Word: eta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...attacks were not wholly unexpected. ETA often steps up its campaign of violence during the summer months, and in recent weeks Spain's Interior Ministry had heightened security at a number of sensitive targets across the country. It wasn't enough - the Burgos bomb was attached to a van parked outside a civil-guard barracks; the Majorca one was tied beneath a civil-guard car. (See pictures of terrorism...
...while ETA's violent tactics are now taken for granted, the reasoning behind them is harder to fathom - it's been 50 years and, still, ETA hasn't achieved its aim. "ETA is going to interpret these attacks as a show of its own strength," says Rogelio Alonso, a terrorism expert at Madrid's University of King Juan Carlos. "But it's a strength that's more fictitious than real...
...years, the story of ETA has been the story of its decline. In the past decade - and especially after the failure of a 2006 cease-fire - the combination of increased police effort, greater cooperation between authorities in Spain and France (which ETA, desiring independence for the French Basque-speaking territories as well, frequently uses for safe houses, logistics-planning and weapons storage), a growing public weariness with the group's tactics, and factionalism within the organization itself, has resulted in an ETA that is, by all accounts, at its weakest in its history. The arrests of several high-ranking leaders...
...wasn't always this way. In the 1970s, burnished by a romanticized image of its members as revolutionaries fighting Francisco Franco's authoritarian regime, ETA assassinated Luis Carrero Blanco, the Prime Minister whom Franco had picked to succeed him. By the end of the decade, it had killed hundreds more people. And in the 1980s, the clandestine organization carried out a series of highly visible attacks: a car bomb parked at a Barcelona department store in 1987 left 21 dead; another, in 1986, exploded as a convoy of civil guards passed, killing...
...their force, none of those attacks got ETA what it wanted: negotiation with the Spanish government over independence for the Basque territories in the country's north. So why, then, when the organization is weaker than ever and has lost any immediate chance of restoring the peace process after it broke the 2006 cease-fire, does it continue to use violence as a political weapon...