Up until its formal liquidation in 2018, the Basque separatist organization ETA [Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, “Basque Homeland and Liberty”] was one of the most lethal paramilitary groups to have operated in Europe after the second World War. Its targeted assassinations included figures as prominent as Francisco Franco’s hand-picked successor, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, and it was responsible for some two thirds of the terrorist-attributed deaths in Spain since the fall of the 2nd Republic. However, outside of their primary operating theaters of Spain and France, it seems that ETA has not captured the public imagination as readily as some of its fellow travelers in terror, with their relevance to current events not discussed much beyond institutions already dedicated to terrorism and political violence. As such, it’s almost surprising to see a widely streaming documentary on the subject within the last couple years, this being No Me Llame Ternera [“Don’t Call Me Ternera”, retitled for English-speaking markets as Face to Face with ETA: Conversations with a Terrorist].
Indeed, nothing seems to underscore the peculiar lack of international attention to ETA like their under-representation in popular culture. Their contemporaries in armed struggle (e.g. the Irish Republican Army, Rote Armee Fraktion, or Brigate Rosse) have merited feature films that managed critical acclaim and resonated in circles not directly allied with their respective causes. The RAF, in fact, have inspired or appeared in numerous feature films (The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Deutschland Im Herbst, Die Dritte Generation, supporting roles in Olivier Assayas’ Carlos miniseries), to say nothing of other media like pop music: Joe Strummer of the Clash famously sported a t-shirt combining the RAF’s Heckler & Koch MP5 coat of arms with a stenciled Brigate Rosse logo, and the first this author even heard of the German radicals was a song title from Sheffield industrialists Cabaret Voltaire.
No me Llame… is, compared with such ventures, much for valuable for its educational potential than as an aesthetic experience, since it relies on a documentary format that will be familiar to anyone who has watched a vintage episode of 60 Minutes (to wit: two cameras alternating between closeups of the interrogator Jordi Évole and his subject Josu Urrutikoetxea a.k.a. Josu Ternera, in a low-lit room, interwoven with archival footage). An additional dramatic element comes in the person of Francisco Ruiz, a Basque policeman nearly killed in an ambush that took the life of the mayor of Galdakao, who he was tasked with protecting. From time to time we cut away from the interview footage for a screen-within-a-screen view of Ruiz watching the same interview, and registering a variety of reactions (particularly as he realizes that Ternera was personally involved with the events that cost him his mobility and caused him, among other things, to be a persona non grata among his many pro-independence Basque countrymen).
Despite the predictability inherent to the film’s format, it is a rarity that we get any kind of candor from broadcast discussions with a high-level member of a designated terrorist organization, regardless of how absent or present they are in the current public imagination. Denying them “the oxygen of publicity” remains standard operating procedure among counter-terrorism professionals, except in scenarios where we can assume the accused will come off as singularly evil and thus have minimal value for winning converts. Therefore it is difficult to engage in dialogue without courting accusations of sensationalism, or of solidarity with the subject cloaked in a disingenuous non-partisan desire to “get to the heart of the matter”.
So, while not a sprawling and immersive documentary powerhouse on par with Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, this should at least be appreciated for what it is: a rare chance to hear a key participant in a violent irredentist struggle speak for himself in a format that, while never rising to the level of outright propaganda, at least runs the risk of shouldering blame for “converting” viewers to the side of the insurgents. The realization of this footage was not done entirely without risk, either for Ternera or for the film’s producers: the former’s confessions certainly raise questions about his being acquitted in 2021 on terrorism-related charges, and the latter did indeed receive the expected criticism for their “platforming” of the dubiously repentant Basque guerrilla.
But maybe here we are getting ahead of ourselves, particularly after mentioning the unfamiliarity with ETA relative to other comrades in “armed struggle”. One obvious reason why this documentary appears now rather than earlier in the millennium is the fact that the threat level of ETA is now as diminished as it is likely to be: as of April 2017, they are unique among modern, State-designated terror organizations for their commitment to unilaterally end combat operations (followed a year later by cessation of all political activities, with Ternera himself being chosen to make this public proclamation). Yet much has happened between that time and ETA’s formation at the end of the 1950s, and it is impossible to fully understand the extremes to which ETA carries its nationalist insurrection without first taking a cursory look at the recent history of the Basque separatism- this is a task that isn’t taken up by this film, maybe assuming too much familiarity with the subject on the part of its audience.
