This is the best opportunity Spain has had in a century.
—Felipe González, interview with the author, September 1981
FRANCO DIED SLOWLY, torturing himself and Spain for more than a month, while aides and ministers, the fawning court, tried to get everything signed and readied for the fight to perpetuate their rule without their Caudillo. Finally, his daughter insisted on disconnecting the various tubes of an elaborate life-support system. On November 20, 1975, he died, leaving behind a written statement warning: “Do not forget that the enemies of Spain and Christian civilization are on the alert.” While black armbands were seen on the streets of Madrid, Catalans discreetly uncorked champagne at home, and Basque youth less discreetly danced in the streets of Euskadi.
Juan Carlos became king and head-of-state, in accordance with Franco’s wishes. He further fulfilled Franco’s wishes by appointing Arias Navarro head-of-government. The first phase of what is known in Spanish history as “the transition” was largely a struggle among various members of Franco’s regime. Arias Navarro tried to build a stable government but, by July, had given up and resigned. Juan Carlos next appointed another figure from the Franco years, a former civil governor, suave and sphinxlike forty-three-year-old Adolfo Suárez.
The new thirty-seven-year-old king, tall, handsome, and silent, known more for skiing than politics, was a mystery. The extreme right wing had never trusted him. Franco had been warned that this prince who never talked was waiting for his sponsor’s death to dismantle the regime. But Franco’s opponents believed, as did Franco, that he was a harmless puppet. The Spanish public believed he had few thoughts of his own and could be manipulated by anyone close to him. Juan Carlos jokes, in which the king was portrayed as an idiot, were in fashion.
One of the new king’s first acts was sending a representative to French Basqueland with the task of contacting ETA, assuring them things were going to be very different, and inviting them to negotiate peace. But nothing about Juan Carlos’s demeanor, public image, or initial public acts had given ETA cause to trust him, and they dismissed the offer as insincere.
The last Franco year had broken all records since the 1950s for repression of Basques. The first post-Franco year, which began with Arias Navarro, was barely an improvement. His minister of the interior, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, another figure from Franco’s dictatorship, but one with an image as a reformer, was now disappointingly Francoist. The participants in demonstrations were brutally attacked, and though the number of arrests was drastically reduced, the sixteen Basques killed by Guardia Civil and police in 1976 was barely an improvement over the eighteen in 1975.
Spain had an opportunity at last to catch up with European history, to become a democracy and rejoin the West. As head-of-government, Suárez tried to please the forces pushing for democracy while keeping his old Francoist colleagues and the military content enough to restrain from forcibly overthrowing the government. The rightists wanted a tough policy toward the Basques, and throwing them to the Guardia Civil seemed a small price to pay for persuading the unhappy right wing not to derail the entire process. Even displaying the ikurriña remained illegal.
ETA was not waiting to see how the transition turned out According to Spanish authorities, ETA killed eighteen people in 1976, starting with a Guardia Civil who tried to remove a booby-trapped ikurriña. At this point, ETA had divided into two groups. The killing was done primarily by a group called ETA militar. In an underground publication they identified three types of people they intended to kill: Franco-supported mayors, police collaborators and informants, and law enforcement officials who attempted to remove ikurriñas.
The second group, ETA politico-militar, began the post-Franco era with a new tactic: They would kidnap people for high ransoms. On January 11, 1976, they captured industrialist Francisco Luzariaga, who suffered a heart attack during the kidnapping and was released. Two days later, they took another hostage but released him after a month because it became clear that the victim’s family were Basque nationalists.
All of this might have made ETA unpopular if the Guardia Civil was not at the same time engaged in its tactics of tearing down ikurriñas and disrupting folk festivals. On August 18, the Guardia Civil attacked a Basque song festival in Guernica because of the presence of ikurriñas.
