Arnaldo Otegi

Arnaldo Otegi Mondragón (born 6 July 1958) is a politician from the Basque Country who has been the General Secretary of Basque nationalist party EH Bildu since 2017. He was member of the Basque Parliament 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.

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 had spent 6 years in prison. Otegi had already received a favorable ruling by that same European court 5 years earlier, when it was ruled that Spanish courts violated his right of freedom of speech in 2003, when he was given a one year prison sentence for slander against the Spanish king.

Otegi 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.

In the April 2022 espionage scandal, it was known that agents of Spanish intelligence had been using the Pegasus software for spying Arnaldo Otegi, as well as other Basque and Catalonian pro-independence politicians and activists.