Everything that Zapatero can claim for the defeat of ETA

The claim by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero on the Cope channel of the role of his government in the defeat of ETA not only served to respond to the thick interpellations that were made to him in that forum, but also to the entire electoral strategy of the right consisting of resorting to to a terrorist group that disappeared more than a decade ago, ensure that it is still alive and blame the party that managed its end. Zapatero said “enough” and recalled who was in government when ETA surrendered.

Forty years of terrorism justify the statement that the defeat of ETA was a victory for the Basque and Spanish society that suffered it. In the first place, of the victims and their relatives, who strengthened Spanish democracy by avoiding resorting to revenge, even though another government, different from and long before Zapatero’s, made the indecent mistake of resorting to State terrorism. In this vindication of the work of all the parties, of the security forces, of the judges, of the victims, they met the former socialist president again on Monday.

Would ETA exist today without the Zapatero government? Probably not. Did the strategy for the end of the band deployed by that Executive shorten and avoid suffering? Definitely. Was it available to anyone? Well, if we look at who occupied the Ministry of the Interior later –Jorge Fernández Díaz– and how the PP managed the embers of the organization, the answer is that it is unlikely.

Zapatero is as right to defend his success as it is true that he started from a failure. The first peace process between the socialist government and ETA, consisting of two parallel negotiation tables –political and technical– ended abruptly with the T4 attack. ETA did not know then that it had just signed its end. The band’s decision to break off contacts without consulting Batasuna made the Abertzale left finally internalize that the “armed struggle” would never achieve anything. “ETA is superfluous and hinders”, Arnaldo Otegi would later say.

The minutes drawn up by the band of the first negotiation include an alleged offer, by the Government, of a common legislative body between Euskadi and Navarra. In the absence of materialization, if the offer was so, the truth is that there were no concessions during the negotiation, unlike on previous occasions, such as the massive and reversible rapprochement of Aznar’s prisoners.

The breakdown of that negotiation plunged the nationalist left into a desert of illegalization and jail. In prison, Otegi matured a new process without violence: a definitive truce had to be wrung from ETA and then, make politics.

In T4 two victims had died. Until its final end, ETA would still have time to kill another ten people. All of them were part of the last and tragic chapter of the band. The continuous police coups in France, the result of the collaboration of the CNI with the Civil Guard and the Police, broke down ETA and paved the way for Arnaldo Otegi and his followers to consolidate their positions.

The explosion at the Madrid airport surprised Otegi meeting with a key figure – because Zapatero attributed that role to him – Jesús Eguiguren, vilified from Madrid by some who were unaware of the true weight of a coffin when the corpse of a colleague is inside. Eguiguren had to carry them too many times. Also Patxi López, the lehendakari from the end of ETA. They say that Rubalcaba never believed in the first negotiation, at the two tables, but in public he strove to save it. It is not a secret that Eguiguren and the Minister of the Interior clashed frequently, but Zapatero knew that both were indispensable to him.

The work of the intelligence service allowed the Government to know that the Barajas explosion was followed by a ruthless internal confrontation in the leadership of ETA resolved by the CNI and the Civil Guard. ‘Thierry’ was arrested in May 2008, and ‘Txeroki’ fell in November.

The dizzying fall of 2009

All in all, the most relevant events for the end of ETA would be unleashed in the vertiginous autumn of that year. On October 14, 2009, Otegi and his main collaborators were arrested for trying to reissue the Batasuna dome. In reality, what Otegi and his collaborators were doing was waging a hidden confrontation with ETA, which was trying to impose its leadership on the whole of the nationalist left.

The arrest of Otegi and his circle, paradoxically, accelerated the entire process for the end of the violence. The confrontation between ETA and the leadership of Batasuna was staged in harsh clashes in the assemblies that debated between the presentation of the band, which advocated the continuity of ETA as the vanguard of the MLNV, and that of Otegi and his group, in favor of a new “non-violent process”.

And while the Government was informed by the CNI of what was happening within the Abertzale left, of how designed new organizations within it that would replace those still controlled by the gang, such as Askatasuna, Segi or Ekin, the opposition of the Popular Party and the conservative media did not budge from the mantras of the “trap truce” and “betrayal of the victims.” The “sources of the fight against terrorism” that previously reported arrests and commandos now served to warn of ETA’s latest maneuver to continue killing and of Otegi’s collusion. None of it was true.