The Basque Nationalist Party was having its own transition. Leizaola took a teaching position and faded into obscurity, while the newly invigorated old party, led by Xabier Arzalluz, an emotional man from an old Carlist family, at last dropped its insistence on loyalty to the Catholic Church. But the old slogan Jaungoikua eta Lagizarra, God and the Old Laws, has remained. Letters in the party still end with un abrazo en JeL, an embrace in JeL, when written in Spanish, or in Euskera, JeL beti gogoan dogula, always remember JeL.
When the Basque Nationalist Party demands the return of the Fueros, it is not asking that the legal code of 1526 be put back into place with its statutes on everything from a woman’s place to the purity of cider. Nor does the party demand complete independence, something the Basques have not had since the Romans. What it wants is the restoration of the ability Basques had under the Fueros to enact their own laws.
But the first order of post-Franco business for the Basques was an amnesty for political prisoners. The amnesty movement, Gestoras Pro-Amnistía, attracted many of the most prominent Basques, including not only stubborn longtime activists like Joseba Elósegi but also soccer stars and artists. The sculptor Eduardo Chillida, whose massive abstract work in stone, wood, or steel had become renowned in the international art world, designed the movement’s logo.
In hindsight, the fact that it took two years to achieve a general amnesty for those imprisoned for resisting Franco—two years of demonstrations, petitions, and negotiations to decriminalize opposition to the dictatorship—was one of the early signs that the new Spanish democracy would not be entirely different from the old regime. Guardia Civil attacked peaceful demonstrations for amnesty and on several occasions shot and killed demonstrators.
Another sign was the fate of Eva Forest, a Catalan mother of three who had run a Madrid organization called Solidarity with Basqueland. She had been jailed and tortured in 1974 for the crime of interviewing the ETA commandos who had killed Carrero Blanco and then publishing the interview in Hendaye under the name Julen Agirre “from somewhere in Southern Euskadi.” Police had discovered a draft of the manuscript in her apartment in a random search. The charge was “necessary collaboration,” meaning presumed guilt by circumstance. After the death of Franco, the Spanish continued to hold, interrogate, and torture her. The story is all the more remarkable because Spain was desperately trying to gain acceptance in Europe as a budding Western democracy and freeing Eva Forest was becoming a European cause célèbre. She was finally released in 1977 without ever having been brought to trial.
Freeing Eva Forest was one of many steps in slowly, one group at a time, obtaining the release of political prisoners. Arzalluz showed a new tough leadership, insisting, in line with Basque public opinion, on a total amnesty that would include all ETA members. The last of the imprisoned Basques were released in December 1977. For a few days, Spanish jails held no Basque political prisoners.
In January, a new round of arrests began.
IN 1977, the new democracy that was to end Spain’s isolation in Europe was launched with general elections to a two-house parliament, the Cortes. One month before the elections, the ikurriña was at last legalized when the Basque Nationalist Party demanded the right to use it as their party symbol. Adolfo Suárez, the former Franco technocrat, became the first elected prime minister. His party won 34 percent, and Felipe González’s Socialists came in second with 28 percent. But in the Basque provinces, the parties demanding autonomy from Spain, led by the Basque Nationalist Party, won a clear majority, including ten Senate seats. One of the new Basque Nationalist Party senators was the fiery Joseba Elósegi.
The combination of amnesty and elections had brought many Spanish Basques home from exile. Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria, still dressed in black, returning from the Soviet Union, held her first political rally in Bilbao to the tune of “Eusko gudariak gera” and, at the age of eighty-two, won back her old seat as a deputy from Asturias to the lower house of the Cortes. Born in 1895, only three years younger than Franco, she had outlasted him. “I said they shall not pass, and they haven’t,” the octogenarian Communist deputy insisted defiantly.
Even Sabino Arana was back, his body returned to its grave in Sukarrieta.
Telesforo de Monzón was also back. In 1971 he and Txillardegi, along with thirty-five supporters, had taken refuge in the cathedral in Bayonne and began a hunger strike. After three days, the sixty-seven-year-old Monzón suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized, but he still refused to take nourishment. In 1977 he was still alive and back on the Spanish side, as militant as ever.
