Izquierda Marxista

Lo que esperaba ganar la derecha española

Autor: G. Buster y Chris Harman

Fecha: 21/3/2004

Traductor: Guillermo Crux, especial para PI

Fuente: Socialist Worker, Gran Bretaña

Madrid bombings

What Spain's right wing hoped to gain

THE TERRORIST attacks in Madrid, placed in three local trains, took place around 7.30am last Thursday. Most of the victims were commuting to work and school. The aim of the terrorists, according to the police, was to blow up the trains inside Atocha's station and bring down the whole building.

Against the background of the pain of the victims and their families, of the solidarity of the people of Madrid, the conservative government of the Popular Party launched a massive campaign to manipulate the popular feeling. A few hours after the attacks, the minister of the interior, Acebes, assured people that ETA had been behind the bombings. For the conservative government, it had to be ETA.

The Popular Party has built its electoral campaign programme around fear. Its fear of any change in the constitutional status that denies full self government to the Basque country, to Catalonia and Galicia. Its fear of the new regional governments that question neo-liberal and centralist policies.

Its fear of the anti-war movement, and fear of the students' protest against reactionary university reforms. Its fear too of workers' industrial action against the transfer of industries to the new-found lands of cheap labour.

And ETA represents, more than anything else, fear. This allowed the conservative government to keep the opposition PSOE completely tied to its dominance through an "anti-terrorist pact". It excluded any solution to the national question in the Spanish state not based on repression.

The objective was clear-mobilise the conservative electoral base, paralyse the left or, at least, stop it campaigning. It wanted use the terrorist attacks to transform popular feeling in a radical way as the Bush administration was able to do after 11 September. It wanted to consolidate its hold on Spanish politics in a decisive new way, breaking and smashing the momentum of the biggest wave of popular protests in the Spanish state since the end of Franco's dictatorship.

G BUSTER, Madrid

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The roots of ETA

SPAIN'S TORY government tried to blame ETA for the Madrid explosions as part of its attempt to hang on to power using Spanish nationalism in a completely reactionary manner. Under the Spanish republic established in 1931 Catalonia and the Basque country had their own governments. Franco's fascists destroyed this independence when they overthrew the republic in the civil war of 1936-9.

Every public activity had to be in Spanish, not the local languages. People could be arrested just for using these in public. The repression deepened the sense of national feeling directed against the Spanish state, especially in the Basque country. When people gained the confidence to rebel openly against Francoism in the early 1970s, they raised slogans for national rights alongside anti-fascist slogans. In working class areas, nationalist demands often merged with anti-capitalist and socialist demands.

The main party which stood for Basque independence, the Basque National Party, was a conservative, Christian Democrat type party. In the 1960s a group of young activists split away to form a left wing anti-fascist guerrilla organisation, ETA. Its actions became a symbol of resistance not only in the Basque country, but right across the Spanish state.

But this feeling of unity against Franco turned into a feeling of betrayal in the Basque country after Franco died in 1975. Governmental power remained in the hands of ministers from his fascist movement for another five years.

The leaders of newly legalised Socialist and Communist parties agreed to collaborate with them in a new parliamentary constitution. Repression This decreed that the Basque country and Catalonia had to remain part of Spain. Some 65 percent of people in the Basque country refused to vote in the referendum on the constitution because they saw it as denying them the chance of real independence.

The Basque National Party decided to work within a constitution it disagreed with and has run the Basque regional government ever since. Sections of ETA kept up an armed struggle for independence. They retained the loose support of about 10 percent of Basques. But they isolated themselves completely from the left wing and workers' movement in the rest of Spain.

Governments, Socialist and Tory alike, continually upped the level of repression. The greater the repression they faced, the more violent ETA's methods became. But they never deliberately targeted masses of ordinary people as last week's bombs did.

The Popular Party consciously upped the stakes by whipping up Spanish nationalism against the Basques. It denounced as treason and "terrorist" any approach to the Basque problem based on the right to self determination. Last weekend people began to see through its lies.

CHRIS HARMAN