Arnaldo Otegi

Arnaldo Otegi Mondragón (born 6 July 1958 in Elgoibar) is a politician from the Basque Country who has been the General Secretary of Basque nationalist party EH Bildu since 2017. He was a deputy of the Basque Parliament between 1995 and 2005 for both Herri Batasuna and Euskal Herritarrok. He was a convicted member of the ETA, an armed separatist organization, in his early years. He was one of the key negotiators during the unsuccessful peace talks in Loiola and Geneva, in 2006, as well as later peace talks that culminated in ETA's permanent ceasefire in 2011 and its full disarmament in 2017. In the 1990s, Otegi 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 alleged relationship with ETA, but continued talks with Jesus Egiguren from the Spanish PSOE party in order to reach a compromise leading to lasting peace. In June 2007, Otegi 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...