THE TIME HAD arrived for what Madrid thought of as the next step toward democracy and what the Basques thought of as the next battle: the drafting of a new Spanish constitution. The hard history of Spain, the divisions of the nineteenth century, lingered on. When Felipe González said that Spain had the “best opportunity” in a century, he was referring to recapturing the opportunity the Liberals had missed after the Second Carlist War to build a liberal democracy. But to the Basques it was the best opportunity in a century to restore the autonomy that the Carlist Wars had taken away from them.
When work began in Madrid on a new constitution, two things became clear very quickly. A broad consensus existed that for Spain to have a peaceful future, it had to allow regions—especially Basqueland and Catalonia—a measure of autonomy. But it was equally clear that the Basques were not going to be left to choose the nature of that autonomy. There would be no return to the autonomy of the Foral system. The constitutional committee did not include a sampling of the parties in the Cortes, but rather a group of seven parliamentarians, including one Catalan and no Basques.
In the language of the 1978 Spanish constitution, Basque or Catalan is referred to as “a nationality,” but only Spain is a nation. It states: “The Constitution is founded on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation, the common and indivisible fatherland of all Spaniards, and recognizes and guarantees the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions of which it is composed and solidarity among them.”
Spain has had numerous constitutions since the one General Espoz y Mina placed on a chair and ordered shot in 1812. But the 1978 constitution was the only one that ever declared the Spanish language the sole official language of Spain.
The constitution was to be ratified by popular vote. Arzalluz and the Basque Nationalist Party called on Basques to abstain from the vote. But Monzón believed it would make a stronger statement if Basques showed their disapproval by voting no. He argued, “We cannot accept the Spanish constitution because we are not Spaniards.” But to most Basques, this was an argument for abstention rather than the participation of casting a negative vote.
The constitution was approved by a majority of Spaniards, but not by Basques: While only 11.3 percent of Basques followed Monzón and voted no, more than 40 percent of Basque voters abstained and others cast blank ballots. The constitution was not approved by a majority of voters in any of the Basque provinces. But against the will of the Basque “nationality,” the new constitution became the law of the “nation.” Any further discussion of Basque independence would be questioning “the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation” and therefore would be unconstitutional.
With the breakup of the state declared unconstitutional and the military given the right, in fact, the constitutional obligation, to intervene if a government violated the law of the land by compromising the indissoluble unity of the state, lawmakers believed that they had given enough assurances to the military to be able to proceed with demands for regional autonomy.
The constitution called for the establishment of seventeen regional entities including Ceuta and Melilla in Africa, which have a combined size of thirty-two square miles. The next smallest is the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, and the third smallest is the Autonomous Basque Community of Euskadi. The constitution did not specify the nature of regional government. Each region proposed, subject to Cortes approval, its own idea of what a region should be. New Castile, which includes Madrid, was not interested in autonomy. To no one’s surprise, the Basques and the Catalans wanted more autonomy than anyone else.
To the dismay of many Basques, Navarra became a separate region. Conservative, pro-Spanish elements in Navarra had pushed for a region apart from the three Basque provinces, but whether or not this was the will of the general population was a longstanding debate. In 1981, the so-called politico-militar wing of ETA made a Navarrese referendum on rejoining the Basque region one of its conditions for a cease-fire. Madrid never responded to that item.
The many differences accrued from several historic periods have separated Navarra from the other three Basque provinces in Spain. Going back to Roman times, the Romanization of the Ebro Valley had made Navarra, by most definitions, only half Basque. The area south of Pamplona is not culturally Basque, and “Spanish” political parties—what the Basques call, not without a slight sneer, Españolistas, Spain lovers—win a far higher percentage of the vote in Navarra than they do in the other Basque provinces. The split over the Kingdom of Navarra, the split over the Carlist Wars, the split over Franco and the Civil War—two separate histories have driven these people apart.
Opinion polls in Navarra indicate that only a minority of Navarrese consider themselves Spanish, but a somewhat smaller minority consider themselves Basque. The majority of modern Navarrese think of themselves as simply Navarrese. But the Navarrese speak Euskera and fit almost any definition of Basque—except theirs. If the seven provinces were to be united today, a separatist movement might emerge in Navarra.
