http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/26/basque-eta-independence-female-fighters
It's the last separatist con ict in mainland Europe, a blood-soaked
40-year war between Basque terrorists and the Spanish government. But
as Eta's old guard is rounded up, a new generation of ruthless female
ghters is taking over … Giles Tremlett reports from Bilbao
Giles Tremlett
26 July 2009
The placards held aloft by the elderly marchers in Bilbao's Albia
Gardens are neatly matched, each with an identically sized photograph
in a green frame on a painted wooden stick. Some 50 protesters walk
slowly in two disciplined lines under the towering plane trees of
this well-tended city centre square. They are mostly stern-faced
women, though one old man has a black Basque beret stretched across a
balding head. It is a peaceful protest, largely ignored by the office
workers and shoppers resting on the square's benches. The faces on
the placards, however, are a reminder of violence. They are the faces
of Eta - the Basque separatist group that has killed 800 people in
bombings and shootings over the past four decades.
The people in the photographs are jailed sons, daughters, husbands,
wives and siblings. The older, grainy black-and-white pictures are
mostly of men, some with the hairstyles and bushy moustaches of the
era in which they were jailed. The more recent ones, the younger
faces, include many more women. They are among the 750 people now in
prison for Eta-related crimes. Others are still at large, keeping
Europe's last blood-soaked separatist conflict alive in the western
borderlands of Spain and France. And increasingly, they are women.
Somewhere across the French border, Eta's clandestine leadership is
being reformed after a series of arrests. This very morning the group
has claimed its latest victim. Inspector Eduardo Puelles, a senior
anti-terrorist police officer, has been burnt to death in the Bilbao
suburb of Arrigorriaga, after a bomb attached to the underside of his
car turned it into a ball of flames and molten metal. Neighbours who
heard his cries said there was nothing quick or easy about his death.
"Get me out of here! Get me out!" he had screamed. Police believe his
murder may have been ordered by one of two women, Iratxe Sorzabal or
Izaskun Lesaka, who are thought to hold senior positions in Eta's
increasingly fragile military apparatus.
We are just a few blocks from the city's ultra-modern, glittering,
titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum, but in the Albia Gardens time seems
to have stood still. A conflict that emerged under a long-disappeared
dictatorship rumbles on, claiming lives and filling jails. As the
protesters march around the square to complain that their sons and
daughters are held in prisons far from home, Puelles's charred corpse
lies 100 yards away in the morgue. It has been brought from a car
park by the red-brick tower block where Puelles, a native Basque,
lived with his wife and two sons. The proximity of the victim and
those campaigning for members of the group that killed him is a
reminder that the Basque Country is a small place. Some 2.2 million
people live in the three provinces that form Spain's largely
self-governing region. "This is a small corner of the world and we
all know everyone," explains Puelles's brother, Josu, another police
officer. Indeed, speculation about how Eta managed to target such a
senior anti-terrorist officer soon points to his neighbours. "He
dressed very shabbily, but they must have known he was a policeman,"
says Maria Valentin, as she steps out of a neighbouring block of
flats under an umbrella to keep off the famous Basque drizzle, the
txirimiri, that comes in off the nearby Bay of Biscay. The police
officers in white forensic suits who are sifting through the wreckage
of Puelles's Renault Megane are not a new sight for her. Eta's
kill-rate has fallen dramatically over the past two decades, but this
working-class neighbourhood is still one of its favourite hunting
grounds. "They killed another policeman just down the road a few
years back," Maria explains. "You don't solve anything like this. Why
can't people just talk?"
For most Spaniards, Eta members are blood-thirsty, cold-hearted
terrorists. "They haven't achieved anything by murdering my husband.
They don't defend anyone's freedom, in fact they just restrict it,"
Puelles's widow, Paqui, told a crowd of 25,000 people who marched
through Bilbao to express their revulsion the day after his murder.
"This is the only thing they know how to do: kill, kill and kill."
