Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA
Another European separatist organization that meant business was ‘Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’, or ETA, translated into English simply as ‘Basque Homeland and Liberty’. Basque, of course, is a region of northern Spain, but one with enough in the way of individual peculiarities for many Basques to believe that it represented a separate country. This sentiment has been alive for centuries, but a militant organization to achieve separation only began to emerge in the 1960s.
At the end of the nineteenth century, as Spain gradually slipped under the yoke of Fascist dictatorship, the Basque Nationalist Party was exiled, surviving the Franco era with its headquarters in Paris. By the late 1950s, however, in an era of turbulent European politics, member’s of the party’s youth wing broke away to form the much more militant and aggressive ETA. The organization was from its onset bedeviled by an ideological divergence, with one faction Marxist-Leninist in orientation, and the other purely nationalist. It was the former branch that was most actively engaged in the armed struggle.
Nelson Mandela once remarked that it is the oppressor that defines the nature of the struggle, and if ETA emerged as a violent organization, this is simply reflective of the violent and arbitrary methods used by the regime of General Francisco Franco to crush it. It was only after Franco’s death in 1975, with a liberalization of Spanish politics, that ETA’s campaign of violence began to accelerate. Bombings and assassinations increased tenfold, and to fund these operations, ETA resorted to bank robberies, kidnapping and ‘revolutionary taxes’, a cleaner word for blackmail and extortion.
By the late 1970s, the Spanish government had resorted to ‘dirty war’ tactics to try and deal with an organization that simply would not go away. Several ceasefires were declared, but none came to much, and the organization continued to be active into the twenty-first century. By 2010, ETA found itself weakened, depleted and increasingly unpopular and irrelevant. At that point, the organization morphed somewhat into a political front, but the issue upon which it was premised had largely fallen away, and in May 2019, it was formally disbanded.