THE BASQUE NATIONALISTS claim that after the Civil War, during Franco’s World War II neutrality, 21,780 Basques were executed. The figure has never been verified. In San Sebastián, by the graceful curve of the world’s most beautiful urban beach, was a prison where Franco’s men shot Basque nationalists almost every day until 1947.
Immediately after the Basque provinces had been taken, Franco outlawed the Euskera language. The Basques were told to “speak Christian.” Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, the “traitor provinces,” were singled out for special punishment and lost all rights of self-rule. Navarra, a very loyal province, still had some fiscal autonomy.
In the summer of 1944, when large numbers of armed Republicans, especially Basques and Catalans, neared the Spanish border, many in Madrid believed that the invasion was about to begin, that Franco would soon be overthrown. But units such as the Guernica Battalion decided to finish the war for France first, thus gaining both the sympathy and availability of the Allies to help them in Spain. In October 1944, a group of Communist Republicans did invade and were defeated.
In March 1945, Don Juan de Borbón, the pretender to the Spanish throne, denounced the dictatorship as an ally of the Axis and called on Franco to step down and make way for a constitutional monarchy.
Ever since the conference at Yalta in February 1945, when the Allies had promised democracy to the countries controlled by the Axis powers, Franco had started a frantic and largely successful project, revising history. He would never again admit that he had wanted to enter the war or that he was a German sympathizer. He claimed he had only 26,000 political prisoners. That did not include those in his forced labor camps. Still, two years earlier the government had confessed to 75,000 political prisoners, none of whom had been released.
The Basque government-in-exile meeting in midtown Manhattan in 1944. Aguirre is in the center at the end of the table and Telesforo de Monzón is on his left. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)
To the French, British, and Americans, Franco’s Spain was a pariah nation. Despite constant overtures by Franco, it was to be excluded from the United Nations, NATO, the Marshall Plan, and later, the European Economic Community. In effect, it was shut out of the postwar Western world. But it was not invaded. Spain was not to be liberated. The policy of President Franklin Roosevelt, stated in 1945, was that the United States would not interfere in Spain as long as it was not a threat to world peace. On the other hand, he said, “I can see no place in the community of nations for governments founded on fascist principles.” Ostracism but not intervention. In 1946, a Polish diplomat tried to make the case that Franco was “a threat to world peace” because German Nazis in Spain were building an atom bomb. This might have led to an invasion, except that the diplomat had no evidence to support his charge.
But the Basques, most Republican exiles, even many in the Franco government, were convinced that the end was near. In July 1945 the Basque Nationalist Party had created an intelligence service to keep the United States informed on events in Spain, in preparation for the invasion. Convening his government in New York in late 1945, Aguirre told his cabinet, “We will return to our country, this year.”
The government-in-exile returned to Basqueland, to Bayonne, and even reorganized the cabinet in preparation for its new responsibilities after the anticipated liberation of Spain. In Spanish Basque country, ikurriñas were turning up unexpectedly on public monuments. Someone was painting EUZKADI, the forbidden word from the forbidden language, on walls in very large letters. Statues of the regime’s heroes, such as General Mola, were dynamited.
Then the Basque government made a decision that would change the landscape of Basque politics for the next two generations.
The government-in-exile contemplated three options: Should it continue an armed underground resistance? Should it organize mass protests and other types of political resistance? Or should it disarm and concentrate on international diplomacy? Putting its faith chiefly in the United States and going against millennia of Basque history, the government-in-exile chose the third option.
The United States and the Basque nationalists, according to Aguirre, were allies. All the way back to President Woodrow Wilson, who had mentioned Basques and Catalans as examples of nations struggling for the right to self-determination, the United States had been friendly to the Basque cause. The Basque Nationalist Party and the OSS had worked hand in hand. The Guernica Battalion had received American training and weapons.
