ETA and the Basque Conflict
A Basque separatist group born under Franco wages a bombing and assassination campaign that kills some 850 people, most of them after democracy arrived.
- Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy — Paddy Woodworth, Yale University Press (2002)
- Endgame for ETA: Elusive Peace in the Basque Country — Teresa Whitfield, Hurst (2014)
- Spain: A History — Raymond Carr (ed.), Oxford University Press (2000)
ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, “Basque Homeland and Freedom”) was founded in 1959 by young nationalists frustrated with the cautious opposition to Franco. It killed for the first time in 1968, and its 1973 assassination of Franco’s prime minister Carrero Blanco won it sympathy even among some non-Basques. But its deadliest years came after democracy, around 1978–80, and attacks went on for three decades. Its victims, by official counts about 850 dead, included the 21 shoppers killed in the 1987 Hipercor bombing in Barcelona and the young councillor Miguel Ángel Blanco, kidnapped and murdered in 1997, which brought millions of Spaniards into the streets.
- Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy — Paddy Woodworth, Yale University Press (2002)
- Endgame for ETA: Elusive Peace in the Basque Country — Teresa Whitfield, Hurst (2014)
The state’s response included a “dirty war”: in 1983–87 the GAL death squads, linked to Interior Ministry officials of the Socialist government, killed 27 people, and a former interior minister was later jailed. Under police pressure and with its support base exhausted, ETA declared a permanent ceasefire in October 2011, disarmed in 2017 and announced its dissolution in May 2018.
- Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy — Paddy Woodworth, Yale University Press (2002)
- Endgame for ETA: Elusive Peace in the Basque Country — Teresa Whitfield, Hurst (2014)
A terrorist group that murdered politicians, police, journalists and children for decades in a democracy; its defeat was a victory of the rule of law, and its political heirs owe a full reckoning.
- Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy — Paddy Woodworth, Yale University Press (2002)
- Endgame for ETA: Elusive Peace in the Basque Country — Teresa Whitfield, Hurst (2014)
An armed response to Franco's repression of the Basque nation that became trapped in its own violence; the state's torture, dirty war and dispersal of prisoners were wrongs too.
- Endgame for ETA: Elusive Peace in the Basque Country — Teresa Whitfield, Hurst (2014)
- Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy — Paddy Woodworth, Yale University Press (2002)
Why it matters today
ETA's violence shaped Spanish politics for forty years and still does: in arguments over prisoners, over the Basque left-wing party EH Bildu, which descends from ETA's political wing, and over who has the right to tell the story. For many Spaniards the victims' memory is sacred; for many Basques the priority now is living together.