This file is a mirror of EUSKAL HERRIA JOURNAL by Basque Red Net.

SPAIN'S DEATH SQUADS AND THE "DIRTY WAR"

Spain and the paramilitary activity

After Franco's death in November 1975, his heir King Juan Carlos I suceeded him and a parliamentary monarchy was established. Thanks to a pact between the Left and the Right, Franco's army, his security forces and most of his judiciary remained intact. Between 1976 and 1977, Spanish Prime Minister Adolofo Suarez granted two amnesties. Legislature introduced in 1977 confered general amnesty and no steps were taken to investigate human rights violations committed during and after the Spanish civil war and prosecute those alleged to be responsible. The paramilitary death squads, which were introduced by Franquism, continued with their activities against Basque dissidents.

First activities of paramilitary groups: "Anti-terrorism ETA" (ATE) and the "Christ the King Guerrilla Fighters"

During the five years following the end of the Spanish civil war in 1939, more than 100,000 Spanish citizens were executed by Franco's firing squads. Torture became common during interrogation and living conditions in prisons were infrahuman. From 1972 onwards, the dirty war turned selective and the Basque Country became the target of the Spanish State. Mercenaries were recruited by the Spanish police and Civil Guard among neofascist groups to carry out attacks against Basque refugees in Northern Basque Country.

In many occassions the police itself executed the attacks against the refugees. The first paid assignments were ordered by the Dirección General de Seguridad Española (national security office) to collect information about the Basque refugees and plan the attacks. Candido Acedo Perez, Civil Guard captain and former chief of the Unidad de Operaciones Especiales (Special Operations Unit) of the same police force, was the liason between the police cupula, which organized the attacks and the mercenaries hired to do the job. Navy captain Pedro Martinez trained the mercenaries.

ATE was the first paramilitary group to attack Basques and Basque property. ATE claimed responsibility for several attacks against Basques citizens in Iparralde (Northern Basque Country) in June 1975. In Hegoalde (Southern Basque Country), and particularly in Bizkaia, dozens of small buisinesses managed by Basques were bombed and the managers intimidated by death threats. Another clandestine group, the Grupos Anti-terroristas Españoles (GAE, Spanish Anti-terrorists Groups), claimed responsibility for these attacks.

Statements by government officials, newspaper editorials, and Spanish public opinion in general, encouraged the activities of the paramilitary groups. The following quote is from the speech given by Spanish national counselor Garcia Ibañez in parliament: "Spaniards think and believe that the moment to say enough is enough has come; no more indulgence but to accept the terrorist challenge; to embark in a greater repression, employ the system of violence: a teeth for a teeth and eye for an eye until the total extermination and annhilation of these criminals and anti-Spanish organizations".

A few days after the speech of Garcia Ibañez in parliament, the Madrid newspaper El Alcazar included the following quote in an editorial: "If quick measures are not taken against the criminals who find refuge and protection in France, the time would come to answer in the same language, even when is not to apply that old adagio love is reciprocated with love. Is it so technically difficult to cross the border in opposite direction and execute in situ those who plan with guilty impunity their terrorist acts to Spain? What is being waited for to make this decision? Perhaps the lack of specialists? Or is it a problem of stimulus?"

The activity of the paramilitary squads ATE and "Christ the King Guerrilla Fighters" in the Basque Country became intense. From mid-1975 to the end of 1976, these squads committed a total of 200 actions, all of which were claimed by them. The victims were Basque activists, from promoters of Basque schools (Ikastolas), PNV militants, to families of the political prisoners and refugees. The first victim, Eduardo Moreno Bergaretxe, was kidnapped in July 1976 and killed.

The "Basque-Spanish Battalion" (BVE)

Shortly after the Spanish constitutional referendum of 1978, the Spanish secret service directed by Jose Maria Bourgon embarked on one of its most ambitious operations: a war against Basque militants. In December 1978, a bomb placed under his car killed Jose Miguel Beñaran Ordeñana, a Basque activist in Iparralde. More paramilitary actions followed including a failed attempted to kill another Basque activist, Jose Manuel Pagoaga in January 1979. ATE and BVE as well as two more groups under such names as AAA and ANE claimed responsibilites for the attacks.

The BVE was born out of ATE. The Spanish secret service, SECED (named CESID after Franquism) designed and organized BVE, which operared freely in the Basque Country thanks to the support of some sectors of the French government. The mercenary Jean Pierre Cherid was a key person in the diry war against Basque activists, the creation of the BVE and later, the Grupos Anti-terroristas de Liberación (GAL, Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups), which were financed by the Spanish government. The BVE was composed of members of several European neofascist groups who had found refuge and were living in Spain at the time GAL was being organized.

