Spain and ETA

Bombers return

By returning to violence, ETA has scuppered lingering hopes of peace

Surveying the peace processEPA

DIEGO ESTACIO had nodded off in his car on December 30th at Madrid's Barajas airport, where his girlfriend was meeting relatives off a flight from Ecuador, when a nearby van, packed with perhaps 500kg of explosives, blew up. The blast did more than end the 19-year-old Ecuadorean's life; it destroyed hopes of peace with the Basque separatist group, ETA, which seems to have been responsible.

Far into the middle of the week rescue workers were still searching for Estacio's remains after they had found those of a second victim, Carlos Palate. Meanwhile José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the prime minister, was wondering if anything could be salvaged from the wreckage of a peace process that began when ETA declared a “permanent ceasefire” last March.

The prospects are bleak. Mr Zapatero's repeated insistence that the peace process remained on track now looks foolish. He has used up a lot of political capital trying to solve the country's most obdurate regional terrorist problem. His reward is the first killings by ETA in more than three years. And his political position is worse than that implies. The opposition People's Party leader, Mariano Rajoy, consistently gave warning that ETA should not be trusted. The bombers have handed the PP a particularly valuable new-year gift.

ETA has had little regard for the constraints under which Mr Zapatero must operate. A PP demand that ETA be forced into unconditional surrender may be unrealistic, but adding two more to the roll-call of 800 victims killed in the past four decades can only increase its appeal. Some insist that ETA still wants to talk. But the interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, declared this week that the peace process was “broken off, liquidated, finished”.

So what happens if Mr Zapatero gives it up? One possibility is that ETA will split. Some of those who have pushed for peace, including many of the several hundred ETA prisoners in Spanish jails, have lost their taste for violence. But a hard core can always be counted on to keep reaching for the bomb or the bullet. After the theft of 350 pistols and large quantities of ammunition in a raid on a French arms supplier in October, the group is not thought to be short of weapons. And there is enough grassroots support among radicals in Basque cities and hill towns to keep the hard core supplied and protected.

Does it matter? ETA is now a pale version of the efficient, and terrifying, killing machine of the 1970s and 1980s. It had failed to kill anyone at all in the 34 months before the ceasefire. It poisons the political atmosphere in the Basque country, but its political impact elsewhere has diminished over the past 15 years.

The biggest fall-out from the bomb will be felt in the Basque region itself. Basques are divided between traditional Spanish centralists and those favouring more self-rule or even independence. Moderate Basque nationalists have spent much of the past decade trying to wean ETA off violence. They have paid a heavy political price, losing opportunities to negotiate greater self-rule. Last year Mr Zapatero conceded new powers of self-government to Catalonia and Andalusia. The moderate nationalists running the Basque region may now opt to join the queue and abandon ETA, still treated by some as a prodigal son, to the police. The police have proved remarkably efficient in pursuing ETA over the past decade, partly thanks to better co-operation with their French counterparts.

ETA may have hoped that its airport bomb would not kill anyone, allowing the peace process to be kept alive. It telephoned three warnings in the hour before the explosion. But bombs are lethally unpredictable. Now the goodwill generated by the ceasefire has been blown away. If ordinary Spaniards shun peace, Mr Zapatero will not try to push them there. It took considerable political courage to travel as far as he already had. ETA is, at best, drinking in the last-chance saloon. More likely, Mr Zapatero may have already walked out of the bar.

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