• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1075 0

like superintendent Amedo, had bank accounts containing exorbitant sums; Amedo’s held twenty-seven million pesetas when his net annual salary was just under two million, a disparity that seemed to explain his sybaritic lifestyle. The Socialists used every available method to obstruct investigations into GAL murders - notably withholding evidence and rallying around the accused to prevent them turning state’s witness - while smearing journalists, lawyers and the conservative opposition for pursuing this. The belligerently porcine Gonzalez himself insisted that ‘no one will succeed in demonstrating’ links between GAL and the state, while simultaneously claiming that ‘The rule of law is defended in the courts, and in the salons, but also in the sewers,’ a devious way of saying that GAL’s actions were justified. Apparently preferring Hobbes to Montesquieu, Gonzalez would subsequently claim that the judiciary had become over-mighty vis-a-vis the elected executive. Another, disgraceful form of defence was to claim that ‘everybody else does it’. Gonzalez’s wife, the noted democrat and feminist Carmen Romero, claimed: ‘Why should we lose sleep because of a phenomenon which has happened in Spain like it happened in France, in Germany, in all democratic countries? Phenomena of dirty tricks, settling of accounts, are normal in very many countries.’ This was said in the context of José Barrionuevo, her husband’s former interior minister, being jailed for ten years for his involvement with GAL, following several very senior police figures into prison.8

ETA atrocities ran parallel with these revelations. Brief ceasefires in the late 1980s came to nothing, with ETA complaining about the pace of negotiations. In 1992 it launched its local version of the Palestinian Intifada - the kale borroka or street struggle - in which groups of youths and minors vandalised buses, street lamps, ATMs, telephone kiosks and rubbish bins, while beating up anyone carrying a Spanish newspaper. This was designed to increase the flow of recruits who lacked their grandparents’ experiences of being beaten up by Guardia Civil. Three years later ETA put forward a ‘Democratic Alternative’ in which it offered a cessation of violence in return for Madrid recognising the sovereignty of the Basque people over ‘their’ territory, the right to self-determination, and the release of all ETA prisoners. This was rejected. That year, ETA narrowly failed to kill the opposition leader, José María Aznar, with a car bomb, making an abortive attempt on the life of king Juan Carlos too. In July 1997, by which time Aznar was prime minister, ETA kidnapped a People’s Party deputy, Miguel Angel Blanco, ordering the government to relocate all ETA prisoners within forty-eight hours. He was shot dead when the government did not respond. Six million people demonstrated throughout Spain—including the Basque country—to secure his release, with many more coming on to the streets to scream ‘Assassins!’ after Blanco had been killed. In 1998 ETA declared a unilateral ceasefire, so as to negotiate with Aznar’s government, a ceasefire the terrorists broke in 2000, and which they may only have called so as to regroup and rearm. On 6 November 2001 sixty-five people were hurt by a car bomb in Madrid, with further attacks on football stadiums and tourist resorts. The events of 9/11 led to the banning of Herri Batasuna and the nationalist youth group Jarrai. Spanish police have thwarted several ETA attacks—not least by detecting an enormous truck bomb by a motorway. Another ‘permanent’ ceasefire declared on 22 March 2006 was called off on 5 June the following year. To herald this development ETA killed two Ecuadorean immigrants in December 2006 as they napped in a car at Barajas airport when ETA collapsed a car park with a bomb. ETA apologised for what it called these ‘collateral casualties’.

ETA is engaged in armed struggle to this day. It claims that it has been cheated of the further possibilities allegedly promised when the Basques achieved autonomy. It further claims that many of the things the