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Basque struggle captured in one life and death

Giles Tremlett

WHEN RAMON Baglietto saw the toddler drop the ball outside his shop and rush on to the road after it — pursued by his mother — he too began to run. He could not stop the toddler's mother, but grabbed the baby she was carrying before she tried to push the toddler clear of a truck thundering down the road into the Basque town of Azkoitia. The truck driver did not see either mother or child. A few moments later Baglietto found himself looking at the dead bodies of the mother and elder sibling of the baby in his arms.

In 1980, some 18 years later, on a curve in the road that climbs out of Azkoitia and over the steep, mist-covered pass of Azkarate, Baglietto was ambushed by gunmen from the armed Basque separatist group Eta. A hail of bullets hit his car. After it had skidded off the road into a tree, one of the gunmen walked up to him and shot him in the head.

Among those responsible for ordering the killing was Baglietto's cousin, Eugenio Etxebeste, Eta's number two at that time. But more shocking for the people of Azkoitia was the fact that one of the gunmen who had taken part in the ambush was Kandido Azpiazu. "He was the same person who, as a baby, Ramon had held in his arms," said Baglietto's brother, Pedro Mari. "My brother was killed by the person whose life he had saved."

Azpiazu was eventually caught and sent to jail. Several members of the Baglietto family, some of whom had previously backed the regime of Spain's dictator Francisco Franco, received threats from Eta and fled the Basque country. Baglietto's widow, Pilar Elias, stayed. She brought up two children and then joined the conservative People's party, becoming a town councillor — and a potential Eta target needing constant watching over by two armed bodyguards.

Azpiazu was released from jail in 1995. But last year he opened a glaziers' shop in Azkoitia. It is a town of 10,000 people, but Azpiazu chose to rent a shop in the same five-storey building overlooking the river Urola where Baglietto's widow lives. Her front door is inches away from the windows of his shop.

"Almost every day she sees him coming into work," said Mr. Mari. "How he could set up a shop when he had said he was too poor to pay the damages he owed Pilar, I don't know." A court has now frozen his assets while the damages issue is sorted out.

The woman who opened the shop door said Azpiazu did not want to talk. "He hasn't said anything to any journalists, nor is he going to," she said.

As the Basque country crawls towards what almost everybody in this green and hilly part of northern Spain hopes will be a definitive peace process, cases such as those of Pilar Elias and Kandido Azpiazu are evidence of the unhealed wounds left by almost four decades of violence.

"Situations like this are bound to crop up," said Azkoitia's Mayor, Asier Aranbarri, who belongs to the moderate, non-violent Basque Nationalist party which also runs the regional government. "We will all have to be as generous as possible if we are going to achieve reconciliation."

Although Eta keeps planting bombs, extorting money from local businesses and talking tough, there is huge optimism. A much-weakened Eta has not killed since May 2003. The latest rumour is of a ceasefire by Easter. "Everybody agrees this has to be the year for peace," said Mr. Aranbarri. "Eta just has to take one more step."

Rumours of peace, however, have come and gone before. "I'll believe it when I see it," said Josu Goya, a former Mayor in the town of Bera for the now banned, Eta-supporting Batasuna party. "All I will say is that I never dreamed that, during my lifetime, we would be as close as this."

The Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has won the agreement of the Spanish Parliament to open negotiations if Eta signals it is ready to renounce violence. Alec Reid, an Irish priest who mediated in the Ulster peace process, is now based in the Basque country. Opposition to negotiations is led by the People's party, which lost power to Mr. Zapatero's socialists two years ago.

"What is there to negotiate?" said Juana de Bengoechea, a People's party councillor in the Basque border town of Irun. "Spain is not at war. What we have is a problem of crime, of terrorist crime."

Former Eta members, she complains, are still welcomed home from jail by groups of people who lay on fiestas and make speeches. "They are told that young people are ready to follow in their footsteps," she said.

Eta founder Iulen de Madariaga, now distanced from the group, is one of the few pessimists. "I don't think Zapatero is doing enough," he said. "Perhaps he is afraid of losing votes."

Eta demands the creation of a separate state taking in the Basque region, Navarre, and part of south-west France, but observers say its minimum demand may be some sort of local referendum.

But sources at Mr. Zapatero's office have said he is willing to negotiate only the future of the group's prisoners. "Personally I don't mind if they are let out of jail," said Mr. Mari. "But they must not be given any political concessions. That would be paying them for having killed."—

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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