Terrorism by the Numbers in Spain
Five of the nine people killed at the Civil Guard installation in Vic were also children. One bizarre variation on the theme of parents and children involves a father and son who were both killed by ETA – but over an eight-year interval. In November 1978, Supreme Court Justice José Francisco Mateu Cánoves was gunned down. His son, who had been studying at the Spanish equivalent of West Point, petitioned King Juan Carlos to be relieved of his Army commission so he could enlist in the Civil Guard and contribute personally to bringing the killers to justice. The request was granted. But in 1986, Ignacio Mateu Istúriz, by then a lieutenant, was killed along with his partner when a bomb went off under their vehicle.
ETA metes out death to the lordly and lowly alike. Its most famous hit was Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the head of Spain’s government during Franco’s rickety final years and the old dictator’s heir apparent. José Maria Aznar was two times lucky. He was still leader of the opposition in April 1996 when a huge blast in Madrid flipped his car, but its 2,300 pounds of armor allowed him to emerge from the Audi unscathed. Not so lucky was the 79-year-old lady crushed to death when the explosion that targeted Aznar collapsed the two-story building that was her home.
In 2001, with Aznar in his second term, ETA apparently tried again with Russian SAM-7 missiles, but according to a captured terrorist, on three separate occasions when Aznar’s plane was in range, the shoulder-launched weapon failed to ignite. A few months later, the terrorists had King Juan Carlos in the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle trained on the royal yacht when it was berthed on the island of Mallorca. Why didn’t they just shoot? Because islands can be sealed off with relative ease, and the killers hadn’t had time to work out an escape plan.
Estanislao Galíndez Llano would probably not be anyone’s idea of a high-profile terrorist target. He was the mailman of the town of Amurrio and was making his rounds on a bicycle in June 1985 when gunmen left him dead in a ditch next to the spilled contents of his leather bag. So why? It may have to do with the fact that four years before, the terrorists had murdered his brother, Felix, and he refused to observe the unwritten law of silence. Poor fool couldn’t keep his mouth shut, so ETA shut it for him.
Carlos Arguimberri Elorriaga drove the bus in Itziar Deva, a town with a population of under 3000. Patricia Llanillo was a housewife. Lorenzo Mendizábal Iturrarte was riddled with bullets while serving customers from behind the counter of the family-owned meat market. What did any of them do to “deserve” a death like that? A further 41 victims were business executives murdered because they either refused to pay protection money or because the ransom was late in arriving or because someone accused them of “exploiting the workers.”
The authors of a book called Vidas Rotas have arrived at a total of 858 victims (857 in earlier editions), which seems a reasonable approximation. They break that down into 59 women and 799 men, without differentiating by age. Of those 858, at least 361 were civilians, but once again, the distinction is shrouded in haze. How should one classify prison employees for example — not just guards and warders but an accountant (Jose Antonio Ortega Lara, kidnapped, buried alive for 532 days in an 8×10 ft. underground cell) or a psychologist (Francisco Javier Gómez Elósegui)? Ramón Díaz García was blown apart because he was employed as a mess cook for the Spanish Navy. Domingo Puente made a living trimming hair at an Air Force base in the southern city of Granada. That made them “collaborators with the forces of occupation.” Fish in a barrel is more like it.
Fewer than 10% of ETA’s victims were killed when Spain was still under the Franco dictatorship. All the remaining 800 plus were assassinated when the country was up and running as a modern democracy. The year ETA caused the greatest number of fatalities was 1980, in which 98 people lost their lives. The only day on the calendar that ETA has not splattered with blood is, for some reason, November 10.
Though not individually targeted, a handful of foreigners have also made ETA’s victim list. There might be even more had ETA been more successful in its attempts to bomb tourist-packed hotels in the southern resort cities of Fuengirola and Marbella in 2002, coinciding with a European Union summit in Seville. Although only six people were injured, that time the aim was clearly to splatter Spain’s international prestige with the blood of dead foreigners, unlike the dozens of bombings targeting the country’s tourism sector and that were intended to scare visitors away.
Eugene K. Brown was no tourist; he had come to Madrid in September 1985 for a three-day corporate strategy session with other senior executives of the American multinational Johnson & Johnson. A few hours before he was supposed to board a plane and return to his family in New Jersey, Gene Brown got up early to do some jogging near his hotel on Madrid’s upscale Serrano street — just where ETA had a car bomb primed and waiting for a van full of Civil Guards.
