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and troubling ways. Groups of right wingers, popularly known as incontrolados, attacked Basque nationalists, killing thirty-five people during this period. But were they really uncontrolled as their name suggested? In November 1980, someone walked into a small, dark, crowded bar, the Bar Hendayais, on a narrow street that dropped down to the bay in central Hendaye, and sprayed the drinking customers with machine gun bullets, killing two, both French citizens, and wounding ten others. The bar, said to be popular with Basque nationalists, was only a few minutes from the border, the St. Jacques Bridge, and three Spaniards were intercepted at the crossing by Guardia Civil. After a phone call to Madrid, they were taken to Irún and released. The attack was claimed by an unknown group called the Basque-Spanish Battalion.

Felipe González’s Spanish Socialist Workers Party joined with the Communists and the Basque Nationalist Party in demanding to know if the government was sponsoring this Basque-Spanish Battalion.

The atmosphere became even more tense in January, when Suárez suddenly resigned from the government without explanation. Was he trying to pacify an angry military that had turned against him? He wouldn’t say.

On the same day as the resignation, ETA kidnaped José María Ryan, an engineer at the Lemóniz nuclear power plant. During the nuclear power controversy of the 1970s, no proposed nuclear plant anywhere was more bitterly opposed than the one in Lemóniz. In 1977 an ETA commando was killed attempting to attack the construction site. In 1978, ETA blew a twelve-inch hole in a steam generator at the site, killing two workers. By the time the project was abandoned in 1982, it had been the object of not only constant demonstrations, several with more than 50,000 participants, but also 250 attacks, primarily by ETA.

Lemóniz was part of a project undertaken by the Franco regime to provide power for Basque industry. A series of three reactors had been planned on the Deba River, none of which was ever completed. Given the unpopularity of nuclear energy in Europe at the time, only a military dictatorship could have contemplated a nuclear power program in Basque country. Lemóniz, which was dangerously close to Bilbao, a city too large to evacuate in the event of an accident, was begun in 1972, but the new democracy had to face the combined forces of ETA and a suddenly liberated ecology movement with thousands of backers. Though Arzalluz and the Basque Nationalist Party supported the plan, which was contracted to companies controlled by the old families of Vizcayan industry, their stance was always unpopular.

In addition to the distrust of the technology itself, which was common to many Europeans in areas where plants had been installed, there was a political issue. Basques were supposed to control their own energy system, but no one believed the Spanish would let them run a nuclear plant autonomously. Nuclear power implied centralized authority, and not only Basque but Galician, Catalan, Breton, Wallonian Belgian, Scot, and Welsh nationalists were among the fiercest antinuclear activists in Europe.

At the time of the Ryan kidnaping, the Spanish king and queen were scheduled to visit Basque country, and, in keeping with tradition, they were to meet with the Basques at the Batzarretxea, the meeting house by the oak of Guernica. The royal couple flew to Vitoria, which had become the capital of the Autonomous Community. Defying protocol, the Basque government organized no official welcome. While the king reviewed Spanish troops, Herri Batasuna activists sang “Eusko gudariak gera.”

When the king delivered his speech in the Batzarretxea in Guernica, he was again outvoiced, by the elected Herri Batasuna delegation singing the Basque hymn. The Basque Nationalist Party disapproved and wanted the Herri Batasuna delegation silenced, but it also made it clear to the king that the only relationship with the monarch that interested the party was not the one in the constitution but the Foral relationship which was now unconstitutional.

The