Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [176]
As if to fuel Basque separatist paranoia, in July 1978 mystery gunmen shot up a car driven by former ETA leader Juan José Etxabe in France. He was badly wounded, but his wife was killed by a hail of bullets that almost cut her in half. Another ETA figure, José Miguel Beñaran Ordeñana, was blown to pieces by a bomb in the sleepy French town of Anglet. Further attacks involved rape, before the female victims were shot, and the killing of two gypsy children when a bomb went off outside a playschool. The tactically driven failure of democratic governments to reform the army, intelligence and police services - which thereby acquiesced in Spain’s transition to democracy - meant that parts of the state apparatus were still wedded to the old ways of killing and torture, using Argentine, French and Italian killers to do their dirty work.
In November 1980 about forty people were drinking inside in the Bar Hendayais just across the French border when two men entered and blasted them with a shotgun and bursts from a semi-automatic. Two customers were killed and nine others wounded. The gunmen drove off in a green Renault 18, which sped through the French border post and crashed on the Spanish side. Three men got out with their hands up, and were quickly surrounded by Guardia Civil and armed police. One of those detained proffered a telephone number in Madrid, claiming they were acting under official orders. A policeman then phoned Manuel Ballesteros, head of police intelligence and of the Unified Counter-Terrorist Command, and Spain’s leading expert on ETA. He said: ‘Let the matter drop. No one has seen or heard anything.’ The men disappeared, their identities unknown, never to be seen or heard of again. Across the border, the French police were apoplectic with fury.
The Spanish police intelligence chief was covering for a dirty war waged by an assortment of ultra-right extremists. They included Fuerza Nueva (New Strength) and Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey (Warriors of Christ the King), a version of the Mexican Catholics who had fought the anti-clerical Reds in the 1930s. The personnel included polyglot rightist drifters who washed into Spain on the tide of lost causes: former members of the OAS, the Italian neo-Fascist Ordine Nuovo, the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina or Triple A, and sundry gangsters, fantasists and mercenaries, drawn to what under Franco had been a notorious haven for ex-Nazis and wartime European collaborators. Since this first dirty war has never been extensively investigated, the degree of government involvement remains unclear.
These killings were used as partial justification for ETA’s own outrages. Most of their attacks consisted of individual assassinations or killings of small groups of Guardia Civil, who bore the brunt of their violence. In April 1976 one was imaginatively murdered by a booby-trapped Basque flag that electrocuted him. Targeting was extended to the Basque Ertzaintza police when they participated in counter-terrorism campaigns, and to prison officers too, for holding ETA prisoners in remote Spanish jails became a grievance. Erzaintza officers had to wear black balaclavas to disguise their identities. ETA also murdered several mayors and local government figures for alleged collaboration with the Spanish authorities. More senior army officers have died fighting ETA than in any Spanish war. High-value assassinations included several leading figures in the Spanish armed forces, including more than a