Basque History of the World (32 page)

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 become Basque nationalists. By the 1970s, only about half the members of ETA had two Basque parents.

More than a cynical calculation, this was a necessary reform. After all, even Txillardegi was an Alvarez whose family had come from Madrid.

T
ERMS SUCH AS
national liberation, class struggle, revolution
were heard increasingly. Under Leizaola, the Basque Nationalist Party began openly denouncing ETA as “a Communist organization.”

Txillardegi struggled to master his own creation until 1967, when the clandestine network of cells managed only its fifth meeting in eight years, consisting of two encounters which together were called Assembly V.

By this time there may have been as many as 450 members. The second of the encounters was held on Easter week, 1967, in Guetaria, Guipúzcoa. The assembly published a document titled “The Official Ideology of ETA.” According to this document, ETA was now “a Basque socialist national liberation movement” defining its nationalism as “revolutionary nationalism” that would fuse the Basque people and their struggle for national liberation with the working-class struggle for “social liberation.” One moment ETA appeared to be Basque nationalist, but the next, it was supporting Spanish workers against a Basque bourgeoisie. It was a complex blend of Marx, Mao, Fidel Castro, and Sabino Arana—Miguel Unamuno’s worst nightmare, ideologies run amok, ism heaped on ism.

Assembly V changed the entire leadership. A new generation that had never known the Basque government or the Second Republic, that had been born in the hungry years of the 1940s and never experienced anything but the grinding stagnation of the Franco dictatorship, took over ETA. The man who presided over the assembly by unanimous acclaim was Txabi Etxebarrieta.

Born in Bilbao in 1944, Etxebarrieta was the author of much of the revolutionary theory of the new ETA. While he was being elevated to the executive committee of the new armed wing of the organization, the older Txillardegi and most of the other founders left or were forced out. “It was a sad period in my life,” said Txillardegi. “I just didn’t believe in this.”

In the 1960’s, in Basqueland, Txabi was a name much like Che in Latin America. He was the most popular leader ETA ever had, a man of clear intelligence with a vision—a plan for Basque independence through selective violence and close alliance with social causes and labor unions. But more than an intellectual, he was a man of action, ready to test his physical courage in the fight for his beliefs. Txabi was an anti-Franco revolutionary.

He earned two distinctions. He was the first ETArist to kill, and he was the first ETA leader to be shot down by the Guardia Civil.

Following Assembly V, ETA became more active. The Guardia Civil began a practice of spot checks along the roads. On June 7, 1968, a Guardia Civil stopped a car in Guipúzcoa that happened to have Etxebarrieta and a colleague inside. The two opened fire and killed the Guardia Civil, a man named José Pardines. Later, Etxebarrieta was tracked down and killed. It was still the same pattern: an eye for an eye between ETA and the Guardia Civil. Only the nature of the acts was escalating. Txabi had counted on this, believing that provoking Guardia Civil would in turn provoke Basques, and eventually a general uprising would be provoked. Next would be ETA’s turn.

12: Eventually Night Falls

Baina gaua dator, joan dira sapelaitsak, eta trikuak,
Marraskilo, Zizare, Zomorro, Armiarma, Igel,
Erreka utzi eta mendiaren pendizari ekiten dio,
seguru bere arantsetaz nola egon baitzitekeen
Gerlari bat bere eskutuaz, Espartan edo Korinton;

Eta bapatean, zeharkatu egiten du
belardiaren eta kamio berriaren arteko muga;
Zure eta nire denboran sartzen de pauso bakar batez,
Eta nola here hiztegi unibertsala ez den
azkeneko zazpi mila urteotan berritu,
ez ditu ezagutzen gure automobilaren argiak,
ez da ohartzen bere heriotzaren hurbiltasunaz ere.

Eventually night falls, the eagles disappear and the hedgehog,
Frog, Snail, Spider, Worm, Insect,
Leaves the river and walks up the side of the mountain,
as confident in his spines
as any warrior with his shield in Sparta or in Corinth;

and suddenly he crosses the border, the line
that separates the earth and the grass from the new road;
with one step he enters your time
and mine, and since his dictionary of the universe
has not been corrected or updated
in the last seven thousand years,
he does not recognize the lights of our car,
and does not even realize that he is going to die.

—Joseba Irazu Garmendia, a.k.a. Bernardo Atxaga
,
T
RIKUARENA
(The Hedgehog)

O
N
A
UGUST
2, 1968, Melitón Manzanas, a hated San Sebastián police captain, was returning to Villa Arana, his three-story home in Irún within walking distance of the French border. As he approached the steps to his house, he heard the words, “Melitón, look who’s killing you.”

He fumbled for a sidearm, but with his wife listening on the other side of the door, seven bullets were pumped into his body. This was “Operation
Sagarra
.” In Euskera,
sagarra
means “apples,” as does
manzanas
in Spanish. ETA humor.

It was ETA’s second killing and first planned assassination. Txabi was avenged.

The target was well chosen. Others had been considered, even attempted, but the victim, Manzanas, was as loathed as Tkabi had been loved. In Basqueland the vengeance was viewed with satisfaction.

The regime responded on cue. The assassination occurred on a Friday and Franco declared a state of siege throughout Basqueland on Monday. It lasted for months, and thousands of Basques were arrested and tortured. Some were sentenced to years in prison. Once the state of siege was under way, the Basque Nationalist Party said through one of its publications, for the first time since 1947, that it was not opposed to the use of violence.

