Spain: Basque terrorist group ETA says it has disbanded

By Alyssa McMurtry

OVIEDO, Spain (AA) - The Basque terrorist group ETA says it has “completely dissolved its structures” and “terminated its political initiative”, formally ending a decades-long insurgency that killed hundreds in Spain.

“The Basque Country stands before a new opportunity to definitively close the cycle of conflict and construct its future together,” it said in a letter dated April 16 but published Wednesday by Spanish media.

“Years of confrontation have left deep wounds, and we have to give them a proper cure. Some are still bleeding because the suffering is not a thing of the past.”

The terrorist group is thought to be responsible for killing 829 people. It was founded in 1959 in response to the Spanish fascist government’s repression of the Basque culture but persisted long after Spain’s transition to democracy.

ETA’s operations were the deadliest from the 1970s to the 1990s, when it used a series of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations to terrorize the Spanish population and politicians into ceding independence to the Basque Country, located in northern Spain and southern France.

The group never met its political targets, and by 2009, a survey carried out by the University of the Basque Country found that only one percent of Basque respondents said they totally supported ETA.

The last victim of ETA was a French policeman in 2010, and in 2017, the group announced its definitive disarmament.

Although the group’s dissolution has been widely anticipated, Spanish news agency EFE reported that Spanish anti-terrorist authorities have said that they hoped for more.