The band even came to have drawn up the expulsion letter for Arkaitz Rodríguez, currently Sortu’s general secretary and whom ETA had introduced into the Bateragune management body. As happened with Miren Zabaleta and Sonia Jacinto, Otegi had managed to redirect them to accompany him to his “trial without violence.” That was the information that Zapatero had on his desk while flags of treason were waved and the President of the Government and the Minister of the Interior were pointed out.

An internal ETA document seized in 2009 recognized the “high level of penetration” of the message “O bombas o votos” launched by Rubalcaba. With Batasuna outlawed, the Minister of the Interior transferred the ball to the roof of Otegi and his people: either they pressed with ETA or they would never return to legality.

The management of prisons, the definitive letter

At the same time, Rubalcaba designed the strategy that involved hitting the organizations of the Abertzale left that were still under the control of ETA. The latest ‘Zutabe’, the band’s internal bulletin, was found in the definitive operation against Segi, the organization’s traditional quarry. In some circles on the left, the operation against the lawyers of the prisoner group caused outrage. But those arrests, again the result of the work of the CNI, were perhaps the most important action in the final stretch of the gang. ETA were its prisoners (700 inmates for 70 released in France) and the only thing that kept them together was H-Alboka, the structure of lawyers that traveled through all the prisons dispensing ETA slogans and quelling possible dissent.

The Ministry of the Interior had woven a network of officials who spied on ETA prisoners. If they positioned themselves against violence, they were brought closer to the Basque Country; if they castled, they remained far from Euskadi. Follow-up was constant and the movements were reversible. When Otegi and his men took control of the EPPK (the Collective of Basque Political Prisoners) and he agreed to sign a statement of assumption of legality and reinsertion, anathema until then, finally the statement to end the violence had the green light.

The management of the prisons was fundamental and within it, Mercedes Gallizo, the general secretary of Prisons whom Rubalcaba defined as “spherical”. Gallizo led the Nanclares road, the grouping of a small group of ETA prisoners in the Álava prison that acted as an advance guard in recognizing the damage caused and submitting to prison legality. Also in the request for forgiveness to his victims.

The group was banned by the ETA officers in the prisons and its anecdotal number within the group, but it became a symbol whose very existence threatened the hegemony that the terrorist organization had exercised behind the prison walls.

When the Popular Party came to power, the Nanclares road was abandoned, although this no longer had any consequences. The job was already done. ETA had announced the end of violence and the prisoners abided by the law, except for an increasingly small group. A different matter is the sincerity with which they assumed and assume the damage caused, but ETA, as a group, ceased to exist in prisons.

Traps with language in the post-ETA scenario

With this situation, the new Minister of the Interior could dedicate himself to laying all the traps with the language that suited him. For months, the PP government played with the possibility that ETA had not ended. Fernández Díaz confused the extortion of businessmen with which ETA had financed itself for decades with the Christmas bonus for the prisoners that the Abertzales youth asked for every Christmas in the shops of Gipuzkoa. He was capable, in the same intervention, of describing the ETA problem as “police” and “political” at the same time. He also suggested that the gang was recruiting new militants that it sold the decapitation of a logistical apparatus that no longer had a leader. In another press conference, Fernández Díaz even said that ETA and abortion had “a little to do with it.”

Former President Zapatero has been slow to raise his voice to vindicate his legacy. When he governed, leaders of the Popular Party attended demonstrations presided over by posters with ballot boxes stained with blood and the logo of the Socialists. Thirteen years have passed since the last death, the French gendarme Jean Serge Nerin. Almost 12 years after that announcement of the “definitive cessation of violence” on October 20, 2011. A few days ago, another PP politician assured that “the foundations of the housing law are based on the ashes of the Hipercor attack.” Pedro Rollán, a member of the PP Management Committee, was referring to the vote in favor of the EH Bildu law, a coalition to which Sortu belongs, the party whose legalization was endorsed by the Supreme and Constitutional Courts.