“Our military-political strategy has been overtaken by the repression of the enemy we face,” the letter said. “This armed fight that we are carrying out these days is not working.

“We have never in the history of the organization been in such bad shape. You can’t carry on an armed fight through warnings and by uttering threats that are never fulfilled.

“Our political potential and capital is there, and we must exploit it in all its facets,” the letter, which is dated August 2004, added. Its authors called for an “institutional” campaign for the “masses,” in collaboration with left-wing nationalist parties in the Basque country. One of the signers is Francisco Múgica Garmendia, whom the Spanish government has labeled as ETA’s top leader.

There are some 600 Basque political prisoners in Spanish and French jails today. The Basques, an oppressed nationality with its own culture, language, and geographical area, number 3 million people, living both in Spain and France. They suffered brutal repression under the fascist regime of Gen. Francisco Franco in Spain. When that regime was replaced by a bourgeois democratic government in the mid-1970s, mass mobilizations of Basques won some measure of autonomy, but never self-determination.

Persecution continued, particularly between 1982 and 1996, under the Socialist Party (PSOE) government of Felipe González.

ETA stands for Euskadi ta Askatasuna—Basque Homeland and Freedom. It was formed in 1959. ETA calls for the right to an independent Basque state. In the late 1960s, ETA adopted a strategy of kidnapping and killing government officials and prominent figures.

The March 11, 2004, bombing of three trains in Madrid—killing more than 200 people and wounding at least 1,500 others—was quickly blamed by the Spanish government on ETA, despite that group’s denial of any responsibility. The government organized demonstrations throughout the country against “terrorism” that drew more than 7 million people. Helping build the massive turnout were the two main trade union federations—the Workers’ Commissions, led by the Communist Party, and the General Workers Union, led by the Socialist Party. Both union federations also blamed ETA for the train bombings the day they occurred.

The Spanish government arrested about a dozen men it claimed were responsible for the bombing—none of them Basques. Nonetheless, immediately following his election, Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of the Socialist Party, declared, “ETA is not going to get a minute’s rest.” Zapatero rejected an offer from the ETA leadership for talks.

“After the terrible March 11 massacre, anything that ETA does will look feeble,” stated Kepia Aulestia, a former ETA member. According to the Financial Times, Aulestia “now advocates a political solution to the conflict.”

The conclusions now publicized by what appears to be a growing section of ETA’s leadership are similar to those that led the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to end its armed struggle against the British occupation of northern Ireland a decade ago.

The IRA announced a cease-fire in 1994. Its leadership backed the process that led, four years later, to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement between the Republican Sinn Fein, pro-British loyalists in Northern Ireland, London, and Dublin. The agreement provided for limited self-rule of the north and Sinn Fein’s participation in the political process.

In the Basque areas, however, any political process that could lead to some form of autonomy does not appear to be on the agenda at the moment. Last year, Madrid banned Herri Batasuna, the main pro-independence political party. The group won 10 percent of the vote in Basque country in the 2001 elections.  
 
 
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