The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [109]
One of the new king’s first acts was sending a representative to French Basqueland with the task of contacting ETA, assuring them things were going to be very different, and inviting them to negotiate peace. But nothing about Juan Carlos’s demeanor, public image, or initial public acts had given ETA cause to trust him, and they dismissed the offer as insincere.
The last Franco year had broken all records since the 1950s for repression of Basques. The first post-Franco year, which began with Arias Navarro, was barely an improvement. His minister of the interior, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, another figure from Franco’s dictatorship, but one with an image as a reformer, was now disappointingly Francoist. The participants in demonstrations were brutally attacked, and though the number of arrests was drastically reduced, the sixteen Basques killed by Guardia Civil and police in 1976 was barely an improvement over the eighteen in 1975.
Spain had an opportunity at last to catch up with European history, to become a democracy and rejoin the West. As head-of-government, Suárez tried to please the forces pushing for democracy while keeping his old Francoist colleagues and the military content enough to restrain from forcibly overthrowing the government. The rightists wanted a tough policy toward the Basques, and throwing them to the Guardia Civil seemed a small price to pay for persuading the unhappy right wing not to derail the entire process. Even displaying the ikurriña remained illegal.
ETA was not waiting to see how the transition turned out According to Spanish authorities, ETA killed eighteen people in 1976, starting with a Guardia Civil who tried to remove a booby-trapped ikurriña. At this point, ETA had divided into two groups. The killing was done primarily by a group called ETA militar. In an underground publication they identified three types of people they intended to kill: Franco-supported mayors, police collaborators and informants, and law enforcement officials who attempted to remove ikurriñas.
The second group, ETA politico-militar, began the post-Franco era with a new tactic: They would kidnap people for high ransoms. On January 11, 1976, they captured industrialist Francisco Luzariaga, who suffered a heart attack during the kidnapping and was released. Two days later, they took another hostage but released him after a month because it became clear that the victim’s family were Basque nationalists.
All of this might have made ETA unpopular if the Guardia Civil was not at the same time engaged in its tactics of tearing down ikurriñas and disrupting folk festivals. On August 18, the Guardia Civil attacked a Basque song festival in Guernica because of the presence of ikurriñas.
The Basque Nationalist Party was having its own transition. Leizaola took a teaching position and faded into obscurity, while the newly invigorated old party, led by Xabier Arzalluz, an emotional man from an old Carlist family, at last dropped its insistence on loyalty to the Catholic Church. But the old slogan Jaungoikua eta Lagizarra, God and the Old Laws, has remained. Letters in the party still end with un abrazo en JeL, an embrace in JeL, when written in Spanish, or in Euskera, JeL beti gogoan dogula, always remember JeL.
When the Basque Nationalist Party demands the return of the Fueros, it is not asking that the legal code of 1526 be put back into place with its statutes on everything from a woman’s place to the purity of cider. Nor does the party demand complete independence, something the Basques have not had since the Romans. What it wants is the restoration of the ability Basques had under the Fueros to enact their own laws.
But the first order of post-Franco business for the Basques was an amnesty for political prisoners. The amnesty movement, Gestoras Pro-Amnistía, attracted many of the most prominent Basques, including not only stubborn longtime activists like Joseba