Spain: ETA developments - full text
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The police in France on Aug. 13 had announced that an arms cache, which they said belonged to ETA, had been discovered in a rented garage in the French town of Biarritz. The Spanish authorities, cited in a report published on Aug. 13 by the International Herald Tribune, said that the cache included up to 40 kg of explosives, two bombs, and 150 detonators.
Immediate Context
The attack on the police station and the discovery of the arms cache were widely seen as indications that ETA was resuming its decades-long campaign of bombings and murders, after the declaration of the end of the latest ceasefire in June. The ceasefire had been broken, however, when ETA detonated an 800-kg bomb at Barajas airport in Madrid (the capital) in December 2006.
ETA was responsible for a series of bomb attacks, including those against two hotels in July 2003 in the coastal resorts of Alicante and Benidorm, on the Costa Blanca, in south-east Spain. A car bomb attack near Pamplona, which killed two police officers in May 2003, was ETA’s first fatal attack since the shooting of two police officers in Andoain in February 2003 and its last deadly attack before the March 2006 ceasefire agreement. In November 2001 an ETA car bomb exploded in a busy residential area of Madrid, injuring as many as 95 people. ETA guerrillas were initially suspected of carrying out the bombings of commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004, the worst peacetime attack on civilians in Spain's modern history, but the attacks were later proven to have been the work of Islamic militants.
Reaction and Outlook
According to the Washington Post of Aug. 24, there had been no warning of the attack and ETA had not claimed responsibility, but a police spokesman was reported to have said: “We have little doubt it was [ETA].” The Guardian of Aug. 24 quoted Interior Minister Alfredo Rubalcaba as saying that a number of attempted ETA attacks had been foiled by the authorities since June.
The discovery of the arms cache in Biarritz, in the Basque region of southern France, which ETA guerrillas were widely known to use as a safe haven and to store weapons, had indicated that the group was preparing to resume its campaign of bombings, the BBC online new service reported on Aug. 13. The weapons were discovered by the owner of the garage, who visited the premises after the rental agreement expired and losing contact with the tenant. Some media reports said that the authorities believed that Juan Cruz Maiza, ETA’s “logistics chief”, had rented the garage in February, paying six months’ rent in advance. The BBC online news service reported on Aug. 13 that no arrests had been made but noted that the police were continuing to search the garage for fingerprints.
Historical Context
The Basque peoples, an ethnic and culturally distinct group of around 2.5 million people, mainly inhabited four provinces in northern-western Spain and three provinces in south-western France. Prior to Spain’s civil war, which broke out in 1936, the Basque region of Spain enjoyed a degree of local autonomy, but this was strongly suppressed after General Francisco Franco assumed the presidency in 1939. During Franco’s military dictatorship (1939-75), Basques were subjected to widespread persecution, including a ban on the native Basque language (“Euskara”) and the imprisonment, torture, and execution of separatist activists.
ETA (“Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna” or “Basque Homeland and Freedom”) was formed in 1959, mainly as a response to Franco’s repressive regime. The first victim of ETA’s campaign of violence was Meliton Manzanas, the head of Franco’s political police in the province of Guipuzcoa. Manzanas was shot dead outside his home in the Basque city of Irun in August 1968. In December 1970 six ETA members were sentenced to death by firing squad after being convicted of Manzanas’s murder, although General Franco later commuted the death sentences to 30 years in prison.
When King Juan Carlos I assumed power in 1975, following Gen. Franco’s death, Spain took gradual steps towards Western-style democracy, returned some local autonomy to the Basque region, and pardoned some political prisoners convicted during the dictatorship. Despite the return of a measure of regional autonomy, some ETA hardliners, disillusioned with moderate Basque nationalists, began demanding independence and stepped up the group’s campaign of violence. Amongst ETA’s most notorious attacks, was the assassination in December 1973 of Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco, who was killed when an underground bomb exploded beneath his car.
Some estimates suggested that more than 800 people had been killed by ETA, including police officers, politicians and members of the judiciary, since it began its campaign of violence in the 1960s.
ETA first announced an “indefinite and total” unilateral truce in September 1998, but resumed its bombing campaign in January 2000, when an army officer, Lt-Col Pedro Antonio Blanco, was killed in a car bomb attack in Madrid.
