Basque Fatherland and Liberty

Basque Fatherland and Liberty (Euskadi Ta Askatas-una, or ETA), a group of separatists seeking Basque independence from Spain, is responsible for a decades-old liberation campaign whose bombings and murders have left more than 800 dead. Among their most high-profile attacks were the assassination of a Spanish prime minister and the killing of 21 shoppers at a Barcelona supermarket.

[Page 93]Feeling that the right-wing Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) was not significantly advancing the goal of achieving Basque independence from Spain, dissidents created this extremely radical and violent faction of the Basque separatist movement in 1959. ETA's liberation campaign has long been funded by crime, including robbery, kidnapping, and extortion. They have resorted to bombings and the murder of government officials and members of political parties to advance their cause. In 1969 several prominent leaders of the ETA were arrested for their involvement in the death of a police chief. One of the ETA's best-known crimes was the murder of the Spanish prime minister, Carrero Blanco, in 1973. Blanco's assassination was a particular triumph for the ETA, as he was also formerly a top-ranking member of the Francisco Franco administration. Franco was adamantly opposed to Basque self-rule, and when he died in 1975, the activities of the ETA dramatically increased. They founded their political wing, Herri Batasuna (which later changed its name to Batasuna), in 1978, and also began to target members of the People's Party, whose founder had ties to Franco, for assassination.

Overall, the ETA has killed more than 800 people, including 21 people who were killed by an ETA bomb at a supermarket in Barcelona in 1987. Cease-fires took place during peace talks with Spain in 1988, 1995, and 1998, but the talks were unsuccessful, and in all three cases the violence escalated again.

A group similar to the ETA that exists mostly in the French provinces of the Basque region is called Enbata. They offer support to the ETA and the groups sometimes coordinate their terrorist attacks. In 2000 a Spanish group, Jarrai, and a French group, Gasteriak, united to form a youthful faction of the ETA called Haika, which has been responsible for an increase in terrorist attacks in France. Fifteen members of Haika were arrested in March 2001. Later that summer, eight members of the ETA were arrested in Spain when they were found with a car bomb that was already armed for an attack.

The September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, while unrelated to ETA, led to a hardening of the Spanish government's stance toward the group's political wing, Batasuna. The party was banned in 2003, and since then a number of other leftist Basque nationalists parties have been banned as well because they are considered fronts for Batasuna.

Despite the harder line, the Spanish government attempted to enter into negotiations with the ETA in 2006, leading the group to declare a “permanent” cease-fire in May. That cease-fire lasted until late December, when a bomb set off by the ETA in a Madrid airport killed two people. The ETA demanded that the Spanish government lift the ban on Batasuna and move people imprisoned for ETA activities to jails in Basque territory. In addition, the organization violently opposed a high-speed rail line that was under construction and would link the Spanish capital of Madrid to cities in the Basque region. On December 3, 2008, ETA gunmen killed a businessman involved in the rail project. The group also claimed responsibility for a 2009 bombing on the island of Mallorca that killed two police officers.

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