BVE and ATE also had victims outside the Basque Country, among the communities of Basque refugees in Latin America. In Venezuela, Espe Arana and her husband Jokin Etxeberria were killed by mercenaries working for the Spanish police. From 1975 to 1980, paramilitary squads committed a total of 500 actions, killing 38 people and injuring 128. Victims were mainly Basque activists, but some actions were directed against the Basque population. In January 1980 a bomb in the Aldana bar in Barakaldo killed four people. In July 1980 an explosive in the day-nursing Iturriaga in Zeberio killed four people, including a pregnant woman. GAE and AAA claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Among the BVE and ATE mercenaries were also civil guards working for the police secret service under General Andres Cassinello. The BVE had a particularity: it claimed to have raped dozens of young Basque women, some of which they killed. First, the victim was interrogated, then beaten, raped and abandoned in the street. Some of the cases were uncovered and made public by popular initiative. In Bermeo, a civil guard, Pedro Garcia Lopez, was identified as the person who raped a fifteen year old Basque woman causing that the town's councilmen requested the withdrawal of the Spanish security forces from the Basque Country. In some other places were young Basque women had been attacked, witnesses claimed the aggressors were policemen. When questioned about these rapes in an interview with the Spanish magazine Interview in 1982, former minister of Interior, Juan Jose Roson, replied: "I haven't experienced seducing a woman by force but judging by what one sees and hears, it must be fascinating"

The next to last attack of the BVE took place on November 23, 1980 when a commando composed of three men, Gilbert Perret, Mohamed Khiar and Vittorio Aldo fired against a crowd inside the Hendayais bar in Baiona. Two people, Jose Camio and Jean Pierre Haramendy, were killed, and another ten people were critically injured. The killers managed to evade the French border police but were caught by the Spanish border police. They were released without charges the following day.

The "Anti-terrorism Groups of Liberation" (GAL)

GAL made its appearance shortly after the Zona Especial Norte (ZEN, Special Northern Zone) plan was put into effect in 1983. ZEN, a political plan created by the Spanish government The ZEN plan, coordinated by the police and political institutions, seeked the physical destruction of suspected ETA activists in Northern Basque Country under French administration.

Jose Ignacio Zabala and Jose Antonio Lasa, two refugees from the south living in Baiona were the first victims of GAL They were kidnapped by the paramilitary group in October 1983. In March 1995, two corpses were identified as being those of Lasa and Zabala. Both corpses showed signs of extensive beatings and torture, including loss of teeth, finger and toe nails. They were killed by blows to the skull followed by shots in the back of the head. Their bodies were buried in quicklime.

In April 1986 a witness testified that in 1983, highly decorated Civil Guard General Enrique Galindo and former civil Governor Julen Elgorriaga entered the Palace de la Cumbre where they presumably interrogated Lasa and Zabala. Two Civil Guardsmen involved in the killings were imprisoned in May, the first pernson to be sentenced inthe GAL investigations. Galindo was held in preventive custody for 72 days for his role in the case. Elgorriaga remains in preventive detention. On May 1996, Civil Guard General (promoted to General by the Socialist government in 1995) was held on bail of 100 million pesetas and charged with kidnapping, torture, and killing in connection with the disapperance of Lasa and Zabala in October 1983. In that same month and year, four Spanish policemen attempted to kidnap another Basque refugee in Hendaia, Northern Basque Country. In January 1989 the chief of the Bilbo police, Francisco Alvaro Sanchez, admitted to have planned this kidnapping.

GAL emerged after almost three years of paramilitary inactivity. From April 1981 until the end of 1983, the squads did not commit any attacks. This period coincides with the meetings of the European Union Security Council in Madrid. Right after the meetings ended in September 1983, the dirty war resumed. The meetings of the Security Council forced a break in the activities of the paramilitary groups. Spain feared that its diplomatic work during the debates on European security and human rights would be affected by the death squads scandal.

Segundo Marey, kidnapped by GAL "in error" in December 1983, provided the first evidence linking the death squads with the state apparatus. According to the information provided by Marey to the judge, his abductors waited for the orders of a mysterious person they refered to as a "civil governor". Later it was found that Marey had been held in Bilbo. During the time Marey was kidnapped, Julian San Cristobal, a member of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), was the civil governor of Bilbo,. San Cristobal was later promoted to Secretary of State fir Security. When the GAL case was reopened in 1994, San Cristobal and four other former police officials were charged with attempted murder, misuse of public funds and unlawful arrest in connection with the kidnapping of Segundo Marey.

The history of GAL is similar to that of its predecessors ATE and BVE. All paramilitary groups shared the same target: Basque activists. But unlike ATE and BVE, which were created and directed by the Spanish police, was directed and financed by Spain's Ministry of Interior.

