‘You were?’
‘I did not think the English were a morbid race.’
On the basis that he would respond haughtily even to the mildest criticism of the Basque temperament, I feign annoyance.
‘The English are not morbid. Not in the slightest. I simply became interested in Mikel’s disappearance. It’s not every day that you have a personal link to a man’s murder.’
‘Of course. Don’t be offended.’
‘Forget it.’
He continues to eat in silence, pouring more vinegar on his salad as an articulated lorry parks outside the window, completely blocking out the sun. It immediately becomes colder at our table, like the chill between us, and little Xavi begins to cry. Zulaika has to pick him up off the floor and pat him on the back and, to judge by his slightly reddened cheeks, regards this as a loss of face. It’s hard to play the toughened hack when you have dribbles of baby sick splattered on your shoulder.
‘So where did you go on holiday?’
‘To Morocco,’ he replies, putting Xavi back in the rocker and shoving a dummy in his mouth. The waitress clears away the plates and says, ‘Such a beautiful boy’ in Spanish before touching his cheek with her knuckles. Under her jeans she’s wearing a red G-string which rides up on her back as she crouches down.
‘I haven’t been to Morocco. Fez nice this time of year?’
‘We travelled all over the country. Fez, yes. Also Tangier and Casablanca.’ He pours himself a glass of water. ‘I had no luck finding the Basque restaurant you were talking about in Madrid.’
It takes me a beat to realize that Zulaika is referring back to the lie I told him about Arenaza. I assume a look of disappointment and say, ‘You didn’t?’
‘No.’
His eyes narrow to suspicious slits. To spite him I stare directly back, two kids in the playground. Zulaika blinks first.
‘You know what I have been thinking?’ he says.
‘What’s that, Patxo?’
‘I think you rang to tell me something the other day. Something important. When you left your message, your voice it sounded tense. Then I think somebody got to you. I think you know what happened to Mikel Arenaza, but for some reason you don’t want to reveal it.’
I’ll say this for Zulaika: he tests my skills as an actor. Moving my head slightly forward, I bounce my eyebrows into a look of utter consternation and do a Dizzy Gillespie with my cheeks. ‘What?’
‘You have heard me,’ he says. ‘If you want to talk about it, then I will listen. If you don’t, then I understand. I have my own theory about what is beginning to happen now in Spain.’
He knows that I won’t be able to resist this. As the fabada arrives, Patxo leans over, keeping his eyes on me for as long as he can, then wipes snot from Xavi’s nose. The waitress spoons beans into my bowl and I dunk a hunk of bread into the sauce before rising to the bait.
‘OΚ. What’s your theory? What do you think is happening in Spain?’
He speaks through a mouthful of beans.
‘What do you know about the GAL?’ he says.
At first I don’t think that I have heard him correctly and ask him to repeat the question. He swallows his food, rests his spoon in the bowl, wipes his mouth with a napkin and then, with the utter self-confidence of one who knows that he has stumbled on perhaps the biggest political story of his career, repeats the question with lazy understatement.
‘I said, what do you know about the GAL?’
28. Dirty War
It is the autumn of 1983. Joxean Lasa and Joxi Zabala are two young men living in exile among the radical Basque community in southern France. Both are attached to the military wing of ETA and have participated some months earlier in a botched bank robbery in Spain. On the night of Saturday 15 October they ask a friend if they can borrow his car in order to attend a fiesta in the village of Arrangoitze, on the French side of the border. The friend, Mariano Martínez Colomo, himself a refugee, agrees to the request. Thirty-six hours later, when Lasa and Zabala have failed to return the keys, Colomo notices that his car, a Renault 4, has not been moved all weekend. Nevertheless, two of the doors are unlocked, Zabala’s anorak is on the back seat and a hank of human hair, as if torn out in a struggle, is lying on the floor. When she opens the glove compartment, Colomo’s wife discovers identification papers belonging to both men.
It later transpired that Lasa and Zabala had become the first victims of the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación, the GAL, a rogue group of vengeful Spanish security officials who would go on to murder twenty-seven people between 1983 and 1987. Most of their victims were exiled members of ETA living across the border in the area around Bayonne, protected by the Mitterrand government as political refugees. Seven, however, were innocent victims who had nothing whatsoever to do with Basque terror. The GAL had two simple objectives: to liquidate key figures in the ETA leadership and to change the French government’s position on terrorist refugees. Subsequent investigations would prove that the GAL was set up and financed by senior figures in the Madrid government using covert funds diverted from the state. Other high-ranking police and military officers, as well as members of the Secret Service, were also implicated. The Socialist prime minister, Felipe González, escaped formal censure, yet his government fell, in large part due to the GAL scandal, in the elections of March 1996 that brought José María Aznar to power.
On the morning of 16 October 1983, Lasa and Zabala were driven from Bayonne to San Sebastián, where they were held for three months in an abandoned palace belonging to the Ministry of the Interior. They were gagged and blindfolded, almost certainly administered mind-altering drugs, beaten and severely tortured. Some of the information gleaned during their interrogation would later lead to the deaths of other etarras at the hands of the GAL. Lasa and Zabala’s bodies were eventually discovered two years later buried under fifty kilos of quicklime, 800 kilometres south of Bayonne outside the village of Bosot near Alicante. The men had been taken to an isolated location, stripped naked, placed before an open grave and shot through the neck. It would be another ten years before their remains were formally identified, and five more before the men responsible – among them senior members of the Guardia Civil and the civil governor of Guipúzcoa himself – were brought to justice.
As Zulaika relates this story over beans and bread, his facial expression barely changes. He would have been no older than eight or nine when the GAL began its campaign of terror, yet subsequent events – the imprisonment of the interior minister, the implication that González himself may have orchestrated the dirty war – doubtless cemented in his young mind both the legitimacy of ETA’s cause and the iniquity of the government in Madrid. The GAL may have succeeded in persuading the French authorities to take a tougher stance against ETA, but its enduring legacy was catastrophic. The GAL’s cack-handed dirty war made martyrs of its victims and spawned an entirely new generation of young Basque activists dedicated to the use of violence as a legitimate political tactic.
And you think this is happening again? You think Arenaza and Otamendi were murdered by the Guardia Civil? By the army? By mercenaries hired through Madrid?’
Zulaika pauses over a final mouthful of fabada. Xavi has fallen asleep, dribble at the sides of his dummy. I have pushed my own bowl to the side of the table.
‘It is something we in Euskal Herria have been anticipating for some time. Think about it. Aznar is committed to the destruction of ETA. This much we know. He has teamed up with Blair and Bush and they are united against terror, whatever that means. But how do you win a war of this kind? Not through negotiation, not through legitimate means, but through the state’s own brand of terror. The dirty war. Spain in its democratic incarnation has a history of illegal tactics. From 1975 to 1981, that is immediately after the death of Franco when the country was supposed to have become a democracy, you have fascist groups avenging the death of figures like Carrero Blanco, responding in childish eye-for-eye fashion to the work of ETA. In 1980 alone, the Batallón Vasco Español, a collection of Madrid thugs, killed four people in a bar, then a pregnant woman, even a child in a playground. Two other women were raped before their murder by the BVE. The killers were well known to local people, but no action was taken against them. Then the officer who is supposed to be in charge of the case is promoted to be the leader of the Spanish police intelligence service two years later. And you ask why people become angry. You ask why the dirty war is not possible.’