Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  El Cabra considered himself a freedom-fighting revolutionary. He handed me a photograph of his younger self wearing a black beret and sporting a revolutionary beard. Che Guevara had been his hero. He spent the final years of the Franco dictatorship running a small group of Basque guerrillas from exile in south-west France, carrying out mostly sabotage and propaganda attacks. In fact, another ex-ETA leader told me, El Cabra’s group rarely, if ever, exchanged shots with the Civil Guard. He buried his arms in zulos, underground hideaways, after Franco died and an amnesty was announced in 1977.

  Up until Franco’s death, ETA had fought a classic war of provocation against the Caudillo and his Civil Guard. It had killed forty-four people – including a dozen civilians caught in a bomb attack on a Madrid cafeteria, the Rolando. Two dozen ETA members had also died – in shoot-outs, blowing themselves up, executed or summarily shot. ETA’s original fame stemmed as much from Franco’s violent reaction to it as from the handful of prominent assassinations carried out in those years. Franco declared eleven states of exception during his time in power. Four were nation-wide and six of the seven others covered the Basque provinces of Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya or both. At one stage, a quarter of his Civil Guard was said to be posted to the Basque Country. ‘If Sabino Arana considered Euskadi to be an occupied country, Francoism made that occupation real and effective,’ explains the Basque author of a history of ETA, José María Garmendia. ETA is, in fact, one of Franco’s legacies to modern Spain.

  Some of those released or allowed home under the 1977 amnesty law would rejoin ETA and participate in the orgy of killing that swept through the Basque Country in the first years of the Transición. Between 1977 and 1980, more than 250 people would be killed as not just ETA but a swathe of separatist, leftwing revolutionary or reactionary right-wing groups reached for their weapons. ‘It was chaos,’ El Cabra recalled. He, however, stayed away from the fight. ‘I cannot impose my doctrine on others by force,’ he explained. Plenty of others felt they could. Some still do.

  Eventually, he set up a museum to the caserío in Artea. He still runs it, though it is clearly in decay as, having fallen out with all the politicians, he no longer receives a grant. It has, amongst other things, displays on farming, on whale-hunting – for centuries a traditional occupation for those living along the coast of the Bay of Biscay, where the first person to land a harpoon on a whale’s back could claim the valuable tongue as a prize – or for hunting wild boar. He has even built a working copy of a medieval ferrería and of a water-driven flour-mill. It is an innocent retirement. El Cabra should be history.

  That is what he would have been, had he not decided to mount an exhibition on ETA’s early days and its fight against Franco three decades after the latter’s death. The display included weapons – which had been disabled long ago when he lived in France – as well as mock-ups of zulos and dummies dressed-up as ETA men.

  The interesting thing about this exhibition, though, was not what it contained but the uproar it provoked. The ethical narrative of Spanish history has changed. ETA long ago lost its heroic halo as the only armed group capable of inflicting real damage against Francoism. In 1973 it quite possibly changed the course of Spanish history by killing Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the man who had been expected to continue the Generalísimo’s work when the latter died. ‘Spain’s transition to democracy started that day,’ says Victoria Prego, author of various books on the period.

  History, however, is being revised. ETA is now being painted uniformly black. Even its early fight is deemed to be no longer heroic or just. Even those like Gotzone Mora, who as a student leader in the 1970s led campaigns to prevent ETA members being executed by Franco’s firing squads, now think they were wrong to support ETA then. ‘We thought they were fighting Franco. In fact they were fighting for separatism,’ she explains.

  Under Aznar, the revising of history went even further. All ETA’s victims – including, for example, the infamous San Sebastián police chief Melitón Manzanas – became official heroes. Aznar’s government awarded them all a medal, the Great Cross of the Royal Order of Civil Recognition to the Victims of Terrorism. If all the victims were now heroes, those who attacked or killed them had to be villains. El Cabra was accused of praising – even encouraging – terrorism. No court, however, found a reason for banning his exhibition. Eventually, given the political scandal, Artea’s Basque nationalist mayor ordered him to close it as the museum was housed in town hall property. ‘The mayor was in the town hall under Franco. When the Transición came he changed jackets and, as he was a banker, the nationalists took him in,’ says El Cabra. ‘It is the nationalists who have shut me down. They did not fight against Franco, they just sat around tocándose los cojones – playing with their balls.’ Police were sent in to enforce the mayor’s order. He tore off the tape which they placed across the exhibition’s entrance in a wooden shed into which he had carved a saying in euskara ‘edozen txoriri eder bere kabia’, ‘every bird thinks its own nest is the best’. ‘Now they are going to try me. Not even Franco managed to send me to prison.’

