When José Antonio Torre Altonaga, nicknamed “Medius,” joined the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) sometime in the waning days of Franco’s 40-year rule, he never thought that the Basque terror group would instruct him to attack—of all things—a nuclear power plant. Medius joined just as ETA went on its most violent binge. Far from dissuading it, Franco’s death in 1975 and the adoption of Spain’s new democratic constitution three years later, emboldened the group’s butchery. The ETA soon had a foothold in regional—later national—politics that was unthinkable under Francoism. This two-track strategy has been the group’s modus operandi since. Attacks in the 1980s, for instance, were chalked up by the media to “ETA militar” as opposed to “politico,” distinguishing terrorists from the scores of Abertzale activists lawfully pursuing the group’s selfsame goals: an independent and socialist Basque republic. The two years following the transition’s culmination in 1978 are remembered to this day as “the years of lead,” an abnormal burst of brutality accounting for shy of a third of ETA’s total murders. Along with 379 still unresolved killings since it officially foreswore violence in 2011, this paradox of violence—namely that it went on a rampage simultaneously with its entry in the democratic process—remains one of the group’s most jarring mysteries in its 52-year history. Who would have thought democracy begat violence?
In 1972, Franco launched the construction of a nuclear facility in Lemóniz (Vizcaya), a 30-minute drive from Bilbao, carried on by the first democratic government of Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez. This relatively minor plant aroused irate opposition from the anti-nuclear movement nationwide, and ETA saw in this backlash a wave to surf on. In November of 1977, ETA sent Medius—then one of the plant’s electricians—to smuggle another three members inside the Lemóniz plant, to whom he showed both the way to the central reactor and a quick escape route. This prep work paid off on the 17th of March the following year. Those same terrorists were again let inside by Medius, where they placed a bomb near the reactor and left via the escape route he had shown them. 15 minutes before it exploded, Medius called management, as he had likely been instructed to do, to usher everyone out—but it was too late. Two workers—Andrés Guerra and Alberto Negro—were killed in the blast.
Upon Medius’s arrest in December, he was found to have led ETA’s cell in Vizcaya, the group’s most violent branch. In 1981, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. One ETA emissary showed up at Negro’s funeral and told his grieving family that the group had aimed merely to halt the construction of the plant and dissuade investors. The excuse was unlikely to alleviate their pain. Guerra was 29, married, and expecting a promotion. Negro was 43, married, with three children.
Later, the 1980s saw an open season from ETA against corporate interests both large and small as the group claimed to wage a class war in sync with its secessionist aspirations. For instance, in 1983, José Antonio Julián was out one night closing one of the nightclubs he ran in Vitoria, when an ETA squad shot him dead as he exited his car. ETA’s allegation that Julián belonged to far-right Spanish groups was never proven. For this crime, Agustín Muñoz Díaz was sentenced two years later to 29 years in prison, along with an accomplice. Although businessmen of all sectors remained the main target of ETA’s extortion, which financed its weapons, it was by far policemen and men in uniform that suffered most from the group’s killing sprees. In 1977, Jesús Alcocer Jiménez retired from the military top brass to run various businesses full-time in Pamplona, Navarra. In June 1978, he survived two bombs, one in his supermarket and another at his home. On the 13th of April, 1984, he wasn’t as lucky. Two ETA members shot him dead in the neck as he went to work that morning. The killers left by car to a nearby town, got off and left a bomb inside. When the car was found, two policemen fell into the trap, dying in the explosion. The subsequent arrests all but dismantled ETA’s group in Navarra, with five terrorists—Juan Carlos Arriaga among them—sentenced to 29 years in prison.