Dorothy Fertig, a 20-year-old Danish backpacker, was traveling in Spain with another girl on July 29, 1979, the day of ETA’s “hat trick” in which huge bombs were detonated at Barajas airport and the capital’s principal rail terminals, Atocha and Chamartin. The blast wave from the Charmartin explosion decapitated Dorothy instantly: an eyewitness described seeing the girl’s head go bouncing and skidding across the concourse, trailing blonde hair.
Four Portuguese citizens also appear on the list of collateral casualties, and the two men crushed to death when ETA blew up one of the parking ramps at Barajas airport in 2006 were immigrants from Ecuador. The terror group’s last, or if you prefer, most recent victim was also foreign, a gendarme killed in a March 2010 shootout during a botched car hijacking near Paris.
You want more victims? How about some of ETA’s own? You heard right: the terrorist organization is demanding that the Spanish government pay them compensation for 473 of their martyred militants. To the surprise of no one and the chagrin of many in Spain’s Socialist party, their list is headed by the 18 militants or facilitators who were murdered — along with nine innocent bystanders — by an inept death squad formed by moronic mercenaries and hit men for hire that were recruited, controlled, and paid off by high-level officials of the Socialist government that ran Spain in the 1980s. It also wants blood money for the two other low-level ETA members killed by a rogue Civil Guard unit around that same time. (Other right-wing terror groups active during that period murdered a total of 66 people, but it is not clear how many, if indeed any, had some sort of relation to ETA).
But before succumbing to the suasion of moral equivalence, you should know that ETA’s victims list also include five members who were murdered by their own comrades as alleged traitors, informants, or apostates. “Pertur,” once a senior ideologue, was accused of taking the platitudes of Marxism too seriously and of arguing that Franco’s death signified their struggle was over. His body was never found but ETA insists he was made to “disappear” by the security services. The death of Domingo Iturbe, who showed an untimely willingness to compromise in 1998 negotiations with the Spanish government, has never been convincingly accounted for. One version maintains that he fell off the roof while fixing a TV antenna in Algiers. ETA insists he was murdered.
ETA also wants to get paid off for the 40 members who “tragically” died when handling the explosives they were attempting to kill hundreds of others with, not to mention the 200 or so killed in armed showdowns with the Spanish security forces. They are also demanding compensation for a lawyer on the ETA payroll who drowned while swimming off the Cape Verde islands, where the French government, under Mitterrand, used to deport terrorists it was loathe to extradite to Spain.
Another ETA member living the sweet life in Cape Verde died in 2008 in a mugging that netted his killer all of three dollars. It seems a cheap price to pay to know that kismet caught up with a terrorist that had seven murders to answer for in Spain. At least 22 of the names on ETA’s own victim roster committed suicide; usually while in prison, though one killer named Félix Ramón Gil Ostoaga grew melancholic while doing 13 years of hard time, and turned a shotgun on himself a few weeks after his release.
Are they victims, too? ETA certainly thinks so, and I suppose it ultimately depends on who’s doing the counting. But of course, none of this is really about numbers.
Excellent and powerfully written article, but I can’t help thinking that, had there been a self-styled Basque constituency of any size in New York or Massachusetts, these last decades, you could have been putting a 3, 4, or 5 in front of the total of lives wasted.
I don’t think “negotiations” with the ETA will solve anything. You’re dealing with people here on both sides of the equation where a murder becomes a generations-long blood feud. A piece of paper or a simple declaration isn’t ever going to end that. Too much blood has been spilled and memories are very, very, long in that part of the world. I don’t really expect much to change, especially now that the conservatives are back in power in Spain.
SOPA Mark-up Delayed as Support Continues to Crumble December 16, 2011 – by Donny Shaw
After day one of the House Judiciary Committee’s mark-up of the Stop Online Piracy Act (a.k.a. SOPA), it’s pretty clear that the bill is going to be passed by the committee and forwarded to the full House. So far every single amendment to improve the bill for its critics has been rejected, with a solid, bipartisan majority voting en bloc to keep the bill as is. But day one of the mark-up has also made it clear that the public is waking up and legislators are taking notice.
While I have no love for terrorism, why is it any different when a government attempts to assassinate or kill people and misses, accidentally hitting civilians? Our campaign of targeted strikes has surely killed more than 361 civilians in the last ten years.
I guess my point is, there isn’t a distinction between attacks that are only aimed at civilians (such as their blowing up of hotels) and ones aimed at government or paramilitary forces (aka police) – it’s all called “terrorism”, yet it’s really only the former that should be called it.
ETA murders anyone who resists their political demands. They murder random people for not supporting their political demands (i.e. by visiting Spain as tourists). They initiated the violence, not the Spanish people. They started the violence because they could not pursue their goals through peaceful political means. There is a case to be made that this was justified during the Franco dictatorship. However, as SNL used to say, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, and has been for thirty-six years. Since then, Basque activists have been free to campaign for their goals. But there is no democratic majority for what ETA wants. So they kill for it.
