Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy. By Paddy Woodworth. Cork University Press. 472 pp, £19.95
Every councillor of every town in the Basque Country (Euskadi) who does not belong to one of the Basque nationalist parties is currently protected by one or more bodyguards. Local politicians who are Communists and Socialists as well as conservatives of the conservative Popular Party, together with judges, university professors and journalists who have spoken out against violent nationalism, are targets of ETA - Euskadi ta Askatasuna(Basque homeland and liberty). Thirty years ago, ETA was a major element in the struggle against the Franco regime. So too, many of those now needing protection and a significant number of those assassinated by the organisation since 1977 were courageous opponents of the dictatorship. How ETA, after playing a part in the demise of the dictatorship, is now at war with Spanish democracy is the subject of one of the most important books about post-Franco Spain ever published.
The Franco dictatorship was the institutionalisation of a victory in the Spanish Civil War won with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini. Oddly, Franco's apparently relaxed style of generalship drove his Axis allies to distraction. He boasted to a senior Italian officer that he could not hurry because of the "need" for "a systematic occupation of territory accompanied by the necessary purge".
He told Mussolini's ambassador, "we must carry out the necessarily slow task of redemption and pacification, without which the military occupation will be largely useless". Redemption meant bloody political purges that would continue long after the war had been won. It meant executions on a scale that later drew protests from none other than Heinrich Himmler, torture, concentration camps and labour battalions. It meant hunger and humiliation for the families of the leftists defined by regime propagandists as subhuman - dirty, filthy, stinking, depraved scum, slime, whores, criminals - in language which then justified the need for "purification". The Catalan and Basque nationalist movements were ruthlessly suppressed, being subjected to a kind of cultural genocide, local institutions and languages suppressed, their leaders executed, exiled or jailed.
A sporadic guerrilla war was waged against the regime throughout the 1940s by those who refused to accept defeat. It was relatively easily suppressed by the army and the regime's massive apparatus of repression. Franco had waged his war of attrition slowly, precisely as he had explained to the Italians, to wipe out liberalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, as well as Catalan and Basque nationalism. In the Civil War and its blood-soaked aftermath, the Caudillo effectively made an investment in state terror. The extent to which he was able to live off the profits was shown throughout 1964 which saw a year-long, nationwide celebration of the "Twenty-Five Years of Peace".
For the defeated, Franco's peace meant the silence of the graveyard. It is in that context that the emergence into worldwide prominence of the Basque revolutionary separatist organisation, ETA, in the late 1960s has to be seen. A well-known police torturer, Inspector Melit≤n Manzanas, was assassinated in San Sebastian in August, 1968. It was the beginning of a long process whereby ETA began to destroy the image and the reality of the Franco regime's invulnerability.
The official reaction of most anti-Franco groups in Spain and in exile was to denounce individual terrorism but privately there was a mixture of concealed glee that the oppressors were getting some of their own medicine, and fear of blanket reprisals. Inevitably, in the Basque Country, repression was intensified with the declaration of a "state of exception" - which relieved the government of even token respect for the empty guarantees of civil liberties written into the Francoist constitution. ETA forced the regime to reveal the blind inflexibility and brutal strong-arm tactics that always lay at its core.
With increasing demands for liberalisation coming from many sectors of a newly dynamic Spanish society in the early 1970s, Francoist intransigence drove regime "progressives" to contemplate dialogue with the moderate opposition. The notorious Burgos trials of ETA militants in December, 1970, provoked an international outcry that put pressure on the regime from inside and outside Spain.
The contribution of ETA to the disintegration of the Franco regime reached its apogee shortly before 9.30 am on Thursday, December 20th, 1973, with the assassination of the dictator's Prime Minister and right-hand man, Carrero Blanco. ETA targeted him because he was scheduled to oversee the Caudillo's plans for the continuity of the regime.
His death reopened many options and probably speeded up the transition to democracy by at least one year. That process came about through a process of negotiation between the moderates of regime and opposition, pushed along far faster than most within the regime wanted by strikes and popular demonstrations, especially in Catalonia and the Basque Country.
By the time of the first democratic elections on June 15th, 1977, there was considerable euphoria about the future. It was assumed that there would be amnesty for political prisoners, including Basques accused of terrorism, and that there would be a high degree of regional autonomy.
In the event, the newly-launched democracy nearly foundered between 1977 and 1981, crushed between the hammer of continuing ETA terrorism and the anvil of military conspiracy. That was largely, but not entirely, the legacy of the dictatorship's narrow-minded centralism and its heavy-handed application to the Basque Country. Although some Etarras left the organisation and moved into conventional parliamentary tactics, there was an unending stream of new recruits who were always ready to use violence for the ultimate goal of an independent Euskadi consisting of the four Spanish and three French Basque provinces.
In a remarkably rare combination of passion and objective clarity, Paddy Woodworth pieces together the labyrinthine story of how the methods used in the 1980s against ETA have left Spanish democracy embroiled in a bitter war. In the mid-1980s, death squads operating under the meaningless name, Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion, carried out a war against ETA in both the Spanish and French Basque Countries, killing 27 people and injuring many more, including children. As Woodworth points out, in the same period, ETA caused at least four times as many victims as GAL.
However, as he shows, GAL posed uncomfortable questions about democracy and created a body of popular support for ETA. In his story lies part of the answer to the paradoxical transformation of ETA from opponent of dictatorship to opponent of democracy. Essentially, the police apparatus of the dictatorship was also the police apparatus of the democratic regime.
Woodworth's vivid prose conveys an evocative feel for many aspects of Basque life. It is based on personal observation and experience. It opens with an account of his time in the mid-1970s as a student in Bilbao when he shared a flat with Julian Sancristobal who, eight years later, would become Director of State Security and responsible for GAL. His determination, as "hard man from the north", to smash ETA provided an umbrella of official support for what was essentially a criminal gang of freelance mercenary assassins.
I remember sitting next to Sancristobal at an official lunch at the time and coming away rather shocked by the crude and thuggish way he spoke about politics. I didn't know the half of it. Now, thanks to Paddy Woodworth, I and others do.
The investigations of the intrepid judge, Baltasar Garzon, led him to Sancrist≤bal who was sent to jail in 1991. When he realised that his ex-comrades were not going to get him out, he ratted on them. His accusations brought the former Minister of the Interior down with him and besmirched the reputation of the charismatic Socialist leader, Felipe Gonzβlez.
Woodworth argues sadly that the Socialists' refusal to accept the guilt of the Minister, JosΘ Barrionuevo, limited the extent to which the final outcome was a triumph for democracy against state terrorism and therefore did not pacify tempers in Euskadi. GAL thus achieved what ETA alone could not - suggest to many Basques that the democratic monarchy of King Juan Carlos was as valid a target for nationalist violence as the Franco dictatorship.
His only optimistic note is that the very fact that there was a judiciary and a press committed to revealing the truth is an impressive symbol of Spain's democratic maturity.
This is a painfully honest, as well as a compellingly readable book which essentially shows that it is impossible to build a new world with the bricks of the old. It is as unputdownable as a thriller and written with a novelist's sensibility, yet never loses sight of the enormity of its subject. This is a complex and disturbing story magisterially deconstructed and retold.
Paul Preston is Principe de Asturiαs Professor and Director of the Ca±ada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies at the London School of Economics. His books include: Franco: A Biography and Comrades!: Portraits from the Spanish Civil War