The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [97]
Marxism was moving ETA farther from the Basque Nationalist Party and closer to workers’ movements. In 1960, the unexpected death from heart failure of fifty-four-year-old José Antonio Aguirre dramatically accelerated this process. Aguirre died in Paris, and his body was brought to St.-Jean-de-Luz, to the home of Telesforo de Monzón. ETA had called Aguirre “our beloved leader,” and its members were among the mourners. Aguirre, partly a product of the dramatic times he lived through, but also through his own eloquence, had been a universal symbol for Basque nationalists—the lehendakari who, like his government, had died young and would be remembered uncritically. His replacement, Jesús María Leizaola, a San Sebastián-born academic ten years older than Aguirre, had none of the first lehendakari’s charisma.
Forgotten by a new generation, if they had ever known, was Leizaola, the young student who had been marched from Bermeo in handcuffs for sixteen miles by Guardia Civil for having shouted, “Jaungoikua eta lagizarra;” Leizaola, the young defender of the church in the first Republican Cortes, who was punched in the face in mid-debate by an angry Socialist; and the Basque Government’s Minister of Justice who had risked his own safety to preserve order in Bibao until the final day of retreat. It is indicative of Leizaola’s standing that it was always rumored that Aguirre’s most unpopular decision, the 1947 disarming of nationalists, had been Leizaola’s idea.
Whereas the Basque Nationalist Party was a conservative movement led by the heirs of Vizcaya industry, the young ETA movement wanted to recruit among workers. Occasional illegal factory worker strikes were the only visible form of resistance to the regime. And Basque labor had a small measure of power because Basque industry was vital for Franco’s hopes of economic recovery. With the help of U.S. credits, Franco was trying to rebuild industry, restoring Vizcaya at the same time he was singling it out for persecution. In 1956, 70 percent of all pig iron and 60 percent of all steel produced in Spain came from the province of Vizcaya.
ETA would not have been able to recruit among workers if it had not rewritten Aranism. Their new nonracist definition of Basques was essential since many of the workers were of non-Basque origin. To be a Basque, they had only to learn the language and embrace the culture, which many did. And even the ones who didn’t, posed no ideological problem for the new nationalists. Asked who is a Basque, Txillardegi recently said, “A Basque is someone who speaks Basque. But there are Basques who don’t It is something imposed by Madrid. They are victims.”
A workable definition of who is a Basque also became more important because Franco had a policy of populating Basque country with people from other parts of Spain. By the time of his death in 1975, more than 40 percent of the population of the Spanish Basque provinces had no Basque parent.
Guernica’s medieval streets had been rebuilt with 1940s brick architecture, occasionally adorned with a surviving archway. It is an odd-looking town because of its uniform 1940s style, set on a medieval street plan. Older residents say that the original city before the war had straighter streets, as though the loss of antiquity had been compensated for with a more antique-looking street plan. The people here who are old enough to remember the war still speak of only two sides: the Reds and the Fascists. Many of the people who moved in after the town was rebuilt were considered to be the latter. Still, if they were open to Basque culture, if they learned the language, then, as far as ETA was concerned, they could become Basques, and, more important, they could