US drone strikes kill people who have murdered Americans and actively work to murder more Americans, and anyone else who opposes them. We use drone strikes because it is impossible to go in on the ground and lay hands on these people. They initiated the violence, not us. Our only condition for peace is that they stop trying to murder Americans (and our allies) and those who have murdered Americans surrender.
That’s the difference.
One need not like ETA to sympathize with the Basques. But I suppose their language should be suppressed since it is “peculiar.”
Off Topic: North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died Saturday on a train trip, a tearful state television announcer, dressed in black, reported Monday. The announcer said that the 69-year old had died of physical and mental over-work on his way to give “field guidance.”
It doesn’t change much about the ETA’s horrendous list of murders, but there is something wrong about at least one of the victims given above.
I’ve been wondering about the young Danish woman, Dorothy Fertig. Her name, neither part, is particularly Danish. The first, “Dorothy”, is so rare as to be non-existent (it’s hard to say in Danish, could it be “Dorte”?). Although it’s not uncommon to find German surnames in Denmark, the surname, “Fertig” is also very uncommon and more likely German. On top of that I can’t find any reference to the young lady in any searches I made apart from this article and in libertaddigital.com – both have Spanish sources. I found nothing about her in any Danish media (I read Danish).
You were right to raise an eyebrow here. She was named as “Dorothy Fertig” in all contemporary news reports I have seen but ABC identified her as German and La Vanguardia as Danish (both papers have their archives online). “Fertig” has been perpetuated down to the present day in over a dozen sources of variable reliability, as is evident from a quickie Google search, but I agree with you, it doesn’t sound quite right for Denmark, though there are numerous Americans with that surname.
Google will give you just as many hits for “Dorothy/Dorothea Fertz” and I suspect this must be correct. As to her nationality, sources are pretty much evenly split between “alemana” and “danesa”, with the Asociación de Víctimas del Terrorismo listing her as German/Fertz and Vidas Rotas as Danish/Fertig. But the variant surnames do not always coincide with a one or another alleged nationality. I assumed that the confusion arose from reports that “Dorothy” was travelling with a German girl who was injured in the blast that killed her companion.
The young woman in question does indeed figure Libertad Digital’s rolling memorial of ETA victims, see…
http://blogs.libertaddigital.com/in-memoriam/archivo-2011-07.html
as “Fertig” and “Danish” but there is no photograph of her there, or anywhere else that I have examined. The Wikipedia entry on post-Franco ETA victims tags her, uniquely, as “Czech (or Danish)” Howso “or”?
This has stirred my curiosity, too, and I have queried the Interior Ministry, though I don’t expect to hear back until after the holidays. Will post here when I know something.
Begoña Urroz was killed by the DRIL (Liberation Revolutionary Iberian Directorate). That explains ETA’s reticence: that group was not responsible for that bombing on 27 June 1960. Emilia Larrea was killed by mistake in 1978 by a group of civil guards that some time before had chased after 3 Comandos Autónomos Anticapitalistas terrorists (and they have killed 2 and wounded and captured the other). All the webs that describe how ETA members kill Emilia larrea are lying, either willingly or unwillingly.There was no danger for the civil guards when they opened fire once again, killing that housewife. No “hot pursuit” at all.There’s another case of official lie: postman José Antonio Cardosa was not killed by ETA in 1989. It was the dirty war. Cabman Martín Merquelanz’s killing was claimed by the far-right Batallón Vasco Español in 1978. Notwithstanding this, he’s considered a ETA victim.
The foreign girl Dorothea Fertig was not killed by ETA “military” (1974-2011?), but by ETA “political-military” (1974-82). Thew so-called polimilis were pardoned (scotch-free) in 1982 when they renounced to violence and dismantled their terrorist organization. Their political party was EE (Euskadiko Ezkerra), that since the early 1990s is part of PSOE, Zapatero’s party. Full circle. The Basque PSOE is called PSE-EE. I don’t believe the Spanish authorities be interested in investigating the bombings by ETA p-m in Madrid on 29 Jule 1979. 7 people killed and over 100 wounded.
I happened to edit the Spanish Wikipedia’s article on people killed by ETA from November 1975 onwards, so I’m afraid that I’m responsible for typing down “or Danish”. Sources are at variance regarding Dorothea Fertig. According to the book “Vidas rotas” (Broken Lives) she was Danish. According to other sources, she was Czech. According to the Spanish press in 1979, she could have been German. Summing up: no one seems to be sure about her nationality or about how to spell her name.