To the people holding up photographs in Albia Gardens, however, their
sons and daughters are not murderers. They are "political prisoners"
or "patriots". German Urizar holds up a photograph of his 27-year-old
daughter, Amaia. Urizar also has a son in jail. Eta's lethal campaign
began 41 years ago, and 69-year-old German has been coming here every
week for 22 years to show his solidarity. "The boy was part of a
comando [Eta's active service units], though he didn't kill anyone,"
he explains. "My girl didn't do anything but they still gave her a
five-year sentence. The number of girls has increased a lot." The
police claimed that Amaia was the girlfriend of former Eta military
chief Garikoitz Aspiazu, alias "Cherokee", and that she helped
recruit new Eta members.
Eta supporters choose their words carefully. Public backing for
terrorism is punishable by a prison sentence, but the 100,000 or more
votes regularly garnered by political groups identified with Eta
suggests a small but obstinately solid support group. Occasionally,
however, the guard slips. "Why have we killed some enemies of our
people? Because they obliged us to," is how Manuel, the uncle of
Irantzu Gallastegui, a woman who took part in the infamous kidnapping
and killing of a young Basque town councillor, Miguel Angel Blanco,
put it recently. "Who says that it isn't human to use violence?"
Manuel says. "Don't think that we enjoy it or that we kill just
because, or out of pleasure. Eta does it out of a sense of patriotic duty."
The letter left behind for his father by Asier Borrero, an Eta member
captured a couple of weeks after Puelles's death, gave his reason for
leaving home and joining the group. "I know I am betraying you as a
son by leaving you," he wrote. "But it is better this way, because I
am not going to stop fighting for our people."
Today, Eta's leadership is based mostly over the border. A poster
showing six of its members adorns the walls of police stations across
southern France. "These people are dangerous and likely to be armed,"
it warns. Four are men, who have been captured since the poster was
printed 15 months ago. The two still at large are women: Iratxe
Sorzabal and Izaskun Lesaka, all that remains of the group that
police believe ran Eta's front-line militants. Details of the two
women's roles today are unclear. "Things are so confused at the
moment that we don't really know who does what," admits one source
close to the Basque regional government's police force, the Ertzaintza.
The balance of sexes reflected in the poster, however, is a sign of
profound change in a group with Catholic, conservative roots. "The
imprint of Catholicism has been considerable," explains Jesus
Casquete, of the University of the Basque Country. "You can't compare
them to the Red Brigades or the Baader Meinhof gang, where women had
considerable roles of responsibility." But this is changing. In the
fortnight following the murder of Eduardo Puelles, police carried out
four separate operations against Eta, arresting 10 suspected members.
Half of them, including two of the three members of a new comando
unit caught with 75kg of explosives, are women. One, Itziar Plaza, is
said to be a senior military commander. Recent recruits include
female students, journalists, nurses and even infant school mistresses.
I meet Oihana Lizaso in the cafeteria of a hotel near the Albia
Gardens. Six years ago police arrested Oihana and her boyfriend,
Jokin Errazti, at a shopping centre in their home town of Usurbil. A
search through their garage revealed 25kg of explosives, detonators,
a grenade, a James Bond-style Walther PPK pistol and a Mat
sub-machine gun. Oihana served five years in jail for collaborating
with Eta. Her boyfriend will serve 17 years. Oihana's Spanish is not
entirely fluent. She thinks in Euskara, the ancient Basque tongue
that is possibly Europe's oldest, and is still the first language of
one in six Basques. Women no longer merely follow boyfriends into
Eta, she says. "It is a personal decision." Like many people in Eta's
orbit, she uses the word "impunity" frequently - to describe the way
she thinks the Spanish authorities treat separatists. "People see the
impunity. They see things happening in their towns or villages," she
says. Does she think Eta is machista? She laughs. "There is machismo
everywhere, but we also have feminism in the Basque country."
Eta was once a man's world. Industrial workers, middle-class Marxists
and Basque-speaking farmers from tiny villages high up in the green,
steep-valleyed hills of Goerri came together in an anger initially
stirred by dictator General Francisco Franco - and largely left their
women at home. For years, the public role of women was mainly as
tough, grieving mothers at the gravesides of male activists. "They
were seen as the keepers of the flame," says Jesus Casquete. Eta's
founders wanted "peaceful women dedicated to cultural and
humanitarian work; violent men who await only a little more strength
and an order". Only a handful broke the mould.