Naturally, for a terror group that meticulously planned attacks involving many accomplices, prosecution to the law’s full extent often led Spanish judges to imprison those who proved decisive in killings without being their ultimate perpetrators. José Manuel García, a 43-year-old Guardia Civil from Asturias who had been sent to the Basque Country in 1983, was shot in the neck in front of his wife on the 3rd of May, 1997, as the two enjoyed dinner in Zierbena, near Bilbao. Although they weren’t on the scene to execute, Asier Uribarri and Lander Maruri were sentenced to 16 years in prison as accomplices for helping locate García. But rather than focusing on magnates and law enforcement, the group that suffered the ETA’s most wanton violence was by far that of unionist politicians. José Tomás Larrañaga, 58, married and a father of three when he was murdered, had backed Franco and served as a local alderman in Azcoitia, but during the transition quickly joined Adolfo Suárez’s party. He suffered two near-lethal attacks, both as he exited a bar, in 1978 and 1980. He moved to Logroño (one among the roughly 250,000 refugees the conflict has produced) but returned often to Azcoitia. In one such visit, in 1984, he was finally shot dead, his executors making sure they had done the job this time. Begoña Uzkudun, who had already served as accomplice in previous attacks, was sentenced to 18 years.
For a group that committed in total 3,500 attacks, 853 murders (22 of them children), and left 7,000 grieving victims, one may wonder the criteria on which these five homicides were pursued. They are not ETA’s deathliest attacks, let alone the best-known. That accolade would go to the bombing of a supermarket in Barcelona in 1987, killing 21—including four children—and injuring 45, or to the 1997 killing of a kidnapped unionist alderman, Miguel Ángel Blanco, for whose life ETA demanded the regrouping of its convicts in the Basque Country, which the government of José María Aznar flatly refused. So, why these five, then? After all, if Spanish prisons are fulfilling their rehabilitative purpose (and given that ETA declared the end of its armed struggle in 2011, after a long and arduous peace process), one wouldn’t expect these five ex-offenders to cross one another’s paths at all. More likely, they would shy away from the “Basque conflict” in the way of repentant felons. They would altogether abandon the ‘whataboutist’ narrative that rationalizes violence against innocent Spaniards as a just and proportionate response to the alleged violence of the Spanish state and the suppression of Basque identity. You would expect them, at the very least, to seek to build a better life—with some even looking for redemption by asking their victims for forgiveness.
None of this happened. The re-encounter with their victims occurred, but it reawakened—instead of alleviating—the latter’s aching pain. Upon being paroled at various intervals in the 2000s and 2010s, these five killers smoothly converted to the successor party to ETA’s political arm, EH Bildu. Early in May of this year, they appeared among seven criminals on Bildu’s ballots ahead of local and regional elections nationwide. Many are running to be aldermen and mayors in the cities their victims call home. None have expressed remorse.
There were 37 more criminals on those lists (44 terrorists in total). Their candidacies are not illegal per se. They are no longer barred from elected office now they’ve served their sentences. And after all, the guiding principle that underpinned talks between then-Prime Minister Zapatero and ETA in the late 2000s was the dangling of legalization as an alternative prospect to violence. The two paths remained largely walled off from one another (when that condition wasn’t met in Batasuna’s case in 2007, the group was disbanded). Zapatero believed that extending to the Abertzale Left—that is, the Basque socialists and communists—an open hand to enter the democratic game would unclench ETA’s fist and persuade it to lay down its arms. After several successive iterations, Bildu emerged as the realization of that principle. To some extent, the pacifying strategy worked.
Besides, the victims’ groups that opposed Zapatero’s peace talks then and now call for Bildu’s illegalization seem blindsided by their own victimhood, demanding a policy that amounts to the surest path towards ETA’s comeback. Such a policy would leave anywhere between a quarter and a third of Basque society without parliamentary representation. Granted, the unwillingness of these Basque voters to condemn ETA’s violence is deeply problematic, one that perplexes politicians of all stripes. But they would never take up weapons or harm anybody. Yet this is precisely the principle that seems to be broken here, with a terrorist-to-candidate funnel that effectively neuters Spain’s electoral law. The effort to migrate Abertzale secessionism into the hallways of power was never meant to lead to that transfusion to be effectuated by terrorists. Had this prospect been weighed at the time, fewer Spaniards would have backed the process, let alone re-elected Zapatero in 2008 when it was fully underway, unbeknownst to the public. Thankfully, the media revolt against this whitewashing of violence was forceful enough that Bildu’s seven convicts pledged not to take up their seats if elected. The bad news is that Bildu claimed nearly 30% of the Basque vote at the end of May of this year. This saga of revolving doors shows that for the many victims who dwell in these soon-to-be Bildu-ruled towns, the conflict is still far from over.