The Basques and the Navarrese in their separate regions, the Autonomous Community of Euskadi and the Foral Community of Navarra, had the same reference point: the Fueros. They each wanted something as close to that ancient condition of semi-independence as they could get. This was far more than anyone else was asking for. Even the Catalans hesitated at the kind of fiscal autonomy the Basques demanded.
The Basques and Navarrese did not get the kind of separate Foral state they wanted, but they did get their own local governments, their own parliaments, their own school systems and highways, all of which were paid for by their own taxes. The only tax restriction was that the total tax package be the same as that in the rest of Spain. The statute of autonomy for the three provinces barely passed, getting an affirmative vote from only 54 percent of eligible voters. It is impossible to say how many Basques would want complete independence from Spain, since such a plebiscite would be unconstitutional and has never been held. But within the Autonomous Basque Community, a clear majority votes in every election for nationalist parties that proclaim as a goal more independence from the Spanish state.
Carlos Garaikoetxea became the first lehendakari since Aguirre. Like all of the subsequent ones, he was handpicked by the Basque Nationalist Party. The party, both conservative and nationalist, has been able to dominate elections and control the Basque government, making Xabier Arzalluz, the party boss, the single most powerful Basque in the Autonomous Basque Community. Part of Garaikoetxea’s appeal was that he was a Navarrese from Pamplona, and his leadership was supposed to bring the two Basques together. Ramón Labayen said, “We thought it would be a good gesture for the people of Navarra, but it turned out that the people of Navarra didn’t give a damn for the gesture.”
Still, for the Civil War generation, there was a sense of triumph in March 1980 when Garaikoetxea stood under the oak tree in Guernica and took the same oath as Aguirre: “Humble before God, standing on Basque soil, in remembrance of our ancestors, under the tree of Guernica . . . ”
For an instant, those who had been there in 1936 could almost feel that the terrible four decades that followed had never happened, had been reversed, somehow erased. Except that Garaikoetxea did not speak mother-tongue Euskera as Aguirre had. An entire generation had grown up under Franco not speaking Euskera, and the Basques were very aware that one of the great challenges before their government was to bring back the language of the Basque people. Garaikoetxea was an Euskaldunberri. He had grown up speaking only Spanish but was now learning Euskera. In his four years as lehendakari, he achieved fluency.
The first time the Spanish army was officially to meet the lehendakari, the officers initially said they would not salute him. They were persuaded that the salute was all in the name of upholding the constitution with its sworn loyalty to the king. But then Garaikoetxea had to be persuaded to salute in return.
TO BASQUES WHO wanted autonomy, the “autonomous regions” were a parody of their dream, and, once again, many young Basques were blaming the Basque Nationalist Party. In 1978, the year of the constitution, Monzón had broken with the Basque Nationalist Party to form a new, more militant group solidly behind ETA that attracted young Basque voters. It was called Herri Batasuna, Popular Unity. In 1979, Monzón was arrested, along with most of the principal figures in Herri Batasuna. The Basque public reacted with a strike that virtually closed down Guipúzcoa. The leaders were all released except Monzón, who was charged with “apology for terrorism.” Telesforo de Monzón, his spirit unchanged but his body feeling the wear of almost fifty years of nonstop political resistance, went on another hunger strike which almost killed him. But that same year, there was another round of parliamentary elections, and this time Herri Batasuna won three deputy’s seats and one in the Senate at the expense of the Basque Nationalist Party. Monzón had to be released to take the seat he had won in the Cortes, the same seat he had occupied in the 1930s for the Basque Nationalist Party. To be precise, he was released to reject his seat, since it was the policy of Herri Batasuna candidates to refuse to take the Madrid seats to which they were elected.
