The Basque reality
By Noemi Ramirez Posted Fri, Sep 1 2000
The targeting of journalists is a familiar strategy of the outlawed Basque separatist organization ETA, but it has gone largely uncovered by the mainstream international media outside Europe.
On April 25, 2000, Jesús María Zuloaga, deputy director and expert on terrorism-related issues at the conservative, Madrid-based daily La Razón, received a packet bomb. The bomb, which was detonated by the police and did not claim any victims, was camouflaged by an empty paperback copy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Authorities linked the bomb to ETA. In early May, however, a local newspaper reported that a previously unknown terrorist group, The Anarchist, instead of ETA, had sent the bomb.
Zuloaga escaped harm. But 12 days later, another journalist, José Luis López de Lacalle, was not so fortunate. The renowned columnist was shot to death outside his house in Andoain, a medium-size town in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa.
This time ETA took responsibility. A press release on June 11 said that López de Lacalle’s assassination was caused by his activity with El Foro de Ermua, a civic organization against any kind of political negotiation with ETA, and the columns he wrote for El Mundo del Pais Vasco. In those he outspokenly denounced the threat to democratic values and freedom of expression ETA represents for both the Basque and Spanish societies.
Not surprisingly, ETA’s justification of the murder of 62-year-old López de Lacalle is that “in the guise of an opinion leader, he asked for the arrest, torture and death of Basque citizens by using the fascist slogan ‘Let’s go and get them’ and the hypocritical ‘Enough is enough.’ ” Calling López de Lacalle a fascist is an ironic distortion of reality. His political activism against the Franco regime and his militancy in the clandestine Communist Party landed him five years in prison during the dictatorship.
López de Lacalle’s death is an unfortunate success in a list of attempted murders of journalists since ETA ended a 14-month cease-fire on Dec. 3, 1999. Besides the attacks against Zuloaga and López de Lacalle, ETA sent a packet bomb to Carlos Herrera, a reporter with the Spanish National Public Radio bureau in Seville, on March 27, 2000. The bomb, disguised as a gift box of Cuban cigars from The Admirers of Carlos Herrera Club, raised the suspicions of the security agents at the radio station and was detonated by the police.
According to an article in El Mundo on May 8, 2000, ETA is also responsible for the killing of José María Portell, director of La Gaceta del Norte, in 1978. In 1980 José Javier Uranga, then director of Diario de Navarra, survived a shooting. Two years later a bomb destroyed the bureau of the news agency EFE in San Sebastián. In 1998 another bomb exploded in the house of Mikel Muez, correspondent of El Pais in Navarra. Other reporters who have also suffered the attacks of ETA are José Ignacio Iribar, National Spanish Television, and Gorka Landaburu, a writer with Cambio 16. The list is not complete.
Many reporters, out of prudence or a desire not to be suspected of being against the building of a Basque nation, choose not to talk about ETA’s threats. One reporter who has opted to talk about the organization’s longtime campaign against her is El Mundo’s veteran political reporter Carmen Gurruchaga. In December 1997 ETA put a bomb on the front door of the apartment where she lived with her two sons in San Sebastián. For the family’s safety, she was transferred to the newspaper’s headquarters in Madrid.
Gurruchaga thinks she became an ETA target because she covered news developments in the terrorism beat rather than writing viewpoint articles. As she puts it, “they (ETA and its satellite organizations) don’t care about opinions; data and facts, however, are indisputable.” Her articles were not rich in adjectives or adverbs as she simply wanted to tell the story without creating a favorable or unfavorable impression in the mind of the reader.
This approach was not the one followed by José María Calleja, who from 1989 to 1996 was anchor of the daily news program at Euskal Telebista, the Basque TV. He also contributed opinion articles to the regional newspapers El Correo and El Diario Vasco. From the very beginning, Calleja voiced his strong opposition to ETA in his coverage of the Basque conflict.
“ETA forces you to be a citizen,” says Calleja. “What’s going on in the Basque Country is not a tennis game, where reporters are the judges, who observe the swing of the ball from their chairs. ETA forces me to take my professional commitment one step ahead and take the side of the victims.”
In his daily work, he felt increasingly frustrated with “the somehow cryptic language used in the Basque Country to talk about them,” Calleja says. “Rather than referring to ETA as the organization, as many people do, I called it the terrorist band and chose assassins to refer to its members.”
His straightforward position brought him the animosity of ETA, and in 1992 the threats started.
“They displayed banners with my face at concentrations in downtown San Sebastián, they made threatening graffiti outside my house … they even had T-shirts with my name on them!” he says.
What followed were a series of hostile phone calls to Euskal Telebista demanding the end of his news program. Calleja remembers the most frightening moment when the Basque Interior Department called him in 1995 with the news that he needed a police escort.
He realized then that the department must have obtained intelligence reports that he was in real danger, and “that really scared the hell out of me.”
Calleja’s decision to move to Madrid in 1996, where he now directs a talk show for CNN+, was not based on security concerns. According to Calleja, Iñaki Zarraoa, then Euskal Telebista executive director, called him to his office one day and told him, “Your belligerency with violence is giving me trouble in my environment.” Zarraoa, who now is the mayor of Getxo, a town near Bilbao, has long been close to nationalistic circles in the Basque Country.
According to Calleja, Zarraoa offered him a weekly program in exchange for not anchoring the daily news. When Calleja heard this proposal, he thought to himself, “Damn! I’m the one with a police escort.”
“I thought I was the one with a problem here, not him,” he explains. So Calleja decided to quit. He became unemployed and soon after got an offer to work in Madrid.
Before the death of Francisco Franco, Spain had a long tradition of suppressing freedom of expression and the press. Political parties were not allowed, and the press was tightly censored. One of the most important reforms of the regime came in 1966 when Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Franco’s Minister of Information and Tourism, worked out a press law, which relaxed but did not abolish censorship.
IPI, in a document entitled Chronicle of One Year in Spain, concluded that the new law was repressive, citing 339 administrative proceedings and 180 sanctions for violation of the law in 1967 and 1968.
In a letter published in the February 1969 issue of IPI Report, Manuel Jiménez Quilez, an official at the Ministry of Information, claimed that because those figures applied to a period of two years, not one, “none of this therefore can justify applying the word ‘repressive’ to the Spanish press law.”
Nowadays there is an increasing number of voices in Spain warning against a new kind of dictatorship trying to control and influence the work of journalists. Maybe one of the voices that better expresses this feeling is Calleja’s: “Franco’s dictatorship persecuted us, tortured us, yet didn’t kill us; ETA’s dictatorship is persecuting us, torturing us and killing us.” This was a feeling echoed by López de Lacalle in the last interview he gave before he was killed.