Carmen Ladrón de Guevara holds a degree in law and business management and administration from the Autonomous University of Madrid, a master’s degree in analysis and prevention of terrorism from the King Juan Carlos University of Madrid, and a Ph.D. in law from the Complutense University of Madrid. In 2010, she joined the legal department of the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT). Since 2017, she has combined her professional activity with teaching at various universities. We talked about her latest book, Las víctimas del terrorismo de extrema izquierda en España: Del DRIL a los GRAPO, 1960-2006 (The victims of extreme left-wing terrorism in Spain: From DRIL to GRAPO, 1960-2006).
Why did you write this book?
In 2005, when I was studying law at university, I went to a terrorism trial at the National High Court. I was so shocked by what I experienced that day that I started volunteering for the AVT, accompanying victims to the trials. In the trials I attended, some of them were against members of the Grupos Revolucionarios Antifascistas Primero de Octubre (GRAPO, Revolutionary Antifascist Groups First of October) and I was struck by the lack of repercussions, how little was said about those trials, and in general about what the GRAPO had meant. At home, they didn’t know how many people had been killed by GRAPO and, from the beginning, that marked me.
Then, when I finished my degree and started to work as a lawyer in defence of the victims, I became part of the legal department of the AVT. When, in 2011, I wrote a report on the unsolved cases of ETA [Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the Basque paramilitary, nationalist, separatist, far-left terrorist group] the president of the AVT, Ángeles Pedraza, told me that I had to do the same for other terrorist groups. I started with GRAPO, and the first difficulty I encountered was that there was nothing written about these victims. When I did the report on ETA, I was able to take as a reference the book Vidas rotas (Broken Lives) that was published a little earlier, which listed for the first time in a systematic way all the victims murdered by ETA. However, there was nothing similar about GRAPO.
When I presented the report, I said that one day it would be necessary to write a ‘Broken Lives’ of GRAPO. The director of Memorial, Florencio Domínguez, who collaborated on that book, was present in the room, and he told me that it should be me. So, after finishing my doctoral thesis, I spoke to him and embarked on the project, although he indicated to me that the research should also cover not only the victims of GRAPO but also those of other extreme left-wing groups whose murdered victims were forgotten. I estimated that the research would take me a couple of years, but in the end, it took me five.
GRAPO is, in terms of number of victims, the third deadliest terrorist group of European origin in Europe, ahead of well-known terrorist organisations such as the German Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades. However, even in Spain, it is practically unknown.
That’s true. I don’t give that information in the book because I hadn’t realised it. It is the second most deadly group in Spain with 93 murders and its last victim was in 2006, but it is true that very few people know of GRAPO’s existence. During a seminar, Professor Matteo Re, who is an expert on the Red Brigades, pointed out to me that these 93 murders made GRAPO the third deadliest group in Europe. In the macabre ranking of terrorist organisations, Spain ranks second and third.
Of the 120 murders at the hands of GRAPO and other extreme left-wing groups, only 79 have been solved.
The number of murders carried out by the ETA that have been solved is lower, but because the nature of the terrorism is different. There is a high percentage of unsolved cases from the groups that carried out attacks in the last years of Franco’s regime and the first years of the transition due to the amnesty law and other pardons. For example, members of Terra Lliure (a Catalan pro-independence group) were pardoned in 1994. It is not so much whether the murders were solved or not, but that the sentence [the perpetrators] have served has been very short. As for GRAPO, most of their attacks were in broad daylight, in the open, and it was easier for witnesses to identify the perpetrators. One of the main causes of impunity in the case of ETA is that most of the unsolved cases were committed in the Basque Country; the spiral of violence and fear meant that eyewitnesses did not turn on the perpetrators out of fear, something that did not happen with GRAPO.
Have those killed by these groups been recognised as victims of terrorism?
Formal recognition as a victim of terrorism requires that the victim claims this recognition. If there is no family member who has applied for it, this recognition is not possible, especially in the case of victims from those years when the existence of the terrorist organisation was unknown. We need to bear in mind that the first law on victims only came into force in 1999.
Hasn’t the activity of these terrorist groups often been presented, on many occasions, in an almost romantic way because of their fight against the dictatorship?
Absolutely. The fact that most of these groups carried out attacks in the last years of Francoism has meant that, years later, they have been sold to us with a romantic, anti-Francoist vision. The culmination of this process is the law of democratic memory, which recognises the perpetrators of these attacks as victims and rewrites history in every sense of the word. Yes, they were anti-Franco, but they were also terrorists. There was an anti-Francoism that was not violent and the transition to democracy did not happen thanks to these terrorist groups, but despite them. These groups did not want a transition. The political arm of GRAPO is the reconstituted Communist Party and that of the FRAP (Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriota, ‘Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front’) is the Marxist-Leninist communist party—that is to say, they are two splits of Santiago Carrillo’s Communist Party that considered it a betrayal that the communist leader accepted legality.
Many of these groups are pro-independence (independence for Catalonia, Basque, Galicia, and even the Canary Islands), but ideologically they are almost all Marxist-Leninist. However, isn’t there an attempt, for political reasons, to ignore their ideological affiliation?
Absolutely. In fact, the only thing that has been criticised about the book and for which I have received attacks has been its title, which could not be more descriptive. When I proposed several titles, I liked this one the least: The victims of extreme left-wing terrorism in Spain. When the cover was made public, I began to receive the first attacks on social networks denying the existence of victims of extreme left-wing terrorism. Then I realised that the title had been a good choice, but it is still surprising that this terrorism is denied when we have the number of people murdered that I present in the book. Including the 853 killed by ETA, 973 have been killed by extreme left-wing groups. Many people told me that these were nationalist groups. Yes, some of them were, but they were also extreme leftists. These are the deniers, and then there are the frentistas, the ‘and when will the victims of the extreme Right come.’ I know that the Memorial Centre is promoting an investigation into this, but the figures are not comparable: 973 murdered compared to some 50-60 victims of the extreme Right. Denying the evidence by using extreme right-wing terrorism is simply duplicitous.
You mentioned earlier the law of democratic memory, and the truth is that the younger generations are increasingly unaware of what terrorism has been in Spain. What can be done to change this situation?
What needs to be done is to write about it and tell the story. I have been very clear about that. With this book, I intend to fill a void, to lay the first stone that will lead to many other investigations. What I have done is the general plan, but I believe that each story deserves to be shared in detail: it has to be investigated and told. When people tell me that it is incredible that young people don’t know who Miguel Ángel Blanco was, I always say that it is impossible for them to know if we don’t tell them. In this sense, I am very satisfied with the result of the book, not because of me, but to make known those who are the real protagonists, the victims who deserve to be brought out of oblivion.