Only months later, a prosecutor ordered Monzón arrested after he outlined the Heri Batasuna position to the foreign press. His health deteriorating, he fled to France to avoid arrest, and in March 1981 he died in Bayonne. Many of his poems, although not of great literary value, became popular songs that are still sung. Herri Batasuna, the only party that is openly supportive of ETA, has consistently garnered 15 to 20 percent of the Basque vote, though the parliamentarians elected to Madrid always refuse to take their seats.
Telesforo de Monzón could have lived a comfortable aristocrat’s life in Vergara, eating with his own silver. But that was not the life he chose. He managed to be arrested one last time, when his funeral procession from St.-Jean-de-Luz was briefly stopped by Spanish police on its way to the family home in Vergara.
AFTER MARCH 1980 the Basques had a government and a legal flag, and signs went up along the Ebro to tell motorists when they were entering and leaving the Autonomous Basque Community of Euskadi. But establishing regions did not silence the demands of the Basque Nationalist Party, nor the guns of ETA, which grew even more active while support for Basque nationalist political parties remained solid.
All of this perplexed, frustrated, and infuriated the Spanish military. The military, and particularly the Guardia Civil, tend to be family careers passed on from father to son, and after more than a generation in power, the transition years were not happy ones for those military families. Their power had been greatly reduced, hemmed in by a Ministry of Defense that was part of a popularly elected government. The 65,000 Guardia Civil were taken out of direct military command and made answerable to the Ministry of Interior. They were also badly demoralized by ETA attacks and their complete isolation in Basque country. Increasingly, they asked not to be stationed in Basqueland, and each year hundreds of those who were stationed there requested transfers.
From the military point of view, the politicians had given away far more than they should have—and still the Basques were not satisfied. The prime minister, Adolfo Suárez, was called “a traitor.” By 1980, rumors of a military coup d’état, persistent since the resignation of Arias Navarro, were one of the main topics of political gossip in Madrid. Many leaders, including Felipe González, warned of the danger.
Between 1978 and 1980, ETA killed as many as eighty people in a year, the most violent period in its history. In the same period, police and Guardia Civil broke up demonstrations almost 600 times and in the process killed forty-one people. In 1979, Amnesty International sent a team to Spain that reported on the use of torture in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao.
The increasingly restless military was acting in odd and troubling ways. Groups of right wingers, popularly known as incontrolados, attacked Basque nationalists, killing thirty-five people during this period. But were they really uncontrolled as their name suggested? In November 1980, someone walked into a small, dark, crowded bar, the Bar Hendayais, on a narrow street that dropped down to the bay in central Hendaye, and sprayed the drinking customers with machine gun bullets, killing two, both French citizens, and wounding ten others. The bar, said to be popular with Basque nationalists, was only a few minutes from the border, the St. Jacques Bridge, and three Spaniards were intercepted at the crossing by Guardia Civil. After a phone call to Madrid, they were taken to Irún and released. The attack was claimed by an unknown group called the Basque-Spanish Battalion.
Felipe González’s Spanish Socialist Workers Party joined with the Communists and the Basque Nationalist Party in demanding to know if the government was sponsoring this Basque-Spanish Battalion.
The atmosphere became even more tense in January, when Suárez suddenly resigned from the government without explanation. Was he trying to pacify an angry military that had turned against him? He wouldn’t say.
On the same day as the resignation, ETA kidnaped José María Ryan, an engineer at the Lemóniz nuclear power plant. During the nuclear power controversy of the 1970s, no proposed nuclear plant anywhere was more bitterly opposed than the one in Lemóniz. In 1977 an ETA commando was killed attempting to attack the construction site. In 1978, ETA blew a twelve-inch hole in a steam generator at the site, killing two workers. By the time the project was abandoned in 1982, it had been the object of not only constant demonstrations, several with more than 50,000 participants, but also 250 attacks, primarily by ETA.