  ‘In each family there is someone who receives from the Basque Nationalist Party,’ he says. ‘It has the vote of the grateful stomach.’ This is a common complaint. The Nationalists have run the regional government for more than a quarter of a century. Their critics claim that they have bought the Basque Country up. ‘Where else in the world do parties stay in power for twenty-five years?’ one non-nationalist Basque historian asked me desperately.

  If those who El Cabra calls ‘grateful stomachs’ have a modern patron it is not the man who now runs the regional government – the lehendakari Juan José Ibarretxe. It is Xabier Arzalluz, the man who commanded the Basque Nationalist Party for more than two decades.

  It would be hard to find a greater hate-figure in Madrid (excepting ETA and its political allies such as the spokesman of the banned Batasuna party, Arnaldo Otegi) than this tough former Jesuit priest whose father had backed Franco during the Civil War. To many critics Arzalluz is the modern incarnation of Arana.

  He has occasionally reached for genetic definitions of Basqueness. ‘If there is a single nation that exists in Europe then that has to be Euskadi … there are objective figures such as cranial studies and blood (type) studies. Is there anyone who, after all the studies carried out by the world’s best universities, dares to say that we don’t have rhesus negative?’ he once said.

  Arzalluz retired as party boss in 2004. I went to see him in his new office perched a few doors up from the stone Arenal bridge over the Nervión River that connects Bilbao’s old quarter with the modern city. He was beginning to look his seventy-three years. He had, however, lost none of his verbal vigour. Basque Socialists, he said, ‘hate euskara or any form of difference’ and ‘most are not from here and they do not love this country.’ ETA itself, he added, was ‘consumed by hatred’ and was a block to any progress towards independence. Its violence had been a main factor in bringing Aznar to power. During the key Transición years Arzalluz was the Nationalists’ man in Madrid. His party called on Basque voters to boycott the 1978 constitutional referendum (which won the votes of only 31 per cent of Basques, or three-quarters of those who turned up). He helped negotiate, however, a Statute of Autonomy that gave a generous dose of self-government while making no mention of self-determination or Basques not being Spanish. Basques backed that referendum. I wanted to know whether the nationalists’ long-term goal was really independence. Arzalluz, thankfully, does not dress his answers up. ‘The Basque Nationalist Party was born to create a Basque state,’ he replied. Its aim was to make the Basque Country one more star on the European Union’s flag, like Holland or Spain. What mattered above all was that Basques should be able to express their own will.

  The PNV was not in a hurry, he said, but that should be the ultimate goal. Given that between them, Nationalists and the ezker abertzale separatists consistently gain just over half of Basque votes in regional elections, that might be taken as a ma
jority for independence. In fact many Nationalist politicians – and many of their voters – are more moderate than Arzalluz. Opinion polls show only a third of Basques want a separate state. A similar number – which has to include some Socialist voters – would like Spain to be a federation. The rest are broadly happy with it as it is.

  Self-determination lies at the heart of the Basque problem. It is a right that does not, legally, exist – though the Basque parliament wants it. Ibarretxe claims Basques have a right to ‘decide freely and democratically, their own framework of organisation and political relations.’ He put forward a plan which would see them ‘freely associate’ with Spain, but also, in effect, push them a long way down the path towards self-determination and, potentially, independence. Aznar reacted by rushing through a law that would allow him to lock Ibarretxe up if he called a referendum. It was typical Aznar – a measure certain to drive more Basques into the nationalist embrace. Zapatero revoked that law. Ibarretxe’s plan, meanwhile, was approved by a wafer-thin majority in the Basque parliament but rejected by a huge majority of Las Cortes, the parliament in Madrid. The final vote was 313 votes against, and just twenty-nine in favour.

