When Franco died in November 1975, ETA split into two factions, the military ETA and the political-military ETA. Their breakup occurred a year before the dictator’s death, following the indiscriminate massacre he perpetrated in September 1974 in the Rolando café on Correo street in Madrid. The massacre was intended to derail the reformist solution that was beginning to emerge for the Franco regime and was taken over by the military ETA, which created a closed and militaristic structure that shaped the future of ETA for decades. The other faction, the political-military one of ETA, even if it took another seven years for the violence to stop, created a more political structure and supported its participation in the first democratic elections of 1977 through the candidacy of Euskadiko Ezkerra. He passed away in 1982.
The underlying question is how it was possible for the military ETA to survive Franco’s death for 36 years, from 1975 to 2011, in a Spain with a democracy recognized with its entry into the EEC in the mid-1980s and in an Euskadi with the greatest self-government in its history. José Antonio Pérez, historian and specialist at the University of the Basque Country (UPV), argues that ETA failed in its attempted insurrection against the Basque population with its action-repression-action strategy precisely because “Euskadi had a political and economic standard of living that Vietnam or Cuba lacked.”
But he also admits, together with Luis Castells, professor of History at the UPV, that after Franco’s death, ETA accumulated enormous political capital which explains its survival: “The Franco regime, with the death sentences of its militants, later pardoned, in the Burgos trial of 1970, gave ETA a political victory, being recognized as the spearhead of anti-Francoism. It increased its prestige with the assassination of the president of the Franco government, Luis Carrero Blanco, in 1973, and with the shooting of his militants Txiki and Otaegui in 1975, which revived the repressive brutality of the Franco regime.
This is underlined in his book by Eduardo Uriarte, sentenced to death in the Burgos trial and pardoned looking back that the most immobile sector of the Franco regime publicized and overvalued ETA to stop the regime’s reformists: “We should not be surprised by the social acceptance of ETA (after Franco’s death). It was precisely the regime’s press that allowed us to continue to describe ourselves as heroes, despite disqualifying fragments, easy to reject due to the crudeness of their presentation.”
After Franco’s death and during the Transition, the State failed and was unable to reverse the situation, Castells points out. “The state apparatus failed, especially the security forces educated in the Franco regime that the UCD governments did not control and who committed serious abuses, including deaths, practiced torture, there was a dirty war. The state was weak. The transition did not consolidate democratization in the Basque Country and did not undermine the political capital of ETA.” The far-right coup plotter, also part of the army, systematically invoked ETA to destabilize the new democracy. His invocation of February 23, 1981 was relevant.
During the transition, ETA was at its peak. Mario Onaindia recalls in his memoirs that the military leader of ETA, José Miguel Beñarán Argalahe told him that it was absurd to accept the reform when they had the queue to enlist in his project of violent rupture. “ETA didn’t just have the support of violent radical nationalism. It was a reference for sectors of the left and trade unionism who saw that ETA achieved what they couldn’t, even by putting the state on the ropes,” says Pérez. “A 1979 poll indicated that 50% of Basques considered ETA members to be patriots and idealists and only 18% described them as murderers,” Castells recalls.
Between the end of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, ETA suffered serious setbacks with the entry of Spain into the EEC, the collaboration of the French police or the arrest of its leaders in Bidart (France). But he survived. “ETA expanded its capital accumulated during the Franco regime and consolidated a social and political base on an ethnolinguistic nationalism. It created a faithful, endogamous community of believers, with a mystical and uncritical discourse. Despite the progress of democratic Spain, it managed to impose the victimist discourse, that of gudaris (Basque soldiers) of today, avengers of the gudaris defeated in 1937 by the Franco regime. “Regular support of around 150,000 votes and 15% of the Basque electorate has been consolidated,” says Pérez. At the same time, it has managed to establish a culture of violence, Castells points out, driven by the emotional drive of a highly mobilized and politicized base that has come to exclude the right to life as a fundamental right.
Herri Batasuna’s control over youth social movements is worth mentioning. “They influenced anti-nuclear groups, radical rock, feminist sectors and collective negotiations. In this way they guaranteed the continuity of the left.” abertzale in the new generations who did not experience the Franco regime”, says Alberto Alonso, director of the Gogorá.
The 2000s marked the end of ETA terrorism. The leaders abertzales They imposed themselves on an ETA greatly weakened by police repression, when they realized that they were putting their social movement at risk, made illegal by their complicity with it. Terrorism ceased in 2011 after killing 853 people. It has been politically defeated, but it is not yet socially delegitimized. And just as the most ultra sector of the Franco regime continued to use ETA, after the death of the dictator, to destabilize democracy, today, without ETA, the most ultra right continues to use it in the opposition to attack progressive governments.
