Word: eta
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...Prime Minister Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, have moved far more cautiously in liberalizing one of Western Europe's most monolithic and centralized governments, and Madrid has thrown the national police into a straightforward drive against the terrorists with a good deal of success. So far this year ETA killings are down to 28, about half the 1980 rate. Last week the government announced the arrest of seven alleged ETA members in Vizcaya province and the seizure of substantial quantities of arms and ammunition. In an attempt to rebuild its popularity, the beleaguered ETA is now adopting the protest tactics...
...Spanish government also hoped that President François Mitterrand's new Socialist government would track down and extradite ETA terrorists taking refuge on French soil. Previous French governments were reluctant to cooperate, fearing that some of the people requested by the Spanish might be political dissidents, not terrorists. Last week French officials continued to be wary. Gaston Defferre, the Interior Minister, has gone so far as to declare that the war against the ETA in Spain is "political." Despite continuing pressure from Madrid, the French have still not agreed to the extradition proposal...
...ETA itself has middle-class social origins. It began in the 1950s as a college study group examining the effects of Spanish domination. ETA originally was nonviolent, but during the tumultuous '60s the organization became radicalized, began robbing banks to finance its operations and for a time espoused a cloudy blend of nationalism and Marxism. The organization's violent phase began in 1968 after a member of the Guardia Civil shot an ETA member who refused to stop at a roadblock. In retaliation ETA assassinated a hated police chief, and the deadly cycle began...
...after a decade of bloodshed, Madrid tried to buy peace by granting amnesty to many ETA prisoners and giving the Basques a good deal of independence. The autonomy law, which did not actually go into effect until last year, established a regional parliament in the provinces with limited power over local administration, social services and commercial regulation, plus the promise of eventual control over a Basque police force...
...reforms have undercut a great deal of ETA's backing, particularly from the middle class, which is weary of the terrorist tactics. There is a grudging recognition, even among the most anti-Castilian of nonterrorist Basques, that conditions have improved decisively. Says Angel Amigo, a young writer and film maker who joined ETA in 1972, aided in a terrorist kidnaping, was captured, tortured and subsequently released: "There has been a change in the scale of values among the young since Franco's day. Under repression, all life turned on politics. War was heroism, but all that is over...