Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  The Basque government prepared to go back into exile. Garaikoetxea, at the time suffering from a sneezy bout of hay fever, was moved to the pollen-rich mountains near the border, ready to cross over.

  But the coup failed. It may have been more than one coup. The relationship between the Guardia Civil action, the army’s Brunete Division, which was to move on Madrid, and various other military actions at the time has never been completely clarified. King Juan Carlos, the commander in chief of the armed forces, is credited with talking the military officers out of backing the rebellion. But some of the plotters claimed that the king knew of the plot and that they had acted believing the king was behind them. It is not known if he had ever indicated support, or if he even knew of the plot. But its success would have been unlikely without his backing, and, in the end, it was the king’s lack of support that caused these officers to back down.

  Whether the king had or had not been involved in the plot, the coup’s failure was a resounding success for him, for the military, and for the Guardia Civil. The king, presented as the man who talked down the coup, gained a prestige he had never had before. The Juan Carlos jokes ended. So did rumors of military coups.

  Most political leaders took February 23 as a lesson that the military and Guardia Civil needed to be kept happy. Not only the government, but Felipe González and his opposition Socialists, people who had spent their lives opposing the Guardia Civil and the military, suddenly responded sympathetically to their viewpoint and with increasing hostility to Basque nationalism. New antiterrorism laws were passed, giving the government the right to close down publications charged with “apology for terrorism,” a crime which was upgraded from misdemeanor to felony.

  Tejero and General Jaime Milans del Bosch received thirty-year sentences, a third leader was sentenced to six years, and eleven others were sentenced to less than three years. But Spain was to have its transition to democracy without purging a single figure from the Franco era, without prosecuting a single one of the many crimes these men had committed over forty years. The democracy would be built without purging the ranks of the military, the Guardia Civil, or even the operations of prisons.

  The nations of western Europe had learned the same lesson as the Spanish politicians. They had almost seen their neighbor return yet again to the 1930s. In the future Spain would be encouraged and not criticized. There would no longer be discussion of its human rights record. Spain would be welcomed into the ranks of Europe. A great effort would be made to move forward its request for membership in the European Economic Community. The West would also persuade Spain to join NATO, thereby integrating its troublesome troops into the Western alliance.

  Even ETA was changed by the coup. The Spanish government’s frustrating two year negotiation with ETA’s politico-militar wing suddenly bore fruit. The members of politico-militar saw that they would be defenseless if the military overthrew the democracy, and concluded that continuing to attack the current Spanish state would be too dangerous for the Basque people. In exchange for an amnesty and release from prison of its members, ETA politico-militar dissolved. But that did not end the violence because other branches of ETA were still active. There is always a splinter group. In time the Spanish government has come to feel that no matter what it negotiates with ETA, a dissident group refusing the accord will always emerge.

  IN THE HISTORY of the Spanish “transition,” there is no more dramatic change than the metamorphosis of Felipe González between the 1981 coup d’état and his election as prime minister the following year. After the coup attempt, the coming-to power of the man all of Spain simply called Felipe was seen as inevitable. The youthful Socialist lawyer-turned-underground-labor-organizer was to be a political leader. The man who used to leap onto the back of trucks, dressed in corduroys and leather jacket, and talk to the workers had somehow vanished. The new man in the dark suits was still youthful and charming, but gone was the lawyer who defended civil rights. He became a firm advocate of repressive antiterrorist laws, arguing that other democracies, faced with terrorism, had done the same and therefore it was a democratic thing to do.

  Felipe had been an active member of the Socialist International, a protégé of Germany’s Willy Brandt, and a young friend of France’s avuncular François Mitterrand, who was also about to come to power. Felipe had headed the Socialist’s committee on Nicaragua that had taken a critical stance in favor of the Sandinista rebels and against U.S. policy. Asked, in a 1981 interview, in what sense of the word was he a Socialist, he replied, “In all senses of the word—except in the Communist sense.” One political maneuver, in preparation for power, was to resign from the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and refuse to come back until it struck the word Marxist from its party charter.

  Asked if he was concerned that power might have a corrupting effect, he insisted that there would be no temptation for him to abuse power because the constitution provided a system of checks and balances that would prevent it.

  The Socialist Party slogan for the 1982 election was Por Cambio, For Change, and although little change was being offered, the Spanish, even many Basques, could not help but feel excited about the prospect of someone taking over the government who had not been a part of, who had in fact opposed, the thirty-six-year dictatorship. After so many years of morose stagnation, nothing more than forward motion was a thrilling prospect. Begoña Aretxaga, later a Harvard anthropologist, was in her native San Sebastián at the time. “I was excited in spite of myself, even without believing,” she recalls of the 1982 election. “The legitimacy of the government depends on the continuous exercise of an act of forgetting.”

  * * *

  14: Checks and Balances

  In people’s lives and in social history there is always a first mistake, a little mistake, which happens almost imperceptibly, a momentary slip-up, but this first mistake creates others, and these mistakes follow each other, accumulating little by little, one on top of another. Eventually, this creates a growing and fateful error.

