The tense meeting in which ETA decided to start killing: “You have to fight machine gun in hand”

Today the whole world knows ETA through its armed actions, its 853 murders, its 3,500 attacks and its more than 7,000 victims caused since it was founded, on July 31, 1959, by a group of students who were part of EKIN , a group of radical dissidents of the dictatorship. In the first years, the gang dedicated itself ‘only’ to placing small artifacts and making graffiti of “Gora Euskadi” (Long live the Basque Country), until they ended the life of a young civil guard, José Pardines, on June 7 1968. That day, as a result of the shooting, ETA member Txabi Etxebarrieta also died, the young man from Bilbao who had become the leader of the gang a year earlier and who, precisely, had promoted the debate within the organization about the need to start the armed struggle and sow their independence aspirations with corpses. It was during conversations that took place at the V Assembly of ETA held in two different sessions, both hosted by the Jesuits: the first, in 1966, in the parish house of Gaztelu (Guipúzcoa) and the second, in 1967, in the House of Spiritual Exercises of the Company in Guetaria (Guipúzcoa) known as ‘Villa San José’. This second part of the assembly marked the ideological and strategic future of the terrorist group, as well as the history of the Basque Country for more than half a century. Until then, various positions had coexisted in the organization, one more a defender of the nationalism of Sabino Arana and another that opted for the class struggle. But Etxebarrieta, with his arrival in the organization at the age of 23, managed to gather efforts around him with a single goal: to start once and for all the armed struggle to liberate the Basque people. From birth As José María Garmendia indicates in his ‘Historia de ETA’ (Haranburu, 1996), violence was very limited to sporadic actions until 1972, but this does not imply that the gang did not see armed violence as one of the most important to achieve the stated objectives. “The need to practice violence is present from the very birth of the organization: it can be said that it is consubstantial with it, despite the ups and downs it suffers,” explains the Basque historian. However, the debate on whether to use armed action was not exempt from hesitation among its members, as well as dissidents who clearly opted for other paths, despite being in Franco’s time. This began in the pages of the magazine ‘Zutik’, the official organ of ETA, a few years before the meeting in ‘Villa San José’, and was influenced by two phenomena that occurred far from the Basque Country: the liberation revolutions nationality of third world countries and Gandhi’s doctrine of non-violence. Each of these episodes marked each of the two positions. In the issue of ‘Zutik’ published in April 1962, for example, supporters of the former argued: «Spain obtains too many economic advantages from Euskadi for us to believe that the day will come when it resigns itself to losing its ‘colony’ , if we are not willing to conquer our right by force. Starting from this premise, it is clear that the path we have to follow is similar to that of the Algerians or the Angolans». The second position, with Ghandi as a reference, thus defended the political path in a later issue entitled ‘On non-violence’: «Franco’s dictatorship and, in general, the domination of the Basque Country by Spain, is based in force. To attack it with violent means would be to take the fight to its territory. […]. Non-violent action makes it possible to employ people who, due to their peaceful principles, would not work with ETA if it had a violent meaning. Our statement, however, is the opposite of those who are not willing to risk even a prison term for the ideal. That is to say, in the antipodes of the Franco supporters deceived to themselves». The second part of the V Assembly This is how the aforementioned V Assembly arrived, which will be the beginning of a new paradigm in the history of ETA. Some experts have considered it “the main political event of nationalism since the post-war period, and its historical repercussion has been greater than that of the PNV Congress of 1977″, explains the report ‘Txabi Etxebarrieta and the Basque 68’, edited by the foundation Iratzar, who defends that the young leader was a central figure in this meeting divided into two parts and presided over by him. The second, the most important of the two, was held between Tuesday 21 and Sunday 26 March 1967, with 40 ETA delegates, of whom only 18 had attended the first part held in December of the previous year. Once in the House of Spiritual Exercises of the Jesuits in Getaria, Etxebarrieta was elected president of the Assembly in which several works were presented, among them the ‘Revised Green Report’ and the papers ‘Ideology’ and ‘On the National Front’ presented by the so-called ‘culturalists’. The intervention of the latter, who were a minority, was very harsh on the history of ETA, for not having had the courage to embark on the path of violence: «We have created a military branch but there have been no military acts. ETA seems more like a group that launches bravado than a revolutionary group. Our violence is purely verbal,” said Federico Krutwig, the politician and writer who led this group, with a German father and a Biscayan mother of Venetian origin, who had learned Basque on his own. Euskal Herria, denationalized The curious thing about this sector is that his criticism of the organization was not exempt from a reality that was difficult to hide. This is how Anjel Rekalde collects in his book ‘Mugalaris. Memories of the bidasoa’ other part of Krutwig’s intervention: «We cannot pretend to ignore that three quarters of Euskal Herria are denationalised; that there is an enormous mass of foreign population that is difficult to sensitize to the national, that there are powerful forces such as the Catholic Church, Spanish Carlism and Spanish leftism, which are opposed to the Basque problem; that there is a large part of the Basque proletariat that is quite gentrified. ETA’s armed struggle and its demand for social justice are unreal, imaginary exercises, where no one knows where it begins or where it will end. The culturalists dropped out at the end of the Assembly and the option that won is well known, with Etxebarria as leader of this new ETA that was going to begin its long history of assassinations with José Pardines less than a year later, on June 7 of 1968. Five years later they put an end to the Francoist president Carrero Blanco, one of the most famous attacks in the history of the gang. In 1974, the violence increased significantly until, in 1987, its bloodiest action took place: the bomb planted in the Hipercor in Barcelona that killed 21 people, including four children. Years later, one of those founding members of ETA, the historian José María Garmendia Urdangarín, who participated in the first positions of radical nationalism, but who decided to leave the terrorist group soon due to the drift it was taking, assured: «I was at the birth of a monster.”