POLITICS-SPAIN: Tough Sentences in Connection with ‘Dirty War’

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Apr 26 2000 (IPS) - A Spanish court handed down sentences Wednesday totalling 345 years for five men convicted of involvement in the 1983-86 “dirty war” against the Basque separatist movement ETA, waged by the interior ministry under the socialist government of Felipe González (1982-96).

Guardia Civil General Enrique Rodríguez Galindo and former civil governor of the Basque province of Guipúzcoa Julen Elgorriaga, who played leading roles in the so-called dirty war, received the maximum sentence of 71 years each.

Rodríguez Galindo and Elgorriaga, as well as lieutenant-colonel Angel Vaquero – sentenced to 69 years – and two lower-ranking members of the Guardia Civil (militarised police) Felipe Bayo and Enrique Dorado – sentenced to 67 years each – were found guilty by the ‘Audiencia Nacional’ appeals court on two counts of kidnapping and two counts of murder.

Two others, former secretary of state security Rafael Vera and a former interior ministry attorney, Jorge Argote, charged with concealing the crimes, were acquitted.

From 1983 to 1986, some 40 attacks and kidnappings, which resulted in 28 deaths, were carried out on interior ministry orders, according to investigations.

Vera and then-interior minister José Barrionuevo had been previously convicted in connection with a kidnapping and murder, but were later pardoned.

A declaration issued by the political commission of the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) Wednesday stated that the acquittal of Vera and Argote was evidence that “the actions that may have occurred outside of the law in the fight against terrorism were never propagated nor accepted by the government of the nation.”

But the PSOE communique failed to mention Rodríguez Galindo, who was decorated by the government of Felipe González for his action against the illegal ETA while serving as head of the Intxaurrondo Guardia Civil detachment located in the city of San Sebastián in Spain’s Basque country.

Nor did it refer to the role played by Elgorriaga, the central government’s representative in Guipúzcoa, of which San Sebastián is the capital, to whom the province’s security forces were answerable.

The victims for whose murders the five men were sentenced Wednesday were José Antonio Lasa and José Ignacio Zabala, alleged members of ETA. The two young men were kidnapped on Oct 15, 1983 in southern France, where they had taken refuge.

They were immediately taken to the city of San Sebastián, near the French border, where they were tortured on government property, according to the prosecution and several witnesses.

The penal courtroom of the ‘Audiencia Nacional’ did not consider that there was sufficient evidence to prove that the accused had taken part in, ordered or acquiesced to the torture, although it did find the five guilty of the kidnapping and murder of the two young men.

The court established that Lasa and Zabala were taken to Alicante, a city on Spain’s southeastern Mediterranean coast, where they were shot in the neck and buried under 50 kgs of quicklime.

Javier Gómez de Liaño, the judge originally appointed to look into the case, said he had never run into such an appalling case. He described the incident as “the blackest page of Spain’s democracy.”

According to Gómez de Liaño, although a spate of attempts on people’s lives and abuses have taken place in recent years in Spain, “there has been nothing like this shooting at point-blank range beside a grave after the victims were kidnapped and physically and psychologically tortured.”

The two kidnapped victims disappeared without a trace. But in January 1985, a local resident of Busot, in Alicante, found human bones while hunting in the brush. The unidentified remains were deposited in the local morgue.

It occurred to an Alicante police officer who ran across the remains 10 years later, in 1995, that they might belong to the two missing members of ETA. Genetic testing identified the bones as the remains of Lasa and Zabala, and the case was reopened.

A police commissioner was ordered by the then-interior secretary of state Margarita Robles – who has since retired from politics – to mount an in-depth investigation, the results of which provided the meat of the case which led to Wednesday’s verdict.

As soon as the ruling was handed down, the prosecution announced that it would appeal the two acquittals, while the lawyers for the defence said they would appeal the convictions.

The prosecution will ask that the three convicted men who are still free – Rodríguez Galindo, Elgorriaga and Vaquero – be immediately taken into custody. Bayo and Dorado have been in prison for four years.