torn out in a struggle, is lying on the floor. When she opens the glove compartment, Colomo’s wife discovers identification papers belonging to both men.
It later transpired that Lasa and Zabala had become the first victims of the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion, the GAL, a rogue group of vengeful Spanish security officials who would go on to murder twenty-seven people between 1983 and 1987. Most of their victims were exiled members of ETA living across the border in the area around Bayonne, protected by the Mitterrand government as political refugees. Seven, however, were innocent victims who had nothing whatsoever to do with Basque terror. The GAL had two simple objectives: to liquidate key figures in the ETA leadership and to change the French government’s position on terrorist refugees. Subsequent investigations would prove that the GAL was set up and financed by senior figures in the Madrid government using covert funds diverted from the state. Other high-ranking police and military officers, as well as members of the Secret Service, were also implicated. The Socialist prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez, escaped formal censure, yet his government fell, in large part due to the GAL scandal, in the elections of March 1996 that brought Jose Maria Aznar to power.
On the morning of 16 October 1983, Lasa and Zabala were driven from Bayonne to San Sebastian, where they were held for three months in an abandoned palace belonging to the Ministry of the Interior. They were gagged and blindfolded, almost certainly administered mind-altering drugs, beaten and severely tortured. Some of the information gleaned during their interrogation would later lead to the deaths of other etarras at the hands of the GAL. Lasa and Zabala’s bodies were eventually discovered two years later buried under fifty kilos of quicklime, 800 kilometres south of Bayonne outside the village of Bosot near Alicante. The men had been taken to an isolated location, stripped naked, placed before an open grave and shot through the neck. It would be another ten years before their remains were formally identified, and five more before the men responsible – among them senior members of the Guardia Civil and the civil governor of Guipuzcoa himself – were brought to justice.
As Zulaika relates this story over beans and bread, his facial expression barely changes. He would have been no older than eight or nine when the GAL began its campaign of terror, yet subsequent events – the imprisonment of the interior minister, the implication that Gonzalez himself may have orchestrated the dirty war – doubtless cemented in his young mind both the legitimacy of ETA’s cause and the iniquity of the government in Madrid. The GAL may have succeeded in persuading the French authorities to take a tougher stance against ETA, but its enduring legacy was catastrophic. The GAL’s cack-handed dirty war made martyrs of its victims and spawned an entirely new generation of young Basque activists dedicated to the use of violence as a legitimate political tactic.
And you think this is happening again? You think Arenaza and Otamendi were murdered by the Guardia Civil? By the army? By mercenaries hired through Madrid?’
Zulaika pauses over a final mouthful of fabada. Xavi has fallen asleep, dribble at the sides of his dummy. I have pushed my own bowl to the side of the table.
‘It is something we in Euskal Herria have been anticipating for some time. Think about it. Aznar is committed to the destruction of ETA. This much we know. He has teamed up with Blair and Bush and they are united against terror, whatever that means. But how do you win a war of this kind? Not through negotiation, not through legitimate means, but through the state’s own brand of terror. The dirty war. Spain in its democratic incarnation has a history of illegal tactics. From 1975 to 1981, that is immediately after the death of Franco when the country was supposed to have become a democracy, you have fascist groups avenging the death of figures like Carrero Blanco, responding in childish eye-for-eye fashion to the work of ETA. In 1980 alone, the Batallon Vasco Espanol, a collection of Madrid thugs, killed four people in a bar, then a pregnant woman, even a child in a playground. Two other women were raped before their murder by the BVE. The killers were well known to local people, but no action was taken against them. Then the officer who is supposed to be in charge of the case is promoted to be the leader of the Spanish police intelligence service two years later. And you ask why people become angry. You ask why the dirty war is not possible.’
