After the police binge comes the hangover, warns former ETA apologist

The phrase was uttered by Floren Aoiz, spokesman for Herri Batasuna, on 1 July 1997, after the release of José Antonio Ortega Lara. Ten days later, ETA kidnapped Miguel Ángel Blanco, who was murdered on 13 July 1997.

On 1 July 1997, the Guardia Civil (Spanish Civil Guard) rescued **José Antonio Ortega Lara** from the hideout in Mondragón (Guipúzcoa) where ETA had held him captive since 17 January 1996: **532 days** in a hole under inhumane conditions. That same day, **Floren Aoiz**, spokesman for Herri Batasuna, uttered a phrase that has stuck to the history of that era: 'After the police binge comes the hangover.' It was no innocent metaphor. Ten days later, on **10 July 1997**, ETA kidnapped **Miguel Ángel Blanco**, a town councillor for the PP in Ermua, and murdered him on 13 July after the 48-hour deadline the group had set for transferring its prisoners to the Basque Country had expired.

## What the hangover foretold and what peine next

The 'hangover' the Herri Batasuna spokesman was announcing was no abstract warning. The kidnapping and murder of Blanco triggered a massive social backlash in the Basque Country and across Spain, with demonstrations of repudiation that pushed the strategy of those who had until then coexisted with the group to the brink. The group kept killing for years. ETA's definitive ceasefire came in **2011** and its dissolution was announced in **2018**, with a tally of more than **850 murders** since 1968, according to the counts of the Ministry of the Interior.

The abertzale left that then cheered on or justified those attacks now claims that all that is in the past and that it was a 'conflict between two sides.' The problem with that reading is that once ETA stopped killing, the supposed opposing side showed no autonomous activity of any kind. There was no hidden army, no parallel structure, no symmetric violence that faded away at the same time. What there was, was a group of militants who decided to impose by force of arms what others sought to achieve through institutions.

## The PNV as ideology supplier and the abertzale left as executor

The other nationalism, that of the **PNV**, took no part in the attacks, and that is a fact the party has always brandished. But the relationship between the two worlds is not one of watertight compartments. ETA emerged from the PNV's orbit in the late 1950s, and the abertzale left that surrounded the group was formed in the same ideological brew. The **Aberri Eguna**, the nationalist holiday celebrated by all the parties in that spectrum, rests on the revelation of **Sabino Arana**, an episode whose traditional date (Easter Sunday 1882) does not match the one Arana himself later documented, as several historians have pointed out.

The PNV has prided itself on never having killed, but it has allied itself with those who did. In the Civil War, in exchange for Basque autonomy, it lived alongside revolutionary forces that committed atrocities in San Sebastián and Bilbao. After Franco's death, while ETA tried to destroy any attempt to democratise the state, the PNV rushed to take charge of Basque autonomy and to fill the new regional administration. And in **1998**, after the popular outcry that trinc Blanco's murder, the PNV joined the **Pacto de Lizarra** (Lizarra Agreement) with the abertzale left, excluding the constitutionalist parties. That led to an ETA truce that lasted little more than a year. Then the group went back to killing, this time with PP and PSOE officials in its sights.

## From the 1997 phrase to a seat in the Senate

The trajectory of **Floren Aoiz** sums up that transition like few others. From spokesman for Herri Batasuna at the time of Ortega Lara's rescue to an institutional presence that, according to the article by **Pedro Chacón** in El Español, could take him to the Senate and the Cortes Generales (Spanish parliament), perhaps sharing a chamber with Miguel Ángel Blanco's sister. It is not a far-fetched hypothesis: for years the abertzale left has been occupying institutions that were previously off-limits to it because of its ties to the group.

Former PP politician **Jaime Mayor Oreja** argued, at a recent gathering in Vitoria, that this historical cycle is yet to run its course and will bring to power the 'friends of ETA.' Chacón's thesis points in the same direction: the definitive catharsis of Basque nationalism would come through the PNV's loss of power in its main strongholds, notably in **Vizcaya**, where it has controlled the Foral Provincial Council and the Bilbao city council since the start of the Transition. That institutional structure has been the breeding ground for most of its cadres.

## A nationalism that reproduces itself even as it changes its initials

The paradox the article points out is that a large share of today's Basque nationalist leaders are direct descendants of the immigration that arrived in the Basque Country from other Spanish regions. In other words, the narrative of national purity rests on a population that arrived on trains from Andalusia, Extremadura or Galicia during the development boom of the sixties and seventies. Ideology, however, is transmitted regardless of family origin.

Chacón closes with self-criticism: part of the blame for nationalism having come this far lies with Spaniards who failed to value what was their own and allowed themselves to be taken in by windmills. That is an opinion, not a fact. What is verifiable is the timeline: Aoiz's phrase is from **1 July 1997**, Blanco's kidnapping from **10 July 1997**, his murder from **13 July 1997**, ETA's ceasefire from **2011** and its dissolution from **2018**. Between one date and another many things fit, but not two symmetric sides.