The repression culminated with the December 1970 trials in Burgos. The Burgos trials, show trials of sixteen alleged ETA members charged with “military rebellion, banditism, and terrorism,” were the kind of disaster for Franco that ETA members had always dreamed of provoking. From the courtroom they shouted, “
Gora Euskadi!
,” and sang the hymn “Eusko gudariak gera.” ETA had returned Basques to their image of the 1930s and 1940s—the heroic Basques, standing up to fascism. The one new addition was an occasionally shouted slogan: “
Iraultza ala hil!
” Revolution or Death, a line borrowed from the Cuban Revolution. International intellectual celebrities such as the Catalan painter Joan Miró declared their support for ETA. After three ETA members were condemned to death in Burgos, demonstrations broke out, not only in Bilbao and Pamplona but in Barcelona, Seville, Oviedo, and Madrid. The governments of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, West Germany, France, Belgium, the Vatican, and Australia petitioned the Spanish government not to carry out the sentences.

Franco’s close advisers convinced the aging and confused Caudillo, after considerable resistance on his part, that it would be a blunder to carry out the death sentences, and he reluctantly commuted them to life imprisonment.

A
S IN MOST PLACES
in the world, in Basqueland the late 1960s was both the worst and best of times to be attending a university. Franco had barred public universities from the “traitor provinces,” but there were two private universities: Deusto, run by the Jesuits in Bilbao, and the more prestigious University of Pamplona, run by the Opus Dei, an elite conservative Catholic lay order. To attend the public university system, most Basques had to leave, go to Madrid or Zaragoza.

However, it had always been Franco’s policy, while repressing the Basques, to nurture Basque industry. This meant that a few university facilities teaching such subjects as economics and engineering had to be available in Bilbao. The economics school in Bilbao was called Sarriko. The government did not want a university in Basqueland full of dissident students studying literature, history, and political science, but those who were interested in engineering, steelmaking, or banking could go to school in Vizcaya.

By 1968, Franco’s plan had clearly failed. Many young Basques had decided to study economics. Txabi, the singular hero of the student body, had been an economics graduate from Sarriko. Deusto, across the river from the center of Bilbao, was known as a breeding ground for militant Basque nationalism. But Sarriko students thought the radicals of Deusto were too moderate, and said they “hid behind the skirts of the Jesuits.”

“Txabi was a strong model, he still is,” said Joseba Irazu, who, like many Sarriko students of the late 1960s, was an unlikely economics student. He had chosen the school largely because he wanted to stay in Basque country, and he had chosen economics because it was taught there.

Joseba Irazu Garmendia was born in 1951 in Asteasu, a village of stone-walled Basque houses tucked into the velvet green mountain slopes of Guipúzcoa. Although only twenty miles inland from San Sebastián, it was then an isolated community of 1,000 people that waited for two Spanish newspapers to be delivered once a day by donkey. Joseba grew up speaking Euskera at home with his carpenter father and his schoolteacher mother, who had been expelled from the school system because she was Basque. In Asteasu, most people spoke Euskera in their houses, but once they passed the front door, they switched to Spanish.

The new teachers, the ones who had replaced teachers like Joseba’s mother, were pro-Franco. Joseba described his teacher as “Fascist but sensible.” The sensible Fascist once made him hold out his fingers to beat the tips with a stick after Joseba had been overheard speaking Euskera. But the teacher did not do this very often, because he remembered his predecessor, who, after beating the fingertips of two husky Euskera-speaking boys, was tossed out the schoolhouse window by them. “We have a guerrilla tradition,” explained Joseba.

By the late 1960s, when Joseba decided to study economics at Sarriko, Basque life and especially the Basque language were changing. In the 1960s, with limited U.S. help but still largely in isolation, Franco had finely been able to move the Spanish economy—by subsidizing Basque industry. After centuries of being highly competitive in the world, this industry had now become absurdly overblown. Instead of the cheapest steel in Europe, the Basques now produced some of the most expensive. The government was covering the high cost of production and guaranteeing a price-controlled Spanish market. Like Franco himself, this false economy was certain to collapse, but the end was not in sight. For now Spain, especially northern Spain, was enjoying some relief from years of misery.

Without the crushing pressure of economic collapse, the Basques, defiant again, were expressing themselves through culture. “For years the Basque society had been underground like a potato,” Joseba said. “And in the 1960s a new Basque country was born.”

Traditional folk festivals that had been banned after the Civil War were being celebrated once again, and traditional dances and music began reappearing. In 1960, three ikastolas, the first since the Civil War, were opened. While studying economics, Joseba for the first time heard songs, ballads of political protest, in his language.

Singers such as Benito Lertxundi from Guipúzcoa, and a number of singers from the French side, including the mayor of Cambo, Michel Labéguerie, sang songs that every student knew by heart, in a style the Cuban Revolution had learned from Joan Baez and popularized with all the leftist movements of the Spanish-speaking world. Because Franco did not understand the impact of 45 rpm records, college campuses had stacks of Lertxundi’s songs of Basque nationalism sung in Euskera.

“Only 10 percent of the students spoke Basque,” Joseba said, “but everyone knew how to say strike in Basque—
greba
.”

The most significant cultural advance of the 1960s was that the Basque Academy of Language at last realized its dream of unifying the Basque language. Although the earliest record of written Basque is from the third century, it remained mostly an oral language until the twentieth century. The reason for its slow development as a written language was not, as Unamuno had suggested, that agglutinating languages are unsuitable for literature. The problem was that Euskera varied so much from one region to another. The local dialect worked well for talking to a neighbor. It asserted intimacy, membership in a community. But Spanish, the universal language, was preferred for writing something down to be read by a large number of people.