Basque History of the World (38 page)

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.”

O
N
O
CTOBER
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.

W
HERE 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.

Barrionuevo, Vera, and Sancristóbal each received ten-year prison terms, and nine other defendants received lesser sentences. The prosecution had asked for sentences of up to twenty-three years, the penalty for belonging to an armed terrorist group under Barrionuevo’s antiterrorist laws. But the judges ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove that GAL was an armed terrorist group.

T
HE EXACT NUMBER
of law enforcement officers in Spanish Basqueland is a state security secret. The Guardia Civil, which admits to 5,000 officers there, also has an undisclosed number of Basque-speaking undercover agents, as does the National Police. According to the Spanish government, there are about 15,000 uniformed police, including Basque police, Ertzantza, who are patrolling the 2.1 million inhabitants in the three provinces of Euskadi—more than seven police officers for every 1,000 citizens. This makes Spanish Basqueland the most policed population in Europe, although the ratio is probably similar in Navarra and may be even higher in the three French provinces.

One of the reasons for the high numbers of police is Madrid’s lack of confidence in the Ertzantza. “The Ertzantza are reluctant to go to certain lengths,” explained an adviser to the Spanish government. The Spanish government claims that the Guardia Civil and National Police have an arrest record four or five times higher than that of the Basque force. This is not necessarily an accomplishment, considering that most of those arrested are released after a few days without ever having been charged. According to Gestoras Pro-Amnistía, the Basque human rights group founded to campaign for amnesty after the death of Franco, in the twenty years since it achieved the 1977 general amnesty, 8,000 Basques have been imprisoned for political reasons, and the majority of them never had trials. Most human rights monitors believe Gestoras Pro-Amnistía’s estimate to be extremely conservative.

The Basques do not credit their police force with gentleness. The Ertzantza has created tough antiterrorist units. Human rights monitors have found that all three groups practice torture, though they use different techniques. Josu Barela, head of Gestoras Pro-Amnistía, said, “What is worse? Do you want to be nearly asphyxiated with a plastic bag by the Guardia Civil, interrogated all night by the National Police, or threatened with death by the Ertzantza?”

More cases of psychological torment than physical torture have been found among those held by the Ertzantza. But Barela said, “We often find that physical torture does not leave victims as damaged as psychological torture. We often find that people who have hardly been touched physically are the most scarred.” Insomnia, unreasoned fear, low self-esteem, a deep sense of guilt are among the symptoms.

The Ertzantza, from its inception, had been concerned about its public image. The Basque government had turned to Ramón Labayen to design a uniform for the new Basque police force. Ramón’s passion is toy lead soldiers. He designs them, creating his own molds. For the new Ertzantza’s uniforms, his only instructions had been to make them look as different from Spanish uniforms as possible. Labayen gave them red berets.

For all its Basqueness and its bright berets, the public had always been a little distrustful of yet another police force. When the new Basque security force began training, rumors spread that the Israelis were doing something in Alava. The Israeli-Basque connection, mostly imaginary, was a chronic topic of rumors.

Basque youth called Ertzantza
cipayos
, a pejorative used in the Indian independence movement for Indian troops that served the British. Armed with sticks and rocks, groups of youth called
encapuchados
, hooded ones, because they wore ski masks, staged seemingly disorganized attacks. The Spanish government believed that they worked with ETA, but in early 1998, ETA leadership publicly denounced them as “very young people ready to do anything,” who interfere with ETA’s overall strategies.

The Spanish government has always seemed to be either unwilling or unable to distinguish among widely diverse Basque groups. But in fact everyone was starting to look alike. Few faces were seen. ETA commandos wore knitted ski masks to conceal their identity. Then, in the 1990s, pro-ETA demonstrators began wearing them too—perhaps to show solidarity with the commandos, perhaps because the police started videotaping demonstrations, perhaps because the rebels in the Chiapas region of Mexico had popularized ski masks as a revolutionary symbol. Guardia Civil and National Police also began wearing masks to protect themselves from being singled out for reprisals. The Ertzantza’s antiterrorist units adopted the same practice. Judges and court officials started wearing them too, for especially controversial sentencing.

An ETA commando. Ertzantza officers on the street. (Both courtesy of the photography archives of
Egin
, Hernani)

I
N
M
ARCH
1996, Felipe González’s Socialist Workers Party was defeated. Manuel Fraga’s Popular Alliance, originally an alliance of Francoist politicians, had changed its name to the Popular Party, the PP, and came to power with José María Aznar as prime minister. The PP, with its Francoist roots, had promised to take a harder line with the Basques than had the Socialists. In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping, and murder, the González government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being “soft on Basques.” To demonstrate the sincerity of its stance, the new government decided to have the entire twenty-three-person directorate of Herri Batasuna arrested.

During the election, in which each party had an allotted television airtime, Herri Batasuna had used its time to run a video from ETA. This party again won its usual 12-15 percent of the Basque vote and two seats in the Madrid legislature, which it again refused to fill, along with hundreds of offices in the Basque legislature and municipalities. The video had shown three men, faces concealed in ski masks, who, having been identified as ETA members, explained the demands of the organization for an independent Euskadi. This tape was a response to the Spanish government’s often-stated view that “nobody knows what ETA wants.”

Aznar’s camp was divided on the impending arrests. Some thought that it would be a mistake to isolate Herri Batasuna, which represented almost 200,000 people; and it would be more useful, they thought, to try to win over its supporters. They also worried that other European countries would strongly criticize the new government for attempting to silence a legal political party that had the backing of voters.