Now, in 1947, the Basque government had no more money to maintain an armed force. The United States, Aguirre believed, would be its defender. The veterans dispersed, some settling in France, some in Latin America, some in the United States. A few refused to accept Aguirre’s decision and slipped into Spain to fight and, in most cases, were killed. Many would never return to their native provinces. Kepa Ordoki died at the age of eighty in 1993, in Hendaye.
While Telesforo de Monzón was living with his wife in St.-Jean-de-Luz growing raspberry bushes, Franco was summering in San Sebastián, eating, according to legend, with the silverware his troops had stolen from the Monzón estate in Vergara. But the Basque government was confident that Franco, the leftover dictator of a destroyed alliance, could not hold out much longer, with his country impoverished and isolated. Basque shipbuilding was barely functioning, Altos Hornos de Vizcaya had laid off half its work force, and trade unions were calling general strikes. The Franco government responded by sending thousands of Guardia Civil and police to Bilbao.
Then salvation came to Franco from unexpected places such as Prague, taken over by a Communist coup in 1948. The world was being divided into Communists and anti-Communists, and Franco was a long-standing anti-Communist—one of his few consistencies. The two Germanies declared separate capitals in 1949. In June 1950, the United States went to war in Korea. Two months after the Korean War began, the U.S. Congress authorized $62 million in credit for Franco’s anti-Communist Spain. The following year France removed the diplomatic status of the Basque government office in Paris, expelling Basques from the city they had helped liberate and turning the building, near the Eiffel Tower, back into the Spanish Embassy.
THE COLD WAR rescued Franco’s regime at a desperate last moment. While the rest of Europe had been recovering from the destruction of World War II, Spain was becoming poorer. In 1950, Spanish meat consumption per capita was half what it had been in 1926. While telling Spain how he was standing up to the Americans, Franco made it clear in Washington, that he would make any kind of deal they wanted. In 1953, the newly elected president, Dwight Eisenhower, sought a military presence in the southwestern flank of Europe. This produced the Defense Pacts of September 1953.
Franco made these agreements seem to Spaniards like far more than they were. In Spain it was believed that the wily Caudillo had at last duped the United States into supporting him with friendship, money, and development projects. The moment was brilliantly satirized by Luis Garcia Berlanga in the film Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall, in which a small Spanish town, confusing the Defense Pacts with the Marshall Plan, feverishly prepares for the arrival of Mr. Marshall and all the gifts he will bestow. When the small entourage of Americans arrive, they drive through the town without stopping.
The pacts gave the United States a bomber base near Madrid, in Torrejón, and other air bases near Zaragoza, Seville, and Morón de Frontera, as well as the Rota navy base in Cádiz. In exchange for allowing a foreign power to establish bases that were potential nuclear targets next to Spanish cities, Spain got $226 million in assistance, but most of it was of little value. The only developmental assistance was for roads, port facilities, and ancillary defense industries that the Americans would need to operate. They did give military equipment, but only used and dated leftovers from World War II and the Korean War.
But the pacts were of enormous symbolic importance. The Basques were stunned by the betrayal. Aguirre, himself a passionate anti-Communist, accepted the Cold War logic that the United States feared an unstable Sp
ain, but he complained that the move was a “weakening of moral force in the fight against totalitarianism.”
Other Basques, however, especially younger ones, were furious. Xabier Arzalluz, today the most powerful Basque politician, was a young law student in Zaragoza at the time. “People of our generation are bitter,” he recently said. “I have great empathy for Americans. But not for the government, not for the State Department. I feel the same way about the British.” Arzalluz remained loyal to the Basque Nationalist Party, but many of his contemporaries began to question their support. “They thought the party was bourgeois, old and passé,” Arzalluz recalled. “When America signed an accord with Franco, young people didn’t believe that we were fighting Franco anymore.”
The Basques were not the only ones of his generation angered by the pact. An eleven-year-old in Seville, Felipe González, vowed that he would never set foot on U.S. soil. In 1977, preparing to be elected prime minister of the new Spanish democracy, he reneged and visited Washington, D.C.