Lemóniz was part of a project undertaken by the Franco regime to provide power for Basque industry. A series of three reactors had been planned on the Deba River, none of which was ever completed. Given the unpopularity of nuclear energy in Europe at the time, only a military dictatorship could have contemplated a nuclear power program in Basque country. Lemóniz, which was dangerously close to Bilbao, a city too large to evacuate in the event of an accident, was begun in 1972, but the new democracy had to face the combined forces of ETA and a suddenly liberated ecology movement with thousands of backers. Though Arzalluz and the Basque Nationalist Party supported the plan, which was contracted to companies controlled by the old families of Vizcayan industry, their stance was always unpopular.
In addition to the distrust of the technology itself, which was common to many Europeans in areas where plants had been installed, there was a political issue. Basques were supposed to control their own energy system, but no one believed the Spanish would let them run a nuclear plant autonomously. Nuclear power implied centralized authority, and not only Basque but Galician, Catalan, Breton, Wallonian Belgian, Scot, and Welsh nationalists were among the fiercest antinuclear activists in Europe.
At the time of the Ryan kidnaping, the Spanish king and queen were scheduled to visit Basque country, and, in keeping with tradition, they were to meet with the Basques at the Batzarretxea, the meeting house by the oak of Guernica. The royal couple flew to Vitoria, which had become the capital of the Autonomous Community. Defying protocol, the Basque government organized no official welcome. While the king reviewed Spanish troops, Herri Batasuna activists sang “Eusko gudariak gera.”
When the king delivered his speech in the Batzarretxea in Guernica, he was again outvoiced, by the elected Herri Batasuna delegation singing the Basque hymn. The Basque Nationalist Party disapproved and wanted the Herri Batasuna delegation silenced, but it also made it clear to the king that the only relationship with the monarch that interested the party was not the one in the constitution but the Foral relationship which was now unconstitutional.
The mood in Spain was growing darker with each event.
Three days later, Ryan’s body was found in Vizcaya, blindfolded and shot dead. The killing of the engineer was deplored by most Basques. But instead of capitalizing on a tragic public relations victory, Madrid reacted the way it always did to ETA violence. An ETA militant, José Arregui, held incommunicado for ten days in prison, died. The gruesome wounds on his corpse testified to the ten days of torture that had killed him. So instead of widespread condemnation of the Ryan killing, Basqueland mobilized a general strike to protest the military’s killing of an ETA member. Five policemen were arrested and several government figures resigned over the Arregui killing.
To a few extremists in the military and the Guardia Civil, the insult to the king followed by the government turning against them, arresting defenders of Spain’s honor, was too much to endure. In December they began to work on a plan of action.
IN THE GENRE of horror movies, a common ploy at the end of the film, after the monster has been vanquished, is for it to suddenly rise up one more time from the muck. That was the role of Guardia Civil lieutenant colonel Antonio Tejero in the history of Franco’s Spain.
On February 23, 1981, while the Cortes in Madrid was installing a new government, twenty armed Guardia Civil entered the legislative chamber, fired rounds into the ceiling, and ordered everyone to the floor. There was Tejero, the officer who, in 1977, had been relieved of his command in San Sebastián for refusing to accept the legalization of the ikurriña, up on the speaker podium, pistol drawn, in his Guardia Civil uniform with its tri-cornered nineteenth-century hat and his long, full, nineteenth-century mustache, giving orders. The old Spanish monster was back for one more try. It was the twenty-fifth attempted military coup d’état in Spain since 1814.
The Basque government prepared to go back into exile. Garaikoetxea, at the time suffering from a sneezy bout of hay fever, was moved to the pollen-rich mountains near the border, ready to cross over.
But the coup failed. It may have been more than one coup. The relationship between the Guardia Civil action, the army’s Brunete Division, which was to move on Madrid, and various other military actions at the time has never been completely clarified. King Juan Carlos, the commander in chief of the armed forces, is credited with talking the military officers out of backing the rebellion. But some of the plotters claimed that the king knew of the plot and that they had acted believing the king was behind them. It is not known if he had ever indicated support, or if he even knew of the plot. But its success would have been unlikely without his backing, and, in the end, it was the king’s lack of support that caused these officers to back down.
