Fourth floor of the Le Toumalin residence, in Saint Paul les Dax, southern France. It is 8 in the morning on March 11, 2004 when the head of ETA's logistics apparatus, Félix Ignacio Esparza Luri, begins his day. He is the guy who controls the organization's military equipment. At 8:11 he hears on television that there has been an attack. At 8:57 his commando companion, Bihotz Cornago, wakes up. The two ETA members don't understand anything.
-That's possible? – she asks.
-Without warning? No.
-Man, let's see who has the balls to say yes now, there has been a call and they have passed...
It is not fiction: the Civil Guard has a microphone in that house and listens to everything. At 10:51, and given the information that is becoming known, Esparza Luri says: “They must have been from Al Qaeda.” Throughout the day, the couple remains amazed. “It had to be the Moors,” Esparza insists.
These revelations appear in the book Sangre, sudor y paz (Península, 2017), one of whose authors is the colonel-chief of the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard, Manuel Sánchez Corbí, for 25 years one of the top officials of the fight against ETA. The most revealing thing, on page 343: “The news is transmitted in a timely manner.” That is to say, on the morning of 11-M, the Ministry of the Interior knew of the stupor of one of the top leaders of ETA in the face of the attack.
The book maintains that the attacks "leave ETA disoriented" and that a period of reflection begins, which will only break many months later with "soft" attacks against tourist interests.
“ETA had a reflection open partly for operational reasons, but also for political reasons, and that fact made it impossible for them to defend terrorism. It put them in a very uncomfortable place, it was a terrible blow for ETA,” reflects Jesús Eguiguren, who between 2002 and 2014 was president of the Socialist Party of Euskadi and who at that time had already opened a (secret) dialogue with the Abertzale leader Arnaldo. Otegi end violence.
Otegi was quick to proclaim in the media mid-morning that that attack was not by ETA, contradicting the Lehendakari, Juan José Ibarretxe, who at around 9:30 had accused the organization: “I had a lot of confidence in Otegi – adds Eguiguren – and I thought who would be well informed. I spoke to him that same day, and he implicitly suggested that I get the message to the government that it wasn't them.”
Within the nationalist left, however, there were doubts during the first hours, even among ETA prisoners.
This is what a former member of the gang, critical of violence, who lived those days in an Andalusian prison tells it: “In December ETA had tried to attack a train, and a few weeks before March 11 they stopped a van with 500 kilos of explosives. When I heard the news, in my cell, I did think it had been ETA. Shortly after we went out to the patio and the rest of the prisoners had the same perception. There was a lot of worry and tension. Otegi's statements did not clear up our doubts at all. “Our perception changed as details about the modus operandi became known.”
What happened in those known. The Government of José María Aznar tried to maintain that the attacks were the work of ETA, contrary to all the elements of the investigation that were becoming known and motivated, basically, by the immediacy of the 14-M elections. According to the former popular minister José Manuel García-Margallo in his memoirs, the political analysis was that, if the Islamist hypothesis was confirmed, they would go “home”, while the authorship of ETA would lead them to “destroy” the urns.
What impact did it have on the band? ETA began a reflection process. On March 21, he called on the Government to “establish a dialogue.” ETA attacked again in August and caused up to 16 attacks until the end of the year, although without deaths. The first attack where there was one was that of T4 in Barajas, on December 30, 2006: two years and eight months after 11-M and with a nine-month truce in between.
“One of the causes of the end of ETA is the rise of jihadism,” Eguiguren says bluntly. I was one of the first to say that ETA was going to end and people didn't take me seriously. I had an intellectual hunch that I was going to take that path. "I had studied the history of terrorism, and you see that when a movement is born it buries the immediately preceding one."
The person in charge of the Basque Government in matters of Memory and Human Rights, José Antonio Rodríguez Ranz, doctor in History, is not so categorical, although he considers that "he contributed to the end of ETA." “Sharing substance with jihadist terrorism, even though ETA spoke of “armed activity,” made them uncomfortable and was another factor, together with the wear and tear they had been suffering from police pressure, pressure from Basque society and the obvious fact that, in "In the 21st century, ETA's activity did not benefit the political project they claimed to defend."
Imanol Murua, journalist and professor at the University of the Basque Country, has written two books about the conversations at Loyola and about the years before the definitive abandonment of violence in 2011. In his opinion, 11-M “had an important impact on ETA.” “It strengthened the rejection of violence in public opinion in general, also in the Basque Country, and became another added factor that made it difficult for the nationalist left to justify the use of political violence, at a time when the vision "Criticism about ETA was beginning to emerge within the nationalist left itself," he adds.
The historic socialist leader tells it first-hand: "I think that gave us more strength to negotiate, they were more uncomfortable, the idea that it had to end increased in them."
Mikel Antza, who was the leader of ETA in 2004, declined to participate in this report. Nor did EH Bildu want to do it.
