Word: woodworth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thing to understand for observers of Spanish elections - including most Spaniards - is how a party that is the political face of one of the bloodiest terrorist groups Europe has known can consistently attract around 15% of the vote in regional elections. A masterful new book by Irish journalist Paddy Woodworth helps to explain this conundrum, why it is that so many presumably sane electors in the northern Basque region have kept putting their X next to the candidates of the extreme nationalist party Euskal Herritarrok or its predecessor Herri Batasuna...
...more than three decades. The GAL operated about one tenth of that time, but what makes them so sinister is that they were not, as at first it appeared, a bunch of far-right fanatics fed up with the law's inability to contain terrorists. The inescapable conclusion of Woodworth's two years of research is that the GAL were primarily the product of Spain's two main forces of law and order, the National Police and the Guardia Civil. Worse, the highest levels of government either authorized or turned a blind eye to the GAL's bloody actions...
...others, members of the Guardia Civil and former Socialist officials in the autonomous Basque region - has been a propaganda gift for ETA. It has also served to convince a significant number of moderate Basques that the central government still wants to crush their cultural identity, just as Franco did. Woodworth writes that not only did the dirty war fail to destroy ETA, but the investigations - or lack thereof - into its members and backers provided "rich material for an ideology which viewed the Basques as victims of a murderous Spanish state apparatus...