  So why not have a referendum on independence? It seems, at least superficially, a fine idea. One vote and, if opinion polls are anything to go by, the Basques would proclaim their desire to remain Spaniards. That should be the end of it – at least for a decent period of time. It would also, surely, be the end of ETA – which would lose even its small amount of support, if it did not hang up its arms anyway.

  Self-determination for the Basque Country, however, does not win votes elsewhere in Spain (except, perhaps, in Catalonia). The two big Spanish parties – which jointly represent the other half of Basque society – dismiss it with the same arguments. Self-determination belonged to another age, they say, to the era of ‘decolonisation’. The Basque Country is not a colony, the argument goes, therefore self-determination does not apply. There are deeper worries, too. The first is that Basque Nationalist governments, if allowed to, would call referendums ad infinitum until a vote went through – which would be irreversible. What, then, would happen to a million people born, and wanting to stay, Spaniards? What would happen to Alava province, where a pro-independence majority would be impossible to achieve? And if Basques were allowed to vote on independence, who else might want to? The Catalans could be next. Perhaps the Galicians would follow? And where do you draw the self-determination line? In 1873, during the first Spanish Republic, the south-eastern seaport of Cartagena declared itself an independent canton and tried to persuade others to follow suit.

  Another reason Spanish politicians give for dismissing self-determination is that this is part of what ETA demands. Any move in that direction could be interpreted as a triumph for terrorism. ‘Our dead do not deserve it,’ said Aznar’s successor at the head of the People’s Party, Mariano Rajoy. The obvious problem with that argument is that it makes anything ETA wants impossible – even if others, who oppose violence, want it too. It is, in fact, a way of turning ETA’s violence to one’s own advantage. It also, however, highlights ETA’s status as a hindrance, rather than a help, on the path to self-determination or independence.

  ETA’s decline has been gradual, but steady. In 1980 it killed more than ninety people. An average of thirty-three victims a year died between then and 1992. In the late 1990s it could manage barely a dozen a year. At the start of this century, and despite its efforts to the contrary, it has shown itself incapable of killing for two whole years.

  As the years went by, and it found it harder to kill, ETA widened its choice of targets. First it was the police, members of the armed services, chivatos – police informers – and senior politicians. (Also, though, it was many others who simply got in the way when the bomb exploded or the trigger was pulled. There are at least twenty children on ETA’s list of victims.) Then it was judges and public prosecutors. After that, it was civilians working for any of the above. Finally, it became anybody who dared openly oppose the gang, be they intellectuals, journalists or business leaders. It was termed, in a display of warped logic, ‘la socialización del dolor’, ‘the socialization of pain’. The perceived suffering of a minority of pro-violence separatists, in other words, must be shared by everybody else – who should, thus, be forced to feel the terror. It is, unfortunately, a remarkably effective way of shutting people up – as the almost total absence of anti-ETA activity on the university campus shows.

  One key moment in ETA’s decline came when a young People’s Party councillor, Miguel Ángel Blanco, from the Basque town of Ermua, was kidnapped in 1997. ETA demanded that, in return for his life, its prisoners be sent from jails around Spain to those in the Basque Country within forty-eight hours. It knew, however, that with Aznar in power, that was never going to happen. As the hours went by towards the deadline a sense of doom spread across Spain. Blanco’s fate held the nation on tenterhooks. The Saturday of the deadline, I recall, there was a general air of anxious nervousness. I was in a village near Segovia, on what was meant to be a convivial day out – bathing in a river – with a party of friends. But everyone was thinking of Blanco, knowing the minutes were ticking by. Then the news came. Gunshots had been heard in woods near the town of Lasarte. A huntsman out shooting had gone to investigate. He had found a seriously wounded man with two gunshots in the head and his hands tied. Television pictures showed an ambulance delivering the man to hospital. ETA’s attempt at cold-blooded execution of a defenceless prisoner had been ham-fisted and messy. But there was little that could be done. Within twelve hours, Blanco was dead. The screw of violence had been given another cruel twist. It was one of those moments when Spaniards showed their almost unique ability for protesting en masse. Up to 3 million Spaniards took to the streets two days later to show their disgust – with the streets of Basque cities such as Bilbao and San Sebastián also filling up. ETA’s leaders were stunned by the reaction. Here, for the first time, was mass public opposition from Basques to their terrorism. ‘When they saw those pictures they were amazed – they could not understand,’ explained Iulen de Madariaga, an ETA founder who has left the group.

