Arnaldo Otegi

Arnaldo Otegi Mondragón (born 6 July 1958) is a Basque politician who is currently General Secretary of Basque nationalist party EH Bildu. He was member of the Basque Parliament for both Herri Batasuna and Euskal Herritarrok. He was a convicted member of the banned armed separatist group organization ETA in his early years. He was one of the key negotiators during the unsuccessful peace talks in Loiola and Geneva, in 2006.In the 1990s he started his political career and quickly gained prominence within the Basque separatist movement, becoming the leader of Herri Batasuna. During the period, he participated in the attempts at finding a political and negotiated solution for the Basque conflict that laid out the grounds for the Lizarra-Garazi Agreements and ETA's truce in 1998. He headed the party Batasuna, declared illegal in 2003 due to its relationship with ETA, but continued talks with the Socialist Jesus Egiguren to reach a compromise leading to peace.In June 2007 he was convicted of "praising terrorism", imprisoned, and then released from prison in August the following year. In October 2009 he was arrested for attempting to put Batasuna back together, and was given a ten-year sentence. In May 2012 his sentence was reduced to 6½ years by the Supreme Court of Spain as they considered him a member, but not a leader of ETA. Otegi was released from prison on 1 March 2016, with the European Court of Humans Rights ruling against Spain for the Spanish National Court's breach of the defendant's right to have an impartial trial, for which he had spent 6 years in prison.He was chosen as candidate for the post of Lehendakari by EH Bildu for the Basque parliamentary election of 2016 but the electoral committee invalidated his candidacy due to his penal disqualification. Otegi was born on 6 July 1958 in Elgoibar, (Gipuzkoa), in what later would become the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (Spain). He holds a university degree in philosophy and literature, is married and a father of two children.

He was a militant of the abertzale left movement from a young age. In 1977 he fled to the French Basque Country, after the Spanish authorities discovered his membership of ETA (pm). In 1987 the French police arrested him, before allowing him to be extradited to Spain. He was found guilty of taking part in the kidnapping of the Basque businessman Luis Abaitua and was sentenced to six years in prison. He spent three years imprisoned and was released in 1990.On leaving prison, he decided to change how he would seek Basque independence and so entered politics. In the Basque parliamentary election in 1994 he was the seventh placed candidate on the party list of Herri Batasuna (HB) for Gipuzkoa. HB won six seats at the election with Otegi initially failing to be elected, but on 27 September 1995, he became a member of the Basque Parliament when he substituted a party colleague.

In November 1997 the Spanish Supreme Court found 23 senior members of Herri Batasuna guilty of collaboration with ETA, imprisoning them for seven years. The ensuing power vacuum was filled by Joseba Permach and Arnaldo Otegi, chosen to become the new provisional leaders of Herri Batasuna. The sentence was overturned by the Spanish Constitutional Court in 1999. Since then, Otegi has been the major spokesman for the movement, first in Herri Batasuna, later in Euskal Herritarrok.