The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [110]
In hindsight, the fact that it took two years to achieve a general amnesty for those imprisoned for resisting Franco—two years of demonstrations, petitions, and negotiations to decriminalize opposition to the dictatorship—was one of the early signs that the new Spanish democracy would not be entirely different from the old regime. Guardia Civil attacked peaceful demonstrations for amnesty and on several occasions shot and killed demonstrators.
Another sign was the fate of Eva Forest, a Catalan mother of three who had run a Madrid organization called Solidarity with Basqueland. She had been jailed and tortured in 1974 for the crime of interviewing the ETA commandos who had killed Carrero Blanco and then publishing the interview in Hendaye under the name Julen Agirre “from somewhere in Southern Euskadi.” Police had discovered a draft of the manuscript in her apartment in a random search. The charge was “necessary collaboration,” meaning presumed guilt by circumstance. After the death of Franco, the Spanish continued to hold, interrogate, and torture her. The story is all the more remarkable because Spain was desperately trying to gain acceptance in Europe as a budding Western democracy and freeing Eva Forest was becoming a European cause célèbre. She was finally released in 1977 without ever having been brought to trial.
Freeing Eva Forest was one of many steps in slowly, one group at a time, obtaining the release of political prisoners. Arzalluz showed a new tough leadership, insisting, in line with Basque public opinion, on a total amnesty that would include all ETA members. The last of the imprisoned Basques were released in December 1977. For a few days, Spanish jails held no Basque political prisoners.
In January, a new round of arrests began.
IN 1977, the new democracy that was to end Spain’s isolation in Europe was launched with general elections to a two-house parliament, the Cortes. One month before the elections, the ikurriña was at last legalized when the Basque Nationalist Party demanded the right to use it as their party symbol. Adolfo Suárez, the former Franco technocrat, became the first elected prime minister. His party won 34 percent, and Felipe González’s Socialists came in second with 28 percent. But in the Basque provinces, the parties demanding autonomy from Spain, led by the Basque Nationalist Party, won a clear majority, including ten Senate seats. One of the new Basque Nationalist Party senators was the fiery Joseba Elósegi.
The combination of amnesty and elections had brought many Spanish Basques home from exile. Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria, still dressed in black, returning from the Soviet Union, held her first political rally in Bilbao to the tune of “Eusko gudariak gera” and, at the age of eighty-two, won back her old seat as a deputy from Asturias to the lower house of the Cortes. Born in 1895, only three years younger than Franco, she had outlasted him. “I said they shall not pass, and they haven’t,” the octogenarian Communist deputy insisted defiantly.
Even Sabino Arana was back, his body returned to its grave in Sukarrieta.
Telesforo de Monzón was also back. In 1971 he and Txillardegi, along with thirty-five supporters, had taken refuge in the cathedral in Bayonne and began a hunger strike. After three days, the sixty-seven-year-old Monzón suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized, but he still refused to take nourishment. In 1977 he was still alive and back on the Spanish side, as militant as ever.
THE TIME HAD arrived for what Madrid thought of as the next step toward democracy and what the Basques thought of as the next battle: the drafting of a new Spanish constitution. The hard history of Spain, the divisions of the nineteenth century, lingered on. When Felipe González said that Spain had the “best opportunity” in a century, he was referring to recapturing the opportunity