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From: http://www.city-journal.org

Three ETA spokesmen on a Basque TV channel in 2003

The heart, if not the soul, of Spain’s capital, Madrid, is its bustling financial district. Thousands crowd daily into the skyscrapers that overlook the district’s main square. Thousands more shop at a branch of El Corte Inglés (Spain’s Macy’s), attend soccer games at Bernabéu Stadium, or ride the subways, trains, and buses whose lines converge here.

Terrorists had hoped to strike this densely packed urban space in early 2008. But unlike the devastating coordinated suicide bombings of March 11, 2004, which killed 191 train commuters and wounded 1,600, this plot did not originate with al-Qaida or any of its loosely linked affiliates. Nor was it hatched among the 12 militant Muslim Pakistanis arrested in January for allegedly planning suicide bombings in Barcelona’s subways and other strikes in Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal. No, the terrorists who dreamed of creating mayhem in the square were as Spanish as paella, as much a part of the local landscape as flamenco or bullfighting: “Euskadi Ta Askatasuna,” or “Basque Homeland and Freedom,” commonly known as ETA (pronounced “etta”). This is Spain’s “other” terrorism—a Marxoid movement that, for some 50 years, has fought for independence for the 2.5 to 3 million Spaniards of Basque descent.

Though no specific date for the financial-district attack had been set, Spanish law enforcement officials said that two arrested ETA militants confessed to planning to detonate a bomb-filled car in the square’s vast underground parking lot or in one of its surface lots at some point before Spain’s March national election. Several officials doubted that the plot would have succeeded, but the suspects were among those who staged the December 2006 bombing of Terminal 4 at Madrid’s Barajas Airport, which killed two and leveled the gigantic structure. ETA had already hidden some explosives for the new strike in the semi-Basque region of Navarre, police disclosed, and maps of the square and its parking lots turned up in one suspect’s apartment.

Because most of the world has focused on al-Qaida and its allied groups, it’s easy for outsiders to overlook the continuing danger of ETA—a seemingly anachronistic “national liberation” force in an ever more globalized world. In 2007, ETA managed to kill only five people. But over the last three decades, its attacks have claimed over 830 lives, and its ongoing commitment to violence has provided leverage to the separatist politicians associated with the Basque “cause,” even as they denounce terrorism. Angry exchanges about ETA dominated part of the preelection debates this spring between Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (the eventual winner) and his rival, Mariano Rajoy of the conservative People’s Party; al-Qaida went virtually unmentioned. Shortly before the election, ETA reminded Spaniards of its brutal presence yet again, gunning down a former city councilman in front of his wife and child in Arrasate, a working-class town in the Basque Country.

The roots of Spain’s ETA problem are in the country’s tormented past. As British journalist Giles Tremlett observes in his 2006 book The Ghosts of Spain, many Spaniards see their country as merely a state that has imposed its will on several other nations—among them Euskadi, as the Basque Country is now officially called; Catalonia, which has its own (nonviolent) separatist movement; and Galicia. In these regions, which account for a quarter of Spain’s population, Tremlett writes, “the word España is often unmentionable.” History can be a political battlefield here. For example, while most Spaniards and the rest of the planet consider Magellan the first person to have circumnavigated the globe, every Basque student knows that the honor goes to Juan Sebastián Elcano, a Basque sailor who assumed command of Magellan’s ships after the Portuguese navigator’s death in 1521. A major street in Bilbao, the Basque Country’s largest city, bears the local hero’s name.

ETA’s dream is to unite the Basques of Spain and northern France into an independent nation. Never mind that Spain conquered and absorbed Navarre, the site of the last Basque-dominated kingdom, back in 1512; or that two-thirds of Navarre’s population are no longer purely Basque; or that polls consistently show that majorities there and in the three Basque provinces (which, unlike the region of Navarre, are overwhelmingly Basque) want to remain part of Spain. ETA argues that time hasn’t healed the historical injustice of the Basque Country’s incorporation into Spain and that the Basques must return to their own traditions. (Some historians maintain that the Basques may stretch back as far as 5,000 years, making them Europe’s oldest people with its oldest language, a unique tongue called Euskara.)