Iratxe Sorzabal and Izaskun Lesaka are proof of how far the women of
Eta have come since then. Sorzabal, now 37, is a former teacher who
has been associated with the group for more than a decade. She was
jailed in France for two years in 1997, after she was caught with two
armed Eta men at a farm belonging to Breton separatists. "Dear Basque
Country," she wrote, in a letter sent by four women prisoners to a
separatist newspaper in May 1999, "It has been too long since we were
forced to escape, fleeing the horror, but without ever abandoning
you, despite the tears of having to leave." She complained of being
exhibited like a hunted animal, but added, "You know full well that
even like this they cannot shut us up or take away our dignity, or
force us to renounce our identity."
Sorzabal went on hunger strike for a month, to protest against plans
to extradite her to Spain when her prison spell ended. The protest
failed and in November 1999 she was sent across the border. She was
not, however, arrested. Sorzabal became, instead, a teacher of
Euskara in the border town of Irun. She also became spokeswoman for a
prisoners' campaign group. In 2001 she was finally arrested by the
Guardia Civil anti-terrorist police in the seaside city of San
Sebastian. A judge set her free: there was insufficient evidence to
uphold claims that she was an Eta comando member.
Sometime later, Sorzabal fled back to France. While many of her
fellow "most wanted" activists have since been arrested, Sorzabal has
had a series of miraculous escapes. She has also left a few clues
about her clandestine existence. In February, she and Eta's then head
of military operations, Iurgi Mendinueta, crashed a car they had
stolen in the French village of Allègre, in the Haute-Loire. Before
they fled, they dug a hole nearby to hide a laptop. It held a
photograph of Sorzabal with a young child. Was the child hers? She
would not have been the first female Eta operative to have raised
children with false names in small French towns.
Inevitably, Sorzabal's experiences in prisons and police stations
have hardened her. Experts place her among Eta's hawks - those who
believe the killing must continue if the dream of a separate Basque
state, made up of four Spanish provinces and part of southwest
France, is to happen. (That is something which, even in the most
optimistic interpretations of Basque history, has not existed for
five centuries.) She is now among those best placed to take over
Mendinueta's post and rebuild the comandos. Time will tell whether
she was involved in the order to blow up Eduardo Puelles.
Izaskun Lesaka, 34, may be even more senior in the Eta hierarchy. She
fled Spain seven years ago, when police began rounding up members of
pro-Eta youth movements. She had been prominent in these groups,
which were blamed for a now defunct campaign of streetfighting known
as the kale borroka. "They are Eta's recruiting ground," said one
source who works with the Ertzaintza police. By the time a judge
issued a search warrant, Lesaka had disappeared. A French court later
found her guilty, in her absence, of recruiting members of a
terrorist gang. Recent information about her is scarce. Some reports
claim she is the author of Eta's communiques and one of three people
(the others are men) who exercise political control over the group,
and give orders to those operating the comandos
Only a few women have risen so high in the ranks. As they have become
vital to the bombers and pistol shooters, however, the road to the
top has been cleared. "The route to leadership is through being
involved in active comandos," says Carrie Hamilton, a Canadian
historian who has spoken to many former Eta women. "It is inevitable
that, at some point, some would take on leadership positions."
Statistics and anecdotal evidence show that the situation has changed
rapidly. In 2002, only 12% of Eta-affiliated prisoners were women. By
2009 that figure has risen close to a quarter. If the latest arrests
are an indicator, the proportion among recent recruits is nearer a
half. Not everyone is surprised. "You must remember that when Eta
called a ceasefire in 2006, it was a woman who read out the
communique," says Beñat Zarrabeitia, of Etxerat, a group representing
prisoners' families. "And in the previous ceasefire, in 1999, they
named Belen González Peñalba, a woman, as one of their negotiators."
Women have, in fact, been present in Eta's history since the
beginning, though almost always in background roles. They ran safe
houses, hid activists, trailed targets or stashed arms. They tracked
politicians or police officers to mass, sitting demurely in the back
rows of the church. The front-line stuff, of planting bombs and
shooting people, was largely a man's thing.
The first women to join comandos found their gender an obstacle. One
anonymous Eta gunwoman recalled the first time she and a female
friend were sent out with pistols. "We said: 'Well, depending on how
we do it tomorrow, they will accept us or not.' And that was because
we were women. You have a lot more to prove when you are a woman,"
she told the anthropologist Miren Alcedo. Indeed, early gunwomen
gained a reputation within Eta as more bloodthirsty than the men.
