Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [172]
Despite the heady talk of Che Guevara, ETA’s initial activities were on a par with what students do everywhere: daubing slogans or the acronym ‘ETA’ on walls and surreptitiously flying the red, white and green Basque flag. The more a person demonstrated, the more they were liable to be savagely beaten up by the Guardia Civil, who were not known for their restraint. If you look for trouble, you tend to find it, as a leading ETA member recalled:
Ten years ago in the festival of Aya, I was wearing a cap with four clusters of ribbons hanging from it. They [the police] grabbed me, they took off the ribbons and they took away my identity card, and they told me to come to Ataun the next day to get it. I went there and they made me return home and come back with the cap that I had on in Aya. I went back with the cap. They slapped me around a little, and yelled at me. And I had to remain quiet. The ribbons were the Basque colours. They gave me a fine of five hundred pesetas and they let me leave.4
Participation in strikes and demonstrations was banned across Spain as a whole, and brought a heavy-handed response from the police, who in the Basque provinces were equally brutal towards any manifestation of separate national consciousness. Repression drove Basque militants off the city streets and up into the hills and mountains where they could plausibly claim to be engaged in climbing or hiking. Others joined ETA as their cuadrilla, that is the groups of boys who hung around together from childhood, and whose bonds were closer than those of extended Basque families. ETA recruiters identify suitable candidates, and then spend months grooming them, through tasks of escalating risk, until they became fully fledged members of the terrorist organisation. It is a long-drawn-out and considered process, with opportunities for disengagement, rather than a hot-blooded spur-of-the-moment enthusiasm.
On 18 July 1961 ETA attempted to derail a train carrying Nationalist veterans of the Civil War to twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations held in San Sebastian. The attack failed miserably. In response, 110 ETA members were rounded up and tortured, before being given jail sentences of between fifteen and twenty years. Another hundred or so supporters fled across the border to France, whose three French Basque provinces - Soule, Labourd and Basse-Navarre - became a haven for ETA despite the fact that most French Basques reject ETA’s politics. Of course, the highly centralised French state has never conceded its Basques an iota of autonomy.
In exile, the surviving ETA leadership formed an Executive Committee, with four subordinate fronts, for finance, politics, armed struggle and culture. They adopted an eight-year plan, in which propaganda and training would eventuate in an escalating series of terrorist attacks designed to trigger all-out guerrilla war. The Fourth Assembly, held in secret in Spain in 1965, also saw the adoption of the action-repression-action spiral-of-violence theory. Each terrorist attack would provoke a stronger counter-reaction, whose random violence would swell the numbers of ETA supporters. This strategy was much favoured at the time by revolutionaries who seem to have imagined they were directing a play, in control of each actor’s action and reaction. In the case of the Monteneros in Argentina and Tupamaros in Uruguay, this proved to be a disastrous calculation, the sort of thing middle-class students envisage in woeful underestimation of the dark forces they stirred up with their ludic Robin Hood ventures. In Uruguay it led to the replacement of Latin America’s sole democracy by a police state, while in Argentina