What the pacts had meant was that Franco would survive, though he always remained somewhat of a pariah. In 1959, concerned about the well-being of his bases, Eisenhower visited Spain. According to accounts of this visit, he was uncomfortable and distant, but he was photographed giving the Caudillo the famous Ike smile, and that was the photo Franco needed to show Spaniards. Eisenhower did seem to be impressed by the huge welcome the Spanish gave him, not seeming to realize that it had been staged by the Falange, the last vestige of the fascist Europe he had defeated.
BUT, THE NEW generation’s disenchantment with the Basque Nationalist Party had not begun with the Defense Pacts.
José Luis Alvarez was born in 1929. Sabino Arana would not have considered him a Basque. His grandfather was not only a Liberal but a maketo—an engraver from Madrid who had moved north at the time of the Second Carlist War, setting up a lithograph shop in Tolosa. José Luis’s father was born in the shop and later moved the family business to San Sebastián, where José Luis was born.
Growing up in the 1930s, José Luis heard Euskera all around him. He heard his Basque mother speaking it with the neighbors.
“What does that mean?” he would ask her.
“I heard it everywhere,” he said. “It seemed to be something that I lacked. Something that was ours. I felt robbed. Cut off from my country.”
Soon no one was allowed to speak it. He remembers the prison by the beach where Franco’s troops shot people every day. A teacher he knew from the neighborhood was taken there. By 1946, he considered himself a Basque nationalist, but a nationalist without a movement and no idea of what to do.
“I didn’t know anyone who was a nationalist. Or who said he was a nationalist. I had an uncle who was executed in Madrid in 1942. I don’t think even he was a nationalist.”
He found a Basque grammar book in the Guipúzcoan dialect and started studying. Eventually, he was able to get secret language lessons from a teacher who said he was from the Basque Nationalist Party.
In 1949, he went to Bilbao to study industrial engineering. His studies gave him the contacts to arrange intense language instruction and soon he was writing in Euskera for an underground publication. But he still had not had any contact with the Basque Nationalist Party.
In 1950, he was arrested in San Sebastián for belonging to an underground student movement. He spent one month in prison. “We couldn’t do anything political but we felt we had to do something,” he said. He and his small group reasoned that they needed to make contact with members of the Basque Nationalist Party. But where were they? In hiding, it was always said. José Luis thought a friend of his brother’s might be one of them. Carefully José Luis and his group asked questions and in time were able to meet with actual representatives of the fabled Basque Nationalist Party.
The young Basques were utterly disappointed.
“We had the impression that they were waiting for Franco to die, or waiting for the Americans to invade. Characteristic of youth we did not take easily to the idea of waiting.”
In 1952, five of them decided to start their own underground movement, organized into small cells. At first there was one cell in San Sebastián and a second in Bilbao. A cell was often no more than three people, making it difficult for the Guardia Civil to penetrate the organization. A cell might be exposed but not the organization.
They named their group ATA, an acronym for Aberri Ta Askatasuna, Homeland and Liberty. But they were Guipúzcoans. In Vizcayan dialect, they later discovered, ata means “duck.” So after six years of being a clandestine duck to Vizcayans, in 1959 they changed their name to ETA, the acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Euskadi and Liberty. As with Arana’s Basque Nationalist Party, July 31, Ignatius Loyola’s Saint’s Day, was chosen as ETA’s official founding date.
ETA, the second choice, was a brilliant label. To someone who does not read Euskera, any text in Basque appears to be peppered with the initials because eta is also the conjunction that means “and.” The sculptor and inveterate punster, Jorge de Oteiza, at ninety his pale eyes still sparkling with mischief, sometimes referred to ETA as Y—the Spanish language word for “and.” ETA appears to mean many other things. Once ETA began its anti-Franco activities, the Guardia Civil desperately tried to decipher the three letters. One infamous Guardia Civil beat prisoners for hours trying to get them to confirm that it stood for a Greek letter and to explain what that meant.