  —Joseba Sarrionaindia, NI EZ NAIZ HEMENGOA,

  (I Am Not from Here), 1985

  * * *

  FRENCH POLICY TOWARD “the Basque problem” has always been to keep it in Spain. As long as the problem stayed in Spain, ETA members could stay in France. The French government’s support of Spanish Basque refugees had long helped to keep peaceful relations between Paris and French Basques. But after the death of Franco, French foreign policy changed. Being an enemy of Spain no longer gave a Spanish refugee automatic legitimacy in France. Since the Spanish government was no longer unquestionably the villain, Basques were no longer unquestionably the victims. Political refugee status and work permits for Spanish Basques were no longer automatically granted. Increasingly, French police rounded up Basques, not all of them ETA members, for questioning, broke into homes, and searched without warrants. Suspected ETA members were arrested and sometimes spent months in prison without being charged with a crime. In 1979, the French government ended political refugee status for newly arrived Basques. But it still refused to extradite Basques to Spain.

  In 1980, an international conference on terrorism sponsored by the Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg concluded, to the approval of human rights groups, that suspects should not be extradited to countries that practiced torture. The two examples cited were Turkey and Spain.

  In May 1981, Mitterrand was elected president of France. The following year, on October 28, 1982, Felipe González came to power in Spain expecting a special relationship with France, since the president was his old colleague from the Socialist International. To his great frustration and disappointment, Mitterrand would not cooperate. To head his law enforcement team, González chose as minister of interior a fellow Andalusian of his generation, a forty-two-year-old son of a policeman of Carlist sympathy, José Barrionuevo. The day the new government was announced, El Pais noted that Barrionuevo was “considered by those who know him as a man capable of imposing authority because he knows how to
legitimize it.”

  The new Socialist government was to be “tough” like past regimes, but unlike its predecessors, it would operate by the legitimate rule of law. Yet on December 15, with the new Spanish Socialist government only two weeks old, Barrionuevo announced that he was reviewing antiterrorist policy. The result was the Socialists passed laws limiting the right of an accused to legal assistance and giving police the right to hold prisoners incommunicado—without access to lawyers and without presenting them to a court—for up to ten days. Known in legal language as the suspension of habeas corpus, this is considered a violation of basic rights in all Western law because it gives law enforcement the liberty to commit even worse crimes. That is exactly what happened with Spain’s new antiterrorist laws. Suspects detained under these new laws were routinely beaten and tortured, and then released in a few days without ever being charged. Journalists were arrested and convicted of “insulting the Spanish government and the King.” Especially targeted was the pro-Herri Batasuna paper Egin.

  Egin, meaning “to act,” began publishing in 1977 with small investments from 25,000 backers. As the constant object of government repression, the paper gathered a following. The Spanish government’s attempt to shut it down seemed to be almost a reenactment of the Franco era. In 1983, an Egin columnist, Sanchez Erauskin, became a popular hero when, while serving time on charges of insulting the king, he used a hunger strike to force the government to reclassify him as a political prisoner. The editor of the paper, José Felix Azurmendi, was regularly arrested by the González government. Columnists, journalists, even people who were quoted in articles, were arrested and sometimes convicted for insulting the government or “apology for terrorism.”

  THE NUMBER OF Basque prisoners in Spanish prisons began rising steadily, with more than 100 arrests in some months. It was becoming apparent that government by Felipe, despite his endearing smile and years of antifascism, was not going to offer an improvement in human rights.

  In 1983, Amnesty International, after sending observers to Spain, reported: “The torture and ill-treatment of detainees, principally people detained under anti-terrorist laws, continues to be Amnesty International’s main concern.” The observers found that 691 people, mostly in Basque country, had been arrested under the antiterrorist laws, and gave examples of prisoners who had been tortured. In replying to the report, Barrionuevo said, “At this point it should be noted that it is normal for terrorist groups to accuse the authorities of torture and ill-treatment as a way of interrupting incommunicado detentions and hindering police investigations.” He went on to say that harsh measures were “justified by the grave threat that is posed by terrorism.”

  Barrionuevo went to the legislature and got approval for a project costing almost $100 million. Called ZEN or Zona Especial del Norte, it was intended to transform the politics of the Basque region by winning support for the Guardia Civil and National Police and turning the population against ETA. Among the proposed techniques to accomplish this was the planting of false stories in Basque newspapers. After Basque municipalities passed measures against the plan and it was condemned by the Basque government, ZEN was quietly dropped—at least as far as is known.

  Other plans proceeded, including sending more Guardia Civil to Basqueland and transferring Basque prisoners to special prisons outside Basque country, where they could be held by Guardia Civil instead of the usual prison guards.

  González was faced with a decrease, not an increase, in ETA activity. But the government encountered constant accusations from the opposition Alianza Popular, the Popular Alliance Party, that the Socialists were soft on terrorism. The Alianza Popular was an alliance of former Francoist factions headed by former Franco minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne. When the government proposed laws suspending basic civil liberties, Fraga said they were not enough, that Basqueland should be put under a state of siege, the way Franco used to do, suspending all civil liberties. Fraga once said, “When the innocent blood of citizens is running, a government should prefer to have blood on its hands than water like Pilate.”

