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.
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.
Juan Manuel "Mamo" GuillermoContreras Sepúlveda was a Chilean Army officer and the former head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Chile's secret police during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In 1995, he was convicted of the murder of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC, and sentenced to seven years in prison, which he served until 2001. At the time of his death, Contreras was serving 59 unappealable sentences totaling 529 years in prison for kidnapping, forced disappearance, and assassination.
GAL were death squads illegally established by officials of the Spanish government to fight against ETA, the principal Basque separatist terrorist group. They were active from 1983 to 1987 under Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE)-led governments.
Arnaldo Otegi Mondragón is a politician from the Basque Country 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.
Operation Colombo was an operation undertaken by the DINA in 1975 to make political dissidents disappear. At least 119 people are alleged to have been abducted and later killed. The magazines published a list of 119 dead political opponents.
The Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front was a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organisation officially founded on 14 December 1983 as the military wing of the Communist Party of Chile in the context of this party policy denominated as the "Política de Rebelión Popular de Masas", created with the goal of a violent overthrow of the civic-military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
General Augusto Pinochet was indicted for human rights violations committed in his native Chile by Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón in 1998. He was arrested in London six days later and held on house arrest for a year and a half before being released by the British government in 2000. Authorised to return to Chile, Pinochet was subsequently indicted by judge Juan Guzmán Tapia and charged with several crimes. He died in 2006 without having been convicted. His arrest in London made the front pages of newspapers worldwide; not only did it involve the head of the military dictatorship that ruled Chile between 1973 and 1990, it marked the first time judges had applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed in a country by former heads of state, despite the existence of local amnesty laws.
José Ignacio de Juana Chaos, better known as Iñaki de Juana Chaos, is a member of the Basque separatist group ETA. He was convicted of killing 25 people in 1987 and was originally sentenced to 3,000 years in prison. As a result of complicated sentencing guidelines, he became eligible for release in late 2004 after only serving 17 years. However, the Spanish Government prevented his release by accusing him of making terrorist threats in two articles written from prison. In August 2006, he started a hunger strike protesting his continued imprisonment but it ended after sixty-three days. Another hunger strike occurred from November 2006 until March 2007, it ended after he was moved from a hospital in Madrid to one in his home region of Gipuzkoa. After he left the hospital he was to be placed under house arrest, but on 6 June 2007, after the end of ETA's ceasefire he was sent to Aranjuez prison. On 2 August 2008, de Juana Chaos was released from prison.
Enrique Arancibia Clavel was a Chilean DINA security service agent who assassinated General Carlos Prats and his wife in 1974.
Gerardo Huber Olivares was a Chilean Army Colonel and agent of the DINA, Chile's intelligence agency. He was in charge of purchasing weapons abroad for the army. Huber was assassinated shortly before he was due to testify before Magistrate Hernán Correa de la Cerda in a case concerning the illegal export of weapons to the Croatian army. That enterprise involved 370 tons of weapons sold to the Croatian government by Chile on 7 December 1991, when Croatia was under a United Nations embargo arising from the war in Yugoslavia. In January 1992, Magistrate Correa sought testimony from Huber on the deal. However, Huber may well have been silenced to avoid implicating the Dictator, then-Commander-in-Chief of the Army Augusto Pinochet, who was himself awaiting trial on related charges.
Emiliano Revilla is a Spanish industrialist who was kidnapped by the Basque separatist group ETA in 1988. He was captured on February 25, 1988, and freed on October 30, 1988.
The murder of Lasa and Zabala was one of the first acts carried out by the GAL, a state sponsored death squad, Basques José Antonio Lasa and José Ignacio Zabala were kidnapped, tortured and executed in 1983.
Basque National Liberation Movement prisoners are all those people who have been imprisoned, placed on remand, or otherwise kept in custody due to their illegal activity in support of the Basque National Liberation Movement.
David Pla Marín is a lawyer and Basque activist, who Spanish authorities believe to have been one of the three leaders of the Basque separatist group ETA at the time of the group's ceasefire declaration in October 2011. In 2000 Pla was condemned to six years imprisonment for planning an attack against the Mayor of Zaragoza, José Atarés. Pla is believed to be one of three people who read out the October 2011 ETA ceasefire declaration. He had previously been the leader of Basque separatist youth organisation Jarrai in the 1990s and had stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for Herri Batasuna in the 1995 local elections.
Diana Frida Arón Svigilisky was a Chilean journalist and a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement. She was kidnapped, tortured and forcibly disappeared by agents of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Gloria Ana Chevesich Ruiz is a Chilean lawyer and judge. She is currently a minister of the Supreme Court of Chile, and previously served as president and minister of the Court of Appeals of Santiago.
The National Information Center was the political police and intelligence body which functioned as an organ of persecution, kidnapping, torture, murder and disappearance of political opponents during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. The predecessor of the CNI, the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), had been dissolved due to pressure from the United States government as a result of the assassination of Orlando Letelier in exile in Washington in 1977.
Mauricio Hernández Norambuena is a former guerrilla fighter and commander of the political-military organization Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front where he performed some of the main military and logistical functions within the group, thus becoming one of its main leaders. During his stay at the FPMR, he acquired the nickname "Commander Ramiro", with which he is still widely known today.
Enrique Rodríguez Galindo was a Spanish brigadier general of the Civil Guard, who was sentenced to 71 years in prison in 2000 for the kidnapping and murder of the alleged ETA members José Antonio Lasa and José Ignacio Zabala in the so-called Antiterrorist Liberation Groups case.
