Ghosts of Spain (44 page)

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.

Watching three city councillors in Bilbao leaving a bar after a coffee, I realised just how saturated with bodyguards the place had become. As they moved, six other people began moving too, getting ahead of them to scour the street, walking beside, behind or just in front of them for the fifty metres it took for them to get back to their offices. Town hall meetings in some places required the presence of dozens of bodyguards. The Basque Country must have had more of them per square mile than anywhere else in Europe.

An already weak ETA called a unilateral ceasefire in 1998. It was dismissed out of hand by Aznar’s government as a trap. Fourteen months later ETA unilaterally brought the ceasefire to
an end. For Basques it was a tantalising taste of peace. For
abertzale
radicals, it was a political boon. Their share of votes increased to between 18 and 20 per cent in municipal and regional elections held that year. For ETA, however, it was a time to rearm and reorganise. It came back fast and furious for a couple of years, but police slowly strangled its capacity for action. By 2002 it was already killing only in single figures. French police became especially active. In 2004, despite its attempts, it failed, for the first year in three decades, to kill anyone at all. The
abertzales
, now gathered in Batasuna, lost one-third of their voters. Then Batasuna was banned altogether.

Numerous ETA members were picked up at what were described as ‘routine police checkpoints’ in France. Rumours began to appear that the same French police officers were at every checkpoint where the terrorists were caught. France had been slowly increasing the pressure on ETA since GAL had carried out attacks on French soil in the 1980s. Now it was arresting dozens of ETA suspects every year. The group’s leadership was broken up time and time again. ETA itself was said to be infiltrated all the way through. Some ETA members even broke the group’s longstanding policy of not shooting back when in France – with
gendarmes
being wounded. That policy had been meant to ease police pressure on the hideouts in France where its leadership, training and logistics are based and from where it organises its attacks.

Spain can claim to have carried out one of the world’s most effective anti-terrorist policies. ETA could keep going for years, if it wanted. It has enough support. Militancy often goes through more than one generation of a family. Even a fresh ceasefire would be no guarantee that it might not reappear at a later date. It looks, however, unlikely ever to become as dangerous as it was in the 1980s – unless, in a radical change, it turns to totally unrestrained attacks against arbitrary targets. That tactic would see its support all but evaporate. A definitive renunciation of violence, meanwhile, would probably see the
abertzale
left launched into the centre of Basque politics. If the 1998 temporary cease-fire gave it 18 to
20 per cent of votes – how much more could it get for a full-time one? Just a little more, and it would become the second power in the region. As its violence decreases at the time of writing this book, hopes grow that it may be tempted to follow that path. Parliament has given the Zapatero government permission to negotiate if ETA renouces violence permanently. Some analysts say that ETA must first recognise that, militarily, it has been defeated. ETA, however, is nothing if not unpredictable.

The one thing police have not been able to crack has been the group’s financing. Much of this used to be provided by the rewards of kidnappings – usually of members of prominent Basque business empires. Several years have gone by, though, since the last kidnapping. ETA’s other main source of income has traditionally been an extortion racket it calls the
impuesto revolucionario
– the revolutionary tax. Directors of large companies, small businessmen, lawyers and accountants are amongst those invited to pay up – or pay the consequences.

Those consequences can run from murder to the firebombing of your shop or business. José María Korta, a business leader from San Sebastián who refused to pay and called on others to follow his example, died when a bomb was placed under his car in August 2000. How many Basques share Korta’s courage? How many pay up? And how many large companies are secretly topping up the group’s funds in order to be left alone? One example serves to suggest that the extortion racket goes much further than most suspect. In 2004, a stock-market-listed vending-machine company called Azkoyen replaced several board members after Judge Garzón accused an executive of handing over £150,000 in extortion money. The company, which operates across forty-two countries and has an annual turnover of £85 million, admitted the cash may have gone missing from its accounts a few years earlier. Azkoyen executive Jesús Marcos Calahorra allegedly drove to Vert in November 2001 where, ‘near to the church, he met two unidentified members of ETA to whom he handed over the money’, according to Garzón.