THE ORIGINAL ETA members considered themselves intellectuals and published an underground journal called Ekin, meaning “to persist” or “to act.” Their stated goal was an independent Basque nation recognized as an equal in the community of nations. But their primary activity was promoting the forbidden Basque language. That, at least, was to be the first step. José Luis explained, “Well, we were the children of petit bourgeoisie.”
There was important work to be done by intellectuals. They recognized that to have a just nation, the teachings of Sabino Arana had to be revised. The racial definition of a Basque was not acceptable. Racism was to be purged from Basque nationalism, as was the Aranist commitment to the Catholic Church. ETA reverted to the original Basque definition. A Basque is an Euskaldun, someone who speaks Euskera. Instead of genealogy, last names, and earlobes, it was fluency in the Basque language and culture that would determine who was and was not Basque.
According to ETA, “Euskera is the quintessence of Euskadi. So long as Euskera is alive, Euskadi will live.”
Franco always had contempt for the impact of culture and so frequently neglected to repress writing and art intended as a protest against him. In 1957, José Luis was able to get his first novel published in Euskera under the pseudonym Txillardegi. The name came from the San Sebastián neighborhood where he grew up. Txillardegi writes in a seductively lyrical style that seems to burst uncontrollably into free verse from time to time.
The novel Leturiaren egunkari ezkutua (The Secret Diary of Leturia), was a milestone in Basque literature, presenting the first Basque antihero. Until then, literature in Euskera had been about Basque history and Basque tradition, about the great deeds of Basques. But Txillardegi’s novel was about the human condition—about love, grief, and suicide—a novel in Basque rather than a “Basque novel.”
BY THE END of 1959, ETA had between 200 and 250 members, and they were studying armed liberation movements. Of particular interest was the Tunisian liberation movement of Habib Bourguiba. They were also interested in a favorite of the Basque Nationalist Party, Menachem Begin’s Irgun, which had used violence to drive the British out of Palestine during the fight to create a Jewish state.
But regardless of their models, violent activism was primarily directed against walls and statues. Their signature became Gora Euskadi.
Though the structure of separate cells helped to protect them, it also made it difficult to control the organization. The members had agreed to meet once every year, but some years the annual meeting never got organized.
In addition to the appearanc
e of Gora Euskadi on more and more walls, ETA bombed an elevator at the Guardia Civil headquarters in Vitoria. Spanish flags were burned. On July 18, 1961, a train carrying celebrators to a ceremony in San Sebastián for the anniversary of the 1936 coup d’état was derailed by ETA. Though the operation was carried out with great care to avoid casualties, the message was clear: The Spanish enemy celebrated in Euskadi at their own peril.
Madrid’s response was equally clear—a massive sweep, arresting, torturing, and imprisoning more than 100 Basques. Among those arrested were Txillardegi and the other five leaders of ETA. But they were released after short sentences. The Spanish were not infiltrating and destroying ETA. They were simply avenging the derailment. ETA would avenge the retaliation. An eye for an eye came to define the relationship between ETA and the Spanish.
Once released from prison, the leaders crossed the border and established operations in France, from where ETA, it is believed, has been directed ever since.
ENEMIES OFTEN become mirror images of each other. Franco was obsessed by his hatred of communism. Each family with its small property being a basic element of the Basque sense of order, communism is anathema to most Basques as well. While the Basque Nationalist Party, from Arana to Aguirre, had been resolutely anti-Communist—the Guernica Battalion had been created to separate from Communist fighters—the new generation was increasingly drawn to Marxist ideology. Franco’s venom had made communism appealing to those who hated him. What could be more anti-Franco? And Aguirre and the nationalists, it seemed to young Basques, were not sufficiently anti-Franco.
Basque History of the World Page 21