Lucía's heart stopped, but the fight goes on

Lucía Jiménez, a journalist who was a colleague at this and other media outlets, will no longer call us to remind us that the mark left by the Canary Islanders who were victims of terrorism cannot disappear with the passage of time. Especially those whose stories were deliberately buried under a blanket of oblivion. Her combative heart stopped beating yesterday.

The Efe news agency reports that she died in Malaga. She was there to attend a tribute to prosecutor Luis Portero, who was murdered by ETA in 2001. And there, as president of the Canarian Association of Victims of Terrorism (Acavite), Lucía Jiménez wanted to make it clear that it was not only on the Spanish mainland that there were deaths, injuries and, in short, families torn apart by senseless terrorism during the dictatorship and democracy. It also happened on the islands, where remoteness does not make us immune to barbarism.

Nardi Barrios, president of the Charter 100 Association, an organization to which Lucía Jiménez belonged, recounted that during the trip to Málaga, the journalist felt ill and was taken to a hospital, from which she voluntarily discharged herself once she had recovered. It was a mirage: death ended up crossing her path.

From Acavite, Lucía Jiménez was determined to raise awareness of the 281 victims of the attacks attributed to the Polisario Front, including her father, who was seriously injured and died as a result of an attack carried out in January 1976 at the Fos Bucraa phosphate mines in Western Sahara. That family wound was reopened last month, when it was fifty years since the Green March and Spain's stumbling departure from what was once its colony: Western Sahara.

In an interview with Efe, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Spain's departure from Western Sahara, Jiménez expressed his regret that the families of these victims have never received adequate recognition, despite having been hit by “attacks against defenseless civilians,” most of them Canarian sailors on fishing boats machine-gunned by the Polisario Front.

From here, we offer our condolences to their families and loved ones. And from here, Lucía, we wish you to rest in peace.

Francisco Suárez Álamo. Editor of the newspaper Canarias7

Article previously published in Canarias7