Whether the king had or had not been involved in the plot, the coup’s failure was a resounding success for him, for the military, and for the Guardia Civil. The king, presented as the man who talked down the coup, gained a prestige he had never had before. The Juan Carlos jokes ended. So did rumors of military coups.
Most political leaders took February 23 as a lesson that the military and Guardia Civil needed to be kept happy. Not only the government, but Felipe González and his opposition Socialists, people who had spent their lives opposing the Guardia Civil and the military, suddenly responded sympathetically to their viewpoint and with increasing hostility to Basque nationalism. New antiterrorism laws were passed, giving the government the right to close down publications charged with “apology for terrorism,” a crime which was upgraded from misdemeanor to felony.
Tejero and General Jaime Milans del Bosch received thirty-year sentences, a third leader was sentenced to six years, and eleven others were sentenced to less than three years. But Spain was to have its transition to democracy without purging a single figure from the Franco era, without prosecuting a single one of the many crimes these men had committed over forty years. The democracy would be built without purging the ranks of the military, the Guardia Civil, or even the operations of prisons.
The nations of western Europe had learned the same lesson as the Spanish politicians. They had almost seen their neighbor return yet again to the 1930s. In the future Spain would be encouraged and not criticized. There would no longer be discussion of its human rights record. Spain would be welcomed into the ranks of Europe. A great effort would be made to move forward its request for membership in the European Economic Community. The West would also persuade Spain to join NATO, thereby integrating its troublesome troops into the Western alliance.
Even ETA was changed by the coup. The Spanish government’s frustrating two year negotiation with ETA’s politico-militar wing suddenly bore fruit. The members of politico-militar saw that they would be defenseless if the military overthrew the democracy, and concluded that continuing to attack the current Spanish state would be too dangerous for the Basque people. In exchange for an amnesty and release from prison of its members, ETA politico-militar dissolved. But that did not end the violence because other branches of ETA were still active. There is always a splinter group. In time the Spanish government has come to feel that no matter what it negotiates with ETA, a dissident group refusing the accord will always emerge.
IN THE HISTORY of the Spanish “transition,” there is no more dramatic change than the metamorphosis of Felipe González between the 1981 coup d’état and his election as prime minister the following year. After the coup attempt, the coming-to power of the man all of Spain simply called Felipe was seen as inevitable. The youthful Socialist lawyer-turned-underground-labor-organizer was to be a political leader. The man who used to leap onto the back of trucks, dressed in corduroys and leather jacket, and talk to the workers had somehow vanished. The new man in the dark suits was still youthful and charming, but gone was the lawyer who defended civil rights. He became a firm advocate of repressive antiterrorist laws, arguing that other democracies, faced with terrorism, had done the same and therefore it was a democratic thing to do.
Felipe had been an active member of the Socialist International, a protégé of Germany’s Willy Brandt, and a young friend of France’s avuncular François Mitterrand, who was also about to come to power. Felipe had headed the Socialist’s committee on Nicaragua that had taken a critical stance in favor of the Sandinista rebels and against U.S. policy. Asked, in a 1981 interview, in what sense of the word was he a Socialist, he replied, “In all senses of the word—except in the Communist sense.” One political maneuver, in preparation for power, was to resign from the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and refuse to come back until it struck the word Marxist from its party charter.
Asked if he was concerned that power might have a corrupting effect, he insisted that there would be no temptation for him to abuse power because the constitution provided a system of checks and balances that would prevent it.
The Socialist Party slogan for the 1982 election was Por Cambio, For Change, and although little change was being offered, the Spanish, even many Basques, could not help but feel excited about the prospect of someone taking over the government who had not been a part of, who had in fact opposed, the thirty-six-year dictatorship. After so many years of morose stagnation, nothing more than forward motion was a thrilling prospect. Begoña Aretxaga, later a Harvard anthropologist, was in her native San Sebastián at the time. “I was excited in spite of myself, even without believing,” she recalls of the 1982 election. “The legitimacy of the government depends on the continuous exercise of an act of forgetting.”