ETA and the Violence of Basque Nationalism in Spain

     The Basque country straddles the border between northwest Spain and southwest France. The people living there comprise their own ethnic group; not speaking Spanish, Catalan or French, the Basque people speak Euskadi, a language not belonging to the Indo-European language group. They have inhabited that land from a time long before the Latin speaking Romans conquered that corner of Europe. By the mid-twentieth century, some Basque people decided it was time to be their own nation. That is when ETA was born.

     In the 1950s the Spanish fascist dictatorship of Franco was still strong. The battles of the two world wars had resulted in a re-structuring of the European map. The communists had ascended and Third World national liberation movements had brought about new countries in the former colonies. During that decade a group of students grew frustrated by the slow and moderate pace of the Basque Nationalist Party; decidedly taking a more hardline and revolutionary stance, they formed the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna or Basque Homeland Party, better known internationally by their acronym ETA. Organized in a loosely connected constellation of secret hideouts, headquarters, underground bunkers, and clandestine prisons scattered throughout the Basque region on the southern side of the Spanish Border, they collected weapons and plotted to bomb their way to independence in a long campaign of terrorist attacks. ETA merged with Batasuna, a Basque nationalist political party who soon became their political wing, though some Batasuna members, disgusted by ETA’s violent tactics maintain the idea that ETA used threats and intimidation to incorporate them into their terrorist movement. While ETA mostly operated on the Spanish side of the border, their political leaders directed operations from the French side and rank and file members also laid low in France when the police were searching for them. France tolerated ETA’s presence during the Franco years, hoping that their activism would help to destabilize the fascist regime.

     ETA held several conferences in the 1960s and officially declared independence from Spain in 1962. Their first act of violence occurred in 1968 when a Spanish member of the Guardia Civil opened fire on an ETA member named Txabi Etxebarrieta who fled from a police roadblock. He was chased and killed and ETA decided to retaliate by assassinating Meliton Manzanas, chief of the secret police in San Sebastian. This incident initiated several waves of kidnappings and terrorist attacks.

One of ETA’s most notorious bombings was Operation Ogro in December 1973. They targeted Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the man chosen by Franco to be his successor. ETA packed a large bunch of explosives onto the ceiling of tunnel in Madrid which Blanco was known to drive over every day. Upon detonation, the bomb blew his car five stories into the air and over a fence where it landed in a residential back yard. Needless to say, Blanco did not survive. After ETA claimed responsibility, some people in Spain hailed ETA for an event that could have been the beginning of the end of fascism in Spain and an initiation into the era of democracy.

     While ETA’s star was rising, the newly emerging democratic government decided to rely on old methods in an attempt to keep them in check. The politicians set up a paramilitary organization called the Antiterrorist Liberation Group or GAL. This groups spent the better part of the 1980s engaging ETA in extra-legal warfare, arrests, harassment, and violence. Given free reign, interrogation and torture of ETA members became routine. Assassinations of suspected Basque separatists were carried out. The Spanish secret service provided the intelligence and logistical support that were necessary for these operations. The international community responded by condemning GAL’s tactics so loudly that they eventually had to disband and halted their surveillance.

     Meanwhile, ETA was also declining in popularity. Basque nationalists regarded them with lukewarm sympathy. Political parties avoided them. The majority of ethnic Basque people actually saw no benefit to liberating their people from Spain or France anyhow. A series of car bombings during the 1980s did not help their public image at all. Their worst attack occurred in Barcelona when several families were blown up in an attack on a shopping mall; in an attempt to be fair, ETA had issued a warning to evacuate the building but the citizens did not have enough time to flee. The Spanish police claimed the instructions given by ETA were unclear and confusing. Then, after the murder of a woman who had defected from ETA to return to a normal life and start a family, anti-ETA protests began to erupt in the Basque region itself. ETA soon after declared a ceasefire but it probably was too little too late; the Basque separatist cause was tainted.

     The 1990s saw a new era for ETA and, some would say, new lows as well. The three top leaders of ETA declared a new ceasefire, came out of hiding, and resigned from any future revolutionary activity. The ceasefire lasted less than two weeks. An ETA sponsored organization of adolescents called the Y Group emerged. The older members of the terrorist organization were mostly in prison, so activities were turned over to this gang of young street thugs who went on a rampage of bombings, arson, rioting, and fighting police with Molotov cocktails. After some larger, and more serious attempts to disrupt the lives of the Spanish citizens, ETA kidnapped a politician named Miguel Angel Blanco. They claimed they would kill him if their demands to have all imprisoned ETA members turned over to prisons in the Basque region were not met. The Spanish government refused to negotiate with them and soon they found the politician’s dead body perforated with gun shot wounds. The public outcry, both Spanish and Basque, was loud and ETA sunk even further into unpopularity.

After the turn of the century, ETA increased their number of bombings attacks. Some were deadly but many of them failed. The war in Yugoslavia and Kosovo’s movement to break free from Serbia inspired new enthusiasm for the Basque cause but the September 11 Al Qaeda attacks on New York City made terrorists look less like legitimate freedom fighters and more like a menace. ETA’s support continued to wane. In 2006, after negotiating with the Spanish government, ETA declared a permanent ceasefire and a turn to non-violent, democratic politics; the peace did not last for more than a couple weeks. A van bombing in an airport that killed two people renewed their lust for for violent revolution. In 2011, ETA declared a ceasefire yet again with a call to end all terrorist activities but this was met with suspicion by the general public. Some ETA members continued to call for armed confrontation but little of anything happened.

     Finally in 2018, after close to 900 people had died in their terrorist attacks over a period of 50 years, ETA announced to the media their final disbandment and dissolution. ETA supposedly exists no more. Many people still remain unconvinced. With the initiation of the Catalan independence movement, many fear that the violent Basque separatists might just be waiting for a more opportune time to re-emerge.

Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin Books, 2006.