Every time I've ever talked to anyone with a Spanish passport about Jose Aznar (the prime minister of Spain before Zapatero), they go on about how dumb he is. Not quite as dumb as Bush, they say, but pretty damn dumb. They were kind of pals, he and George W; Aznar sent troops to Iraq in 2002. Then in 2004 Islmists bombed a bunch of trains in Madrid, Aznar blamed ETA, and Zapatero, a socialist, was voted the new prime minister a few days later. (For the record, Aznar's party, the Partido Popular (PP), was also Franco's party.)
Back in the 1980's, the then-in-power socialists had the bright idea to send convicted ETA members to prisons in places like the Canary Islands or Andalucia rather than here in the Basque country. (I've heard people blame that policy on Aznar, but it predates him.) The idea was to keep the ETA members isolated from each other so that they couldn't plot anything, but it also had the effect of making it difficult or impossible for their families to visit. Some Basques have been imprisoned in the Canary Islands, over 2000km away, for over twenty years now. Other Spanish criminals go to prisons close to home. As far as I can tell, most Basques are a lot more angry about that specific issue than they are about independence/autonomy/lack thereof in general. The poster in the photo says 'Basque prisoners and refugees HOME' (eta means and in Basque) and the arrows point to a map of the Basque country (the whole thing, including Navarra and the French Basque country) which, incidentally, is shaped kind of like a heart. And that poster is everywhere -- almost as prevalent as the Basque flag in some places.
There's talk right now of ETA's permanently disbanding. I don't have a good enough sense of things to know whether or not that means much -- it seems to me like ETA is always threatening to disband or call a cease-fire, but it never lasts. I've heard a few people here say they don't believe ETA will go away completely until all the Basque prisoners are back in the Basque country. Which probably means the government will dig in its heels in order to not look like they're negotiating with terrorists. The current prime minster's been burned once already, when he started peace talks with ETA and then they set off a bomb that killed two people at the Madrid airport. There are elections coming up in November, but they will almost certainly put the Partido Popular back in power, and the PP isn't likely to do the Basques any favors. And so it all continues.
On a somewhat lighter note, ETA was originally going to be named ATA. (ETA is an acronym for Basques and Freedom in Basque, and ATA was an acronym for, um, something else. I forget what.) But then someone realized that in one of the Basque dialects, ata means duck. And you can't have a freedom fighting/terrorist organization called duck, now, can you?
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