innocent people were being killed and clumsily, and these killers were making a lot of money, public opinion began to turn against it in a major way. The anecdotal evidence was different, namely that many Spaniards were certainly ready to turn a blind eye, until they began to realize that there was a lot of corruption involved as well. Obviously an opinion poll like that is not reliable anyway, because very few people are going to say they support it. About sixty to sixty-five percent opposed, then there was a big segment of “I don’t know”, and maybe only ten to fifteen percent in favor. The very few opinion polls that existed on the subject suggested that a majority of Spanish public opinion was opposed to the GAL operations. Paddy Woodworth: This is hard to measure, since there were not many opinion polls. Michael Standaert: Can we begin by talking about the amount of support inside Spain, outside of the Basque region of course, for the operations of GAL – in the 1980s?
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