Courts continue to investigate the dirty war against Basque activists, during which the GAL killed at least 28 people. The killings took place in Northern Basque Country with the exception of Santiago Brouard who was murdered in Southern Basque Country.

After the French government began to expel Basque refugees to Spain, the GAL stopped its activities in Northern Basque Country . According to the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur (August 24, 1984), this policy of expulsion would have been part of a project coordinated by Madrid and Paris and implemented in four stages:

• Limited autonomy granted to the four southern Basque provinces in Spain;
• A campaign to ensure "repentance" among the political prisoners;
• A "repressive phase" in three levels: a paramilitary squad "financed by Spain to intimidate Basque refugees; the deportation of Basque refugees to Africa and South America; and the extraditon of Basque refugees to Spain".
• In a fourth stage, "Already convinced that its fight lacks perspective, ETA would grant a truce. Then, in a pacified environment, Madrid would probably come up with some sort of compensation".

On June 14, 1984, France and Spain signed the "Acuerdos de la Castellana" (the Castellana Agreement), a cooperation agreement for stronger cooperation against the Basque resistance.

Shortly after the franco-spanish agreement, judges in Pau (France) and Madrid (Spain) acquitted GAL mercenaries accused of carrying out attacks against Basque refugees while Spain's media, as in Franco's time, remained silent. Right after the death by torture of Joxe Arregi in a police barracks, a Madrid newspaper, Diario 16, which now brags about having investigated GAL, included the following quote in its editorial of March 23, 1981:

The activists of ETA, who are not men, who are beasts. To what degree do beasts deserve human rights?... Beasts are enclosed behind the heaviest bars that there are in the village; first they are hunted by all kinds of tricks. And if in the venture someone is killed, bad luck, or good luck... No human rights come into play when a tiger must be hunted. The tiger is searched after, is hounded, is captured, and if necessary is killed. Fifty ETA members might die in combat and the hands of Spain will continue to be clean of human blood. The policemen who will shoot against will be received as brave men".1

Since the trial in 1991 of two Spanish policemen, Jose Amedo and Michel Dominguez, a clearer picture began to emerge on how the GAL death squads started and how they operated. But the two policemen claimed to have acted on their own.

Police officials testified not having knowledge about GAL. A Spanish court sentenced the two policemen to 108 years imprisonment each but the Spanish government pardoned them three years later. Information about the misuse of the secret state monies or "fondos reservados" intended to finance the dirty war against Basques and direct government involvement in the GAL affair began to come out in 1994 when Amedo and Dominguez decided to break silence and testified before the Spanish National Court.

To buy their silence, the office of state security in the Interior Ministry paid their wives more than $4,000 a month between 1988 and 1993 and to Amedo and Dominguez each, $800,000 pesetas. The secret operation, for which more than 14 former police and senior government officials and a Civil Guard General have been indicted, brought the inquiry even closer to former Spanish prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez. But the National Court denied evidence against Gonzalez who in turn, has denied all knowledge or involvement with GAL.

New models of repression

GAL killings stopped in 1987 when France began to hand over Basque refugees alledgedly connected to ETA and expelled others to Algeria. But sporadic attacks to Basque dissidents by paramilitary groups continued. In 1989 several armed men fired at a group of leaders and MP of the left-wing, pro-independence Basque political party Herri Batasuna (HB, People's Unity) in a Madrid restaurant. Josu Muguruza was shot dead. and several others were injured. Six years after the attack, only one person has been arrested and convicted in connection with the attack. He was killed in a traffic "accident" in 1997.

A few months before the Madrid attack, several armed men kidnapped HB town councillor Fermin Urtizberea in Hondarribia. In the summer of 1994, and in the middle of the election campaign, two bombs exploded each in Muskiz and Artxanda (Bizkaia) causing critical injuries to bystanders. Another aggression to add to the long list of ongoing attacks to Basques by paramilitary groups.

During the last twenty years, the BVE, ATE and GAL committed 725 attacks, killed 67 people and critically injured more than 200, including several children. The state dirty war against Basques, in different stages and different techniques, will continue unless the so-called "Basque problem" is resolved through a democratic process that recognizes the political nature of the conflict and the necessity of a negotiated solution.

Source: Luis Nuñez Astrain, Iñaki Egaña, and Iñigo Elkoro, Estado Español y Actividad Parapolicial (Acusación Popular en representación de los familiares de las Victimas del GAL, Euskal Herria, 1995)

1. Translation from Joseba Zulaika, Basque Violence Metaphor and Sacrament, University of Nevada Press, (1988).