  ON OCTOBER 16, 1983, two Basque refugees, José Antonio Lasa and José Ignacio Zabala, were kidnapped in France. No one claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, and neither the two men nor their bodies were ever found.

  On December 4, Segundo Marey, fifty-one, was sitting in his home in Hendaye, shoes off, watching The Benny Hill Show on television, when two hefty men broke in and took him, still in socks, to a mountain hideaway in Spain. The Red Cross received a note that Marey could be exchanged for four Spanish policemen being held by the French government in connection with an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap a Basque.

  The four policemen were released, and Marey was found near the border, fifteen pounds lighter after ten days in captivity. A note was found in his pocket saying, “You will have more news from GAL.” GAL, it was to be learned, was a Spanish acronym for Antiterrorist Liberation Groups. It appeared to be an extreme right-wing vigilante death squad that attacked Basque militants in their safe refuge across the border. Still, the Marey case was odd because he seemed to be nothing more than a furniture dealer without any known political involvements.

  On December 19, GAL struck again, killing a Basque refugee, Ramón Oñaederra, in a Bayonne bar.

  It was widely rumored in Basqueland that GAL worked for the Spanish government. After the Oñaederra killing, Arzalluz came out and said it “I am personally persuaded, although I cannot prove it, that the GAL and that ‘dirty war’ have ties to government measures in Madrid.”

  This was vintage Arzalluz. The head of the Basque Nationalist Party was always making wild accusations and later admitting that he had no proof. His party lived in terror of his next statement. Herri Batasuna made the same allegation as Arzalluz, but it too was always making accusations against the Spanish state. Another rumor was that wealthy Vizcayan businessmen sponsored GAL. There were always rumors in Basqueland.

  The killings went on. The brother of the most wanted ETA leader was killed. The French state became more concerned about terrorism in Basqueland now that it was spreading to their provinces. In September 1984, after a series of meetings between the two governments, France agreed to extradite to Spain seven alleged directors of ETA. More extraditions followed. ETA responded with a campaign against French interests in Spain, not in France. ETA has always tried to keep the war out of France so that commandos would have a border to escape across.

  On November 20, 1984, Santiago Brouard, a pediatrician, was killed in his Bilbao office by GAL. Brouard was the perfect go-between, both a respectable professional and a well-known leftist nationalist who had once gone into exile rather than betray a wounded ETArist he had treated. At the time of his killing, he had been trying to arrange negotiations between ETA and Madrid.

  The public outrage over this assassination seemed to slow down GAL activities. Or was it a more cooperative France that made the difference? In 1986, France increased the number of Basque extraditions to Spain, even though it had been documented that Basques turned over to the Spanish on previous occasions had been tortured.

  In 1986, after killing perhaps twenty-seven people, GAL vanished.

  In 1987, the Madrid magazine Tiempo conducted a poll in which 52 percent of respondents said they believed the Spanish government had been behind GAL. But in what may offer a more telling insight into Spanish democracy, 51 percent approved of GAL’s killings.

  WHERE WAS THE system of checks and balances that González had confidently predicted would prevent his abuse of power? For five years he was able to govern without any such impediments. Then the mystery of GAL began to unravel. After a traffic accident, incriminating documents were found in the car of José Amedo, a senior Spanish policeman. It appeared that he and another high-ranking officer, Michel Dominguez, had traveled frequently to French Basqueland with false identification papers. Arrested by Spain and wanted in France, the two confessed. Their 1989 trial, inevitably labeled “GALgate,” resulted in sentences
of 108 years for both of them for organizing GAL and its killings.

  GAL agents turned out to be mercenaries: an assortment of right-wing French military left over from the Algerian war, underworld hitmen from organized crime in Marseilles, former Portuguese colonialists, and Italian neo-Fascists. Once, in 1984, the French had even caught a GAL operative and identified him as a former member of the OAS, an infamous right-wing French military group from the early 1960s Algerian independence war. He was known to have been working for the Spanish government since Franco’s time.

  Citing security concerns, Barrionuevo refused to make any comments on the case. He was widely thought to be the true author of GAL. The Amedo and Domínguez trial revealed that the two convicted GAL organizers had operated with money from the Ministry of Interior. Felipe González insisted, even in the 1990s, when the trail finally led to Barrionuevo, that he himself had known nothing about GAL. Although a member of his own party in Vizcaya as well as several GAL members implicated González, no one was able to mount a successful legal case against him. González claimed that the case was being pursued as a political attack against his party, which may be true, but would still not establish his innocence.

  Barrionuevo’s undoing was that early Marey kidnapping. The reason Marey was taken was that the GAL kidnappers had mistaken him for an ETA suspect named Mikel Lujúa. Once they realized that the shivering victim carried away from his television was not Lujúa the terrorist, but Marey the furniture dealer, they contacted the number two Spanish law enforcement official, Rafael Vera, the director of state security. Vera called police officials in Bilbao, who consulted with Julian Sancristóbal, the civil governor of Vizcaya, who in turn got approval from Barrionuevo to try to exchange Marey for the four Spanish policemen.