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By Root 779 0

a terrorist ‘this tomb, this living death that was beginning to suffocate me and in which I was physically dying’. In 1980 she moved to Mexico where she studied sociology and had a child called Akaitz. She decided to return to France in order to negotiate her route back to pre-terrorist normality in Spain. The Spanish authorities agreed not to pressure her into renouncing her political views, while ETA assured her she would be safe. In 1985 she returned to Ordizia, where against her will the Spanish government feted her as a reformed terrorist. Threatening graffiti appeared on walls. She did not help herself by publicly calling Herri Batasuna ‘a puppet of [ETA’s] Fascist militarism’. On 10 September 1986 Yoyes walked with her son to see the town fete. An ETA assassin stalked her: ‘I went up to Yoyes and said, “Are you Yoyes?” She asked me who I was. I said, “I am from ETA and I have come to execute you.” Immediately, I fired two shots from my pistol into her breast. She fell to the ground and I finished her off with another shot to the head.’7

In October 1982 ten million Spanish people voted for the Socialist PSOE in a heady dawn that brought many 1960s radicals to power under the charismatic prime minister (or president of the Council of Ministers), the lawyer Felipe Gonzalez. Among his appointments was José Barrionuevo, who in 1969 had forsaken his Francoist past to join the PSOE. He had been Madrid’s deputy mayor, responsible for the city’s police. He became Spain’s interior minister, retaining many of the intelligence and police officers left over from the Franco years. After ETA had murdered the general commanding the army’s elite Brunete Division, the Socialists adumbrated Plan ZEN - the Spanish acronym for ‘Special Northern Zone’ - which perpetuated the Francoist policy of saturating the Basque country with intrusive policing. This availed them little because ETA could fall back on its cross-border sanctuary in France.

Spanish efforts to get the French to crack down on ETA’s organisation failed because the French did not realise that the Socialists were conceding many Basque nationalist demands; the French also clung to a romantic view of political refugees to compensate for their own dubious policies in the 1930s and 1940s. This led senior elements in Gonzalez’s government, which many suspect included the prime minister himself, to launch a second dirty war, which had commenced even before the murder squad GAL was formed when two young ETA members, Joxean Lasa and Joxi Zabala, the latter on the run in France with his friend after a bank raid, vanished in autumn 1983. Although the police did not realise it at the time, their bones turned up on Alicante’s coast two years later when they were disturbed by a dog. As it would transpire much later, they had been abducted in Bayonne by Guardia Civil and then held in a disused palace assigned to the civil governor and the Ministry of the Interior. There they had been repeatedly tortured before being shot in the back of the neck. A little after their disappearance, an ETA leader riding a scooter in Hendaye was rammed by a Ford Talbot that loomed into view behind him. Four men put a hood on his head and tried to drag him into the boot of the car. French police stumbled on this attempted abduction and found themselves arresting a police inspector and a captain and two sergeants from Spain’s crack anti-terrorism unit. They claimed the incident had been a traffic accident. Later their story shifted to wanting to have a word with their victim. Released on bail, they disappeared back to Spain.

The formation responsible for these nefarious activities was called Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacíon or GAL, in English Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups. Its bombers, kidnappers and killers were an idiosyncratic assortment of boxers, publicans, Marseilles gangsters, mercenaries and a lady so short that the recoil from the shotguns and rifles she used to kill nine people with routinely almost knocked her flat. Her nickname was ‘the Black Lady’, or ‘the Blonde Assassin’ when she donned