ETA debate sharpens in Spain

The release from prison of a key member of the Basque separatist group has divided the country.

from the March 13, 2007 edition

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"This government has made an immense error," says Gustavo de Arístegui, a PP congressman. "It is still negotiating with ETA, and ETA is still demanding gestures from it."

During the eight years it was in power, the PP had itself transferred ETA prisoners back to the Basque Country and conducted its own negotiations with the separatists. But these distinctions have been lost in the outrage that the party has whipped up. At Saturday's march, protestors chanting "Zapatero, resign!" cheered as PP leader Mariano Rajoy told them, "We have been mobilized by ... a government which has let itself be blackmailed by a murderer and that has ceded to that blackmail."

Iñaki Anasagasti, a senator from the Basque Nationalist Party, isn't surprised by the rhetoric. "We're in an election year," he says. "And the Popular Party, which is obsessed with ETA, is going to manipulate the issue." Indeed, with municipal elections in May and national elections eleven months later, many say the PP has seized on Zapatero's stance on ETA – which has killed nearly 850 people in the past 40 years – as his chief political liability. "They've decided that this is the issue they can win on," says Gorka Landaburu, editor of the weekly newsmagazine Cambio 16.

Many see Zapatero's politically risky decision as a sign of his willingness to restart the peace process after the December attack. "With this decision, Zapatero has left a door open," says Mr. Landaburu.

Others suspect the gesture was in part an attempt to support moderates within the separatist movement. "The issue is fundamentally humanitarian," says Sagrario Morán, an ETA expert at Madrid's Universidad de Rey Juan Carlos. "But certainly it helps strengthen the position of those elements that want an end to the violence."

Whatever the rationale, the de Juana decision has dramatically divided the country. And that, says Landaburu, is precisely the problem. "When our democracy is divided, ETA is strengthened. It's only when we're united that ETA is weakened."

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