  Two days after Miguel Angel Blanco was killed, my telephone rang. At the other end of the phone a voice began to speak in a heavily accented, inaccurate, but fluid and bizarrely idiomatic English. It was a voice I did not know.

  ‘I am a friend of the people in Eeee, Teeee, Ayyy,’ the voice said. ‘I used to speak to journalists a lot, but I have not done so for a long time.’ My caller sounded like one of those madmen who pester journalists everywhere with bizarre and improbable tales. I decided, however, to hear him out. I did not take an exact note of the conversation, but the important parts of it went something like this: ‘I have seen the people who were responsible for shooting Blanco. You must know that this is not the end of it. There will be much more,’ he said. The phrase that stuck in my mind was the one used to describe what, he claimed, would be a future campaign of similar killings. The mad professor reached deep into his bag of English idioms. ‘This is the new cottage industry in the Basque Country,’ he said.

  Looking back, I see my caller was not so mad. Blanco’s killing, which had been preceded by that of San Sebastián People’s Party councillor Gregorio Ordóñez, was, indeed, the start of a rash of murders of small town councillors belonging to parties deemed to be españolistas. People who, until then, had spent their time arguing over such mundane matters as waste collection, building licences and children’s playgrounds were now worried for their lives. Eleven would be killed over the next three years. Those not killed could find themselves, in radical heartland towns of industrial Guipúzcoa, burnt out of their businesses, their homes petrol-bombed or simply attacked by thugs on the street. One Socialist councillor found a note slipped into her two-year-old’s pocket in the playground. ‘We know where you are and we are going to give it you. Bang! Bang! Bang!’

  Masked men would walk into bars where councillors were known
to have breakfast and shoot them in the head. In some places even the mask was not necessary. Witnesses could be guaranteed to keep silent. When one of the killers of Gregorio Ordoñez was finally caught, the word was put out that he had been recognised, and reported to police, by a man from whom he bought a bicycle. Letters arrived at local newspapers warning the ‘coward and traitor’ who told police that Lasarte was in a shopping centre to ‘hide well’. ‘Euskadi is the size of a handkerchief and whoever betrays a gudari usually has health problems,’ the letter said. The bicycle salesman soon joined the list of ETA’s victims.

  Perhaps the most senseless but revealing killing of all was by a drunken young radical, Mikel Otegi. He convinced himself that two Basque ertzaina police officers driving past his front gate had come to arrest him. He went for his shotgun and killed them in cold blood. A jury made up of ETA supporters and people too scared to oppose them declared him not guilty despite the fact that Otegi’s own brother had called the police. It was a sign of how deep ETA had sunk its teeth into Basque society. The killer fled the country before a new trial could be called. He joined ETA in France and was recaptured several years later.

  In the late 1990s things were still much better than a decade earlier, but the corpses of councillors were piling up. The state replied by providing them all with armed bodyguards. ETA responded by widening its list of targets further. Journalists, opinion-makers and intellectuals were next. El Mundo columnist José Luis López De Lacalle, a sixty-three-year-old former anti-Francoist militant who had suffered jail, was gunned down as he bought the Sunday newspapers. A bomb left in a flower pot failed to go off as Juan Francisco Palomo and Aurora Intxausti, journalists for Antena 3 and El País, wheeled their eighteen-month-old son out of their house in San Sebastián in his buggy. Gorka Landaburu, of Cambio 16 magazine, had his fingers blown off by a parcel bomb. More bodyguards arrived to protect the university professors, journalists and intellectuals now under threat.