The victims of the state’s dirty war against ETA are the most forgotten compared to the victims of ETA’s terrorism and even those of the Franco regime. Even more forgotten are the French victims outside ETA, murdered on French soil between 1983 and 1987 by the GALs (Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups) – a third of their 27 crimes – which French institutions continue to ignore. Thus the Spanish institutions of the victims, such as the Fernando Buesa Foundation, the Memorial of the Victims of Terrorism and Covite, the main association of the Basque victims, have begun to make them visible with the aim of France dignifying their memory. The recent exhibition at the San Sebastián de Gogora, Basque Government Memorial, focusing on the major 1985 GAL massacre at the Hotel Monbar in Bayonne – four second-tier ETA members who fled to France – helped highlight their 27 murders.
The proliferation of murders by the GAL of French citizens unrelated to ETA initially suggested bungled actions by mercenaries hired by part of the state apparatus, such as the police officer José Amedo, who had the support of the Minister of the Interior, José Barrionuevo, recalls the professor of the Complutense University of Madrid Jerónimo Ríos, author together with Egoitz Gago of the book State terrorism in front of its victimsS. Amedo would later recognize that these were intentional crimes to intensify pressure on France to collaborate with Spain in the fight against terrorism. Ríos recalls that the first declaration of the GAL, issued in December 1983, already signaled this: “We express our idea of attacking French interests in Europe, since its government is responsible for allowing terrorists to act with impunity in its territory.”
As a result, a third of the 27 murdered by the GAL were non-ETA French citizens, but French institutions ignored these victims. “No one helped us and no one wanted to talk to us. No one asked us, not even to know our pain and our history. In France no one wanted to talk about the GAL. ETA was considered something important, but when you want to talk about the GAL, there is absolute silence”, Veronique Caplanne, daughter of Robert, who was murdered by the GAL in Biarritz in October 1986, recently told Jerónimo Ríos.
Why did the French state ignore the French victims of the GAL? Professor Ríos attributes this to the fact that France has established as official doctrine that ETA is a Spanish problem and placed the GAL murders in these coordinates, even though the victims were French citizens unrelated to ETA attacked on French soil, and there were indications that French police officers collaborated with the terrorist organization that emerged from the Spanish state apparatus. They continued to forget them even when France intensified collaboration with Spain against ETA due to diplomatic pressure and the GAL’s effects on the alarmed French citizens of the Pyrenees-Atlantiques, Ríos points out.
Ríos recounts the case of Sylvie Olascuaga, whose brother Christian was murdered by the GAL in Biriatou in 1984. “Since there was a great silence, she went to the mayor and denied him support. She insinuated that my brother might have a double life. The French political parties were not interested. Everything remains the same in France. There has been no justice for these victims,” says Ríos.
Not even the victims of ETA or their neighbors murdered by the GAL, like the French, had the support of the republican institutions, but they did have the support of the associations around them. abertzale —today he is Egiari Zor—, very exclusive in his support of victims.
Considering the void of French institutions, the French victims of the GAL have connected with Spanish institutions such as the Fernando Buesa Foundation, the Memorial to the Victims of Terrorism and Covite. Since 2023, they have organized three events in recognition of forgotten victims in Biarritz (France) with Véronique Caplanne, victim of the GAL.
Caplanne recently pointed out to Ríos: “In Spain the victims are much more recognized than here. What the Victims’ Memorial or the Buesa Foundation did with me to talk about our experience, in France is impossible. The people who were in the GAL don’t want to talk about it. In Spain there was a judicial trial with few, but some convictions. Here in France, nothing. They continue with the same thing, that the French police did not participate and everything came from Spain.”
But Spain, although better than France, has not reached the minimum desirable in terms of justice, memory and dignity, Ríos points out. Remember that most of the 27 GAL murders were barely investigated, much less solved; Most rulings held a small number of mercenaries responsible.
However, while in France there was no investigative initiative, in Spain two exceptional convictions were pronounced: that of the kidnapping of Segundo Marey and that of the torture and murder of the alleged ETA members José Antonio Lasa and José Ignacio Zabala which condemned, as is known, the minister José Barrionuevo and the secretary of state Rafael Vera, in one case, and the civil governor of Gipuzkoa, Julen Elgorriaga, and the late general of the Guardia Civil Enrique Rodríguez Galindo, in another. “Both sentences hold senior police officials and politicians responsible for the GAL. We have not found anything similar regarding the French victims and the political co-responsibility of the French authorities involved in the GAL,” concludes Ríos. However, Barrionuevo and Vera spent very little time in prison, after being pardoned by President José María Aznar.
Forty years after the GAL murders, the victims aspire to have dignity thanks to the knowledge of the truth, says Ríos, who is very critical of the trivialization of state terrorism that the GAL makes with its statements justifying some of its perpetrators – Barrionuevo, Vera and Amedo – and the moral damage they add to their victims. They want the injustice of those murders to be recognized and the truth told, says Alberto Alonso, director of Gogora.
Relatives of French victims of the GAL, such as Véronique Caplanne, with the support of the Memorial to the Victims of Terrorism, the Buesa Foundation and Covite, are preparing initiatives to commit France to recognizing its forgotten victims, a third of those murdered by the GAL. Gogora’s recent intervention in San Sebastián on its main massacre, that of the four murdered in the Monbar hotel in Bayonne, served to denounce, by the socialist Basque Department of Human Rights, state terrorism and to focus attention on the 27 murders of the GAL, including those of ETA members resident in France. Alonso underlines his “normal welcome”. It is intended to address the recognition of the 35 abandoned victims of the dirty war at the end of the Franco regime and the Transition in 2026. These, in Spanish territory.
