ETA, an acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, was an armed Basque nationalist and far-left separatist organization in the Basque Country between 1959 and 2018, with its goal being independence for the region. The group was founded in 1959 during the era of Francoist Spain, and later evolved from a pacifist group promoting traditional Basque culture to a violent paramilitary group. It engaged in a campaign of bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings throughout Spain and especially the Southern Basque Country against the regime, which was highly centralised and hostile to the expression of non-Castilian minority identities. ETA was the main group within the Basque National Liberation Movement and was the most important Basque participant in the Basque conflict.
Batasuna was a Basque nationalist political party. Based mainly in Spain, it was banned in 2003, after a court ruling declared proven that the party was financing ETA with public money.
Basque nationalism is a form of nationalism that asserts that Basques, an ethnic group indigenous to the western Pyrenees, are a nation and promotes the political unity of the Basques, today scattered between Spain and France. Since its inception in the late 19th century, Basque nationalism has included Basque independence movements.
The Ertzaintza is the autonomous police force for the Basque Country, largely replacing the Spanish Policía Nacional and Guardia Civil. An Ertzaintza member is called an ertzaina.
Baltasar Garzón Real is a Spanish former judge. He served on Spain's central criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, and was the examining magistrate of the Juzgado Central de Instrucción No. 5, which investigates the most important criminal cases in Spain, including terrorism, organised crime, and money laundering. In 2011, he was suspended from judicial activity and in 2012 he was convicted of illegal wiretapping and disbarred for a period of 11 years. During this time, Garzón legally assisted Julian Assange.
The Basque Country is the name given to the home of the Basque people. The Basque Country is located in the western Pyrenees, straddling the border between France and Spain on the coast of the Bay of Biscay. Euskal Herria is the oldest documented Basque name for the area they inhabit, dating from the 16th century.
Arnaldo Otegi Mondragón is a Basque politician who is currently General Secretary of Basque nationalist party EH Bildu. He was member of the Basque Parliament for both Herri Batasuna and Euskal Herritarrok. He was a convicted member of the banned armed separatist group organization ETA in his early years. He was one of the key negotiators during the unsuccessful peace talks in Loiola and Geneva, in 2006.
The Communist Party of the Basque Homelands was a communist Basque separatist party in the Basque Country, Spain. The party was outlawed by the Spanish Supreme Court in 2008 after it was judicially proven to be part of Batasuna and, ultimately, ETA.
The Basque National Liberation Movement was an umbrella term that comprised all social, political and armed organizations orbiting around the ideas of the illegal armed organisation Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), proscribed internationally as a terrorist organisation.
ETA's 2006 "permanent ceasefire" was the period spanning between 24 March and 30 December 2006 during which, following an ETA communiqué, the Spanish government, led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero on one side, and the militant group on the other, engaged in talks as a means to agree on a formula to voluntarily disband the latter. It was terminated as a result of the 2006 Madrid Barajas International Airport bombing.
A car bomb attack was carried out on 19 June 1987 at the Hipercor shopping centre in Barcelona, Spain, by the Basque separatist organisation ETA, which was classified as a terrorist group. The bombing killed 21 people and injured 45, the deadliest attack in ETA's history. Controversy surrounded the timing of telephone warnings made before the attack and the authorities' response to them.
Miren Uxue Barkos Berruezo, simply known as Uxue Barkos, is a Spanish journalist and politician who served as the President of Navarre from 2015 to 2019. She previously represented the Basque coalition Geroa Bai, and before that, Nafarroa Bai, in the Spanish Congress of Deputies.
The Basque conflict, also known as the Spain–ETA conflict, was an armed and political conflict from 1959 to 2011 between Spain and the Basque National Liberation Movement, a group of social and political Basque organizations which sought independence from Spain and France. The movement was built around the separatist organization ETA, which had launched a campaign of attacks against Spanish administrations since 1959. ETA had been proscribed as a terrorist organization by the Spanish, British, French and American authorities at different moments. The conflict took place mostly on Spanish soil, although to a smaller degree it was also present in France, which was primarily used as a safe haven by ETA members. It was the longest running violent conflict in modern Western Europe. It has been sometimes referred to as "Europe's longest war".
Santiago Brouard or Santi Brouard was a doctor and Basque politician. He was one of the leaders of Herri Batasuna, and deputy mayor of Bilbao. He was killed by the Spanish government's death squad, the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL), in one of its highest-profile acts. Broaurd was shot by GAL gunmen Luis Morcillo and Rafael López Ocaña as he left his paediatric clinic in Bilbao.
A car bomb attack was carried out by the armed Basque separatist group ETA in the Puente de Vallecas district of Madrid, Spain on 11 December 1995, which killed 6 people and injured a further 19. The target was a camouflaged army vehicle which was transporting nine civilian employees of the army towards the nearby motorway.
The Monbar Hotel attack was carried out by the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL), a Spanish state-sponsored death squad, on 25 September 1985 in Bayonne, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France. The targets were four members of the Basque separatist terrorist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), whom the Spanish government believed to be senior figures in the organization, itself proscribed as a terrorist group in Spain and France. All four people were killed, with a fifth person, apparently unconnected to ETA, injured in the shooting. This represented the deadliest attack carried out by the GAL. Although two of the participants were apprehended shortly after the shooting, controversy surrounded the possible involvement of senior figures in the Spanish police.
The Galician independence movement or the Galician separatist movement is a political movement which supports the independence of Galicia and the other Galician-speaking territories outside the Autonomous Community of Galicia, including As Portelas, O Bierzo, and the Eo-Navian lands from Spain, and possibly the North Region from Portugal due to its cultural and historical connection with Gallaecia.
Women in ETA in Francoist Spain were few in numbers, and portrayed as dangerous by the media. Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) grew out of a Basque nationalist movement with roots that pre-dated the Second Spanish Republic. When Franco seized power, the new regime cracked down on Basque nationalism, imprisoned and killed many activists and made traditional women's activism difficult to continue. Women found themselves being investigated by the new regime. Basque nationalists began to stockpile weaponry following the end of World War II. ETA was created in 1952 by students in Bilbao, creating a fissure in the Basque nationalist community by the mid-1950s. Their attitude towards women was patriarchal and informed by their conservative Roman Catholicism. There would be few women in the movement in this period.
Genoveva Forest Tarrat was a Spanish far-left activist, writer and political prisoner. Born into an anarchist family in Barcelona, she studied medicine in Madrid. During the 1970s, she supported the Basque separatist group ETA in their resistance to the government of dictator Francisco Franco. From 1974 to 1977, she was imprisoned for complicity in the Cafetería Rolando bombing (1974), which killed 13 people in Madrid. After Spain's transition to democracy, she served a term as a senator from 1992 until 1993. The wife of the Spanish writer Alfonso Sastre, she died in May 2007.
Josu Muguruza (1958–1989) was a Basque journalist and politician who was assassinated in Madrid on 20 November 1989. Muguruza was among the leaders of Herri Batasuna, a Basque nationalist political party. He was about to serve at the Spanish Parliament for the party when he was killed.