Juan Pablo Fusi, former head of the National Library of Madrid and an authority on the Basque Country, points out that Basques look no different from other Spaniards and were never a nation, though they’ve had a strong sense of national identity since at least the sixteenth century. Basque nationalists have relied on a largely invented history to justify their claims, charges José Martínez Soler, who runs 20 Minutos, a free newspaper in Madrid. “ETA plays off the widespread nostalgia among Basques for something they never had—an independent Basque country,” he says.

Both men agree that ETA, founded as a Marxist-Leninist group in 1959, gained popularity from fighting Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the dictator who ruled Spain from the thirties until his 1975 death. But ETA’s war continued even as King Juan Carlos I oversaw Spain’s transition to democracy, which culminated in 1978 with a constitution that granted considerable autonomy to Spain’s 17 regions and 50 provinces. A year later, some nationalist parties associated with ETA declared that the degree of autonomy was insufficient and began championing an independent Basque state. Over time, the list of ETA targets expanded from the Civil Guard (one of Spain’s three main police forces and the one that did most of the Franco regime’s dirty work) and the state’s military personnel to judges, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, writers and other intellectuals, and even Basque nationalists who opposed independence.

The Spanish government responded with an equally ugly “dirty war” against ETA called GAL—Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación—a secret government-sponsored campaign from 1983 to 1987, in which death squads killed, kidnapped, and tortured not only alleged ETA members but also civilians who, it turned out, had nothing to do with the group. In 1997, a Spanish court convicted several officials, including a former interior minister in the government of Socialist prime minister Felipe González, on charges related to the illegal campaign. Disclosure of GAL in a country with Spain’s history of government oppression generated sympathy for ETA that it otherwise would have lacked because of its own violence.

Eduardo Uriarte Romero knows too well why ETA remains a threat: he once belonged to it. One of 16 ETA guerrillas put on trial for the 1968 murder of a police chief, he is alive today only because the trial sparked huge protests among Basques, which led Franco to commute his two death sentences to 169 years in jail. Freed by a general amnesty in 1977, Uriarte says that he quit ETA after Spain became a democracy and the Basque region became semiautonomous. “Some in ETA argued that we had to go on after Franco’s death, that nothing had changed. But clearly, that was not true,” he notes, reminiscing over coffee at a Bilbao hotel with other former ETA members. “Since 1978, Madrid’s legal reach over us here in the Basque Country is marginal at best.”

Indeed, the Basque Country now boasts its own flag and national anthem, as well as its own health, security, and tax systems. “The Basque government collects nine out of every ten [tax] euros in the region. We have 7,500 cops and our own parliaments,” Uriarte points out. The Basque provinces also have their own Euskara-language public schools now—some 80 percent of the state schools in the region—which are teaching children a language that many of their parents don’t know. A 2001 poll found that only half of all Basques could speak or understand the old tongue; even the Basque president, Juan José Ibarretxe, had to learn Euskara after assuming his post.

Now a leader of the Foundation for Liberty, a pro-democracy Basque organization that champions democracy and civil liberties and opposes ETA and other violent groups, Uriarte argues that ETA delegitimized itself in the early eighties when it began to target Basque nationals who opposed independence. “Suddenly, anyone and everyone became fair game,” he says. The number of victims increased dramatically as ETA’s targets broadened. “From its start through the 1960s, 77 people were killed,” observes foundation vice president Javier Elorrieta García. “After the transition [to democracy], that number shot up. Today it is nearly 900.”

ETA’s stock-in-trade is less political murder than ongoing intimidation. ETA, like the Mafia, finances its operations mostly through extortion. “You get a typed letter, almost a form letter, at your business or home, saying that the time has come to do your patriotic duty and pay your ‘revolutionary tax,’ ” Elorrieta explains. “They demand between 30,000 and 300,000 euros, depending on the size of your company. If you don’t pay up, you get a second letter, which contains a warning. Then you get a third, which gives you a date by which you must comply. You don’t get another after that.” Most victims find it safer to cooperate. Spanish law enforcement officials estimate that ETA raises some 3 million euros yearly, or $4.7 million, from such shakedowns.

Judith Miller, a contributing editor of City Journal, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who writes about national security issues.