The most infamous was Idoia López Riaño, alias La Tigresa, the
tigress. It is hard to separate myth from reality in the case of a
green-eyed, glamorous gunwoman who police, journalists and some
repentant former companions have painted as a man-eating,
man-murdering monster. Legend has her cruising discotheques for young
policemen for one-night stands and then calmly pumping bullets into
others a few days later. In police lore she was said to straddle her
lovers while thinking: "I'd love to shoot the bastard in the mouth."
Her love of nightlife, an ability to attract men and the fact that
she once picked up a policeman who came to her aid after a traffic
accident are among the few hard facts. Her own comando members tired
of her indiscipline as they scrambled to safe houses when she failed
to return home after an evening out. During one attack in Madrid she
was detailed to cover another comando member as he opened fire on a
car full of army officers. She could not, however, resist spraying it
with bullets first. She is now serving a 30-year jail sentence for 23
murders. "She used to complain that women had to prove themselves
twice as much as men," a former companion-in-arms said.
Over the past decade, however, a new trend has emerged. The first
symbol of change was Olaia Castresana, a 22-year-old infant-school
teacher from San Sebastian. On weekdays Castresana looked after
children under six; at weekends and during the holidays she blew up
things, and people, for Eta. A bomb eventually exploded in her hands
in the eastern resort of Torrevieja in July 2001. The force of the
explosion sent masonry and body parts raining down on a nearby
swimming pool. Another of her bombs had killed a policeman a few
weeks earlier. Castresana became a new female "martyr", praised at
her funeral by radical separatist politicians such as Arnaldo Otegi,
the man many hope will prove to be Eta's Gerry Adams. "Eta will never
be defeated by police measures," he said the day before Puelles was
killed. Castresana's school sweetheart, Anartz Oiarzabal, a funeral
parlour employee who was also her bombing partner, contacted the
separatist Gara newspaper while on the run. He placed a death notice
to her: "I love you", it said in large, bold print. Eta later named a
comando after her.
Soon, police noticed a surge in the number of Eta women. Some were
leading comandos; one, Soledad Iparraguirre, was in charge of all the
comandos. Iparraguirre also had a legendary status among Spanish
police. She is said to have sworn vengeance after they killed her
boyfriend in a shoot-out when she was 20. Anti-terrorist police made
her the author of a chilling phrase: "Black shoes and a two-day
beard? Kill him, he's a cop." As a comando member in the 80s and 90s
she became an expert in car bombs, taking part in the murder of 14 people.
Police lost track of Iparraguirre in the 90s. Eventually they learnt
that she was in a relationship with the musician and Eta leader Mikel
Albisu. He fled Spain after smuggling two Eta prisoners out of jail
inside his speaker boxes, after a concert. In 2004, the police
finally tracked the couple down to a French farmhouse. They
discovered an eight-year-old boy in the idyllic, country home they
shared with a French couple near Sallies-de-Béarn. The boy, who
attended a local Roman Catholic day school but had also spent two
years at a boarding school while his busy parents "travelled", was
their son, known as Pierre. The couple had been living in
Sallies-de-Béarn for a dozen years. They were taken for foreigners in
a region that attracts bohemians from around Europe.
On the day of Eduardo Puelles's death, life continues as normal in
the world of radical Basque separatism. At the separatist Herriko
Taberna bar in Santutxu, a nearby barrio of Bilbao, like-minded
radicals gather to drink. Three rows of coloured photos hang on the
wall, the 24 people from this barrio alone who are in jail. Seven are
women, including recent additions Anabel Prieto and Maialen Zuazo -
both arrested last year and accused of killing a policeman in a bomb
attack that destroyed part of a Guardia Civil barracks. The photos
are not the grim, identity card mugshots that appear in Madrid
newspapers but pictures taken by friends of young women, giving the
camera their best smile. They leave little doubt about who the heroes
are for those who come here. The bar girl admits she knows them, but
does not want to talk. "I'm an ex-prisoner myself," she explains as
she fills glasses of beer. "I don't want to risk trouble."
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