‘I didn’t ask that. It just seems unlikely -’
Zulaika interrupts me, jutting forward, as if I have offended him. ‘ Unlikely? ’ He’s like a petulant teenager who hasn’t got his way. I have the sense that this is the first time he has properly articulated his theory, and he won’t like anyone testing it for flaws. ‘Last month a respected expert at the United Nations, the same United Nations that Spain and America chooses to ignore over Iraq, proved that our Basque prisoners have been subjected to torture and abuse in Spanish jails. It is still going on, Alec, to this day. The UN showed that those detained were beaten, that they were kept awake for long hours and forced to exhaust themselves with physical exercise, that they have plastic bags placed over their heads just to give the guards something to laugh about, that they are starved and beaten. It is Guantanamo on our own Spanish soil. You’re naive if you think that a dirty war is not being fought against ETA and al-Qaeda all the time. The ringleaders of the GAL are still treated as heroes by the majority in Spain. They walk into a restaurant and there is applause. But when a family from Euskal Herria wins compensation for the way they have been mistreated by the police, it can take ten years to receive the money. This is of course disgusting and the United Nations report also points this out. So what we are seeing now is just a scaling up of an already existing problem.’
Zulaika shakes his head as if to deflect any potential rebuttal of his argument and leans back in his seat, draining another glass of water. The zealot at rest. What would be the point in drawing to his attention ETA’s own record of more than 800 dead over a period of thirty years, the thousands injured, the families obliterated by terror? Isn’t it time it all stopped? Too many lives have been taken for the sake of a line on a map which will never be drawn. I manage to say only this:
‘Patxo, you have to agree that these are not good times for ETA. From what I read in the British newspapers, a lot of the leadership has been rounded up. The French have got their own anti-terrorist police, they’re working in conjunction with the Spanish, extradition is a lot easier than it used to be. Why would Aznar or his subordinates risk that by launching another GAL? It just doesn’t make sense.’
He pauses and calls the waitress over, requesting two cups of coffee. For once, she ignores Xavi, who sleeps. It has dawned on me that Zulaika must have knowledge of Buscon’s role in the Arenaza abduction. A mercenary figure would validate his conspiracy. The masterminds behind both dirty wars disguised their links to the plot by hiring foreign extremists to do their dirty work for them. Kitson himself said that Buscon was a member of Portugal’s Secret Service. Several right-wing figures from the Portuguese underworld were involved in the GAL.
‘Let me answer that in two ways,’ he replies, following some truck drivers with his eyes as they exit the restaurant. ‘First, ETA is not finished. Not at all. It is like the serpent. You cut off its head and three more will grow in its place. The gudaris will simply bring the fight to France, and they will base themselves elsewhere: in Belgium, in more hospitable countries. Secondly, you must always remember that the Spanish are a vengeful people. Vengeance is in their blood. Perhaps as a tourist you do not see this. You see smiling families on the streets of Madrid and all the nice weather in Marbella and you think that nothing is wrong here. But they are cruel and morbid.’
‘I don’t accept that at all. You said the same thing about the English.’ And don’t call me a fucking tourist, you prick. ‘If nationalism shows us anything, it is that all human beings, of whatever creed or colour, are capable of appalling acts of violence, of horrific cruelty. We all have it inside us, Patxo. You, me, the chef who made our beans. Madrid doesn’t have the monopoly on inhuman behaviour.’ His forehead creases up, as if he has failed to understand what I am saying. I don’t bother to go back and translate. ‘Let’s just stick to the facts. All you have are two dead bodies and no suspects and suddenly the entire Spanish state is involved in a third dirty war?’
The waitress has set down Zulaika’s cup of coffee into which he pours two packets of sugar, stirring as he composes his response. She seems to flinch at mention of the term ‘dirty war’ and looks worriedly into my eyes. Her face is white with fatigue and there is a slight pink rash on the underside of her chin. It has suddenly become very warm inside the restaurant and I take off my sweater, setting it on the seat beside me.
‘Do you know the story of Segundo Marey?’ Zulaika asks.
Marey was kidnapped by the GAL and held for ten days in 1983, despite having no discernible relationship with ETA. He was the most high-profile of the innocent victims caught up in the second dirty war. To see where Zulaika is going with this, and to keep up an impression of general ignorance about Basque history, I shake my head and say ‘No.’
‘The Marey family are Basques. Like many people, they were forced to leave Euskal Herria in the Civil War because of the activities of the fascist troops under Franco. Segundo was four years old when he was brought across the border into France. As an adult, he lived a blameless life working at a furniture business. He played an