The modern renaissance of Basque nationalism and romanticism was largely attributed to the shipbuilder's son Sabino Arana (1865-1903), who claimed to be vouchsafed a vision of being the Basque peoples' savior. Though only living to 38 years of age, he did manage to singlehandedly revive a poetic interest in Basque identity, and also to found the PNV [Partido Nationalista Vasco, Basque National Party] which would survive him up to the present day. The PNV would be banned during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (together with all like-minded nationalist or secessionist parties), followed by an early division into two wings in the 1920s, and yet another post-Civil War ban by Franco. Though the PNV was mostly composed of a Catholic membership at the time of Franco's assent, he deeply resented their decision not to join his "crusade against Communism," and perhaps sealed their fate as an outlaw entity.
The official founding of ETA can be traced back to a split between the youth factions of the PNV in the 1950s, particularly when the PNV's reluctance to support a 1947 general strike led the more militant youth to look elsewhere for political organization- this would spur on the formation of the group EKIN ["to act" in the Basque language], whose co-founder Julen Madariaga would be instrumental in contributing both to the rise of ETA and, with his Aralar party, the eventual discouragement of its violent tactics. (The "action arm" of the group was later rechristened the "military arm" at their first clandestine Assembly in 1962.) EKIN was originally a study group intending to keep some vestige of Basque-ness alive during the era of Francoist repression, although it would eventually make its break with the PNV in 1958 when it decided to make good on the promise of action embedded within its name. In 1961, the action which succeeded in "putting them on the map" would be an attempted derailment of a train carrying Spanish Civil War veterans to a memorial service- none were killed, but the resulting backlash served to place the militants favorably in the public eye. From this point on, and against the backdrop of a 1960s typified by anti-colonialist uprisings, the table was set for ETA’s lengthy armed struggle.
There are many other points that could be illustrative of the rift between the Basque country’s pro-independence left and their adversaries, but one that comes immediately to mind is the distinct linguistic development of the region. The Basque language, Euskara, is highly peculiar in that it not only shares no relation to Spanish or other Romance languages, and is also assumed to be the last surviving pre-Indo-European language on the continent. Unsurprisingly, the decision of the Franco regime to ban its public use, and render a population effectively mute in its own country, was one of the major driving forces behind the formation of ETA. As soon as the military governor of Guipúzcoa made the decree banning Euskara in public speech and print, local Basque freedoms had already diminished to a level below what had been enjoyed under Spain’s short-lived 2nd Republic.
None of this sways interviewer Évole’s position on the morality of ETA, and of Ternera in particular, which is never particularly in doubt. He spends much of the conversation attempting to corner Ternera into admitting accountability for the group’s most renowned and / or reviled actions: the Carrero Blanco assassination, the 1987 bombing of the Hipercor supermarket in Barcelona, the bombing of the Zaragoza Guardia Civil barracks in the same year, the 1997 kidnapping and murder of Partido Popular councillor Miguel Ángel Blanco. To this end, a good number of his inquiries are therefore of the “leading question” type: see, for example, his discussion of ETA’s impuesto revolutionario [“revolutionary tax”], an extortionary measure which was levied on Basque business people to help fund ETA operations, and the non-payment of which could, and did, result in lethal consequences. Évole asks if this isn’t something that a mafia, rather than a “national liberation” movement, would do, and receives an unmemorable answer which does nothing to contradict the (barely) implicit accusation.
Ternera, as might be expected, refers to the necessity of waging guerrilla war within a system that was suffocating his people, but in his reluctance to provide concrete examples of such, he shows a surprising inability to deflect his interrogator’s rapid-fire attempts at eliciting a sincere remorsefulness. He could have quite easily, for example, pointed to the aforementioned Franco-era ban on the public speaking of the Basque language, which neutered much of the public, social life in the Basque country.
He certainly could also have mentioned the brutal tactics of the GAL [Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación], a State-sponsored mirror image of ETA (none other than former prime minister Felipe González was alleged to have said, at a private 1983 dinner in Bilbao, "the terrorists have to be crushed with their own hands…those of terrorism.”) That “crushing” action in question resulted, in the same year as González’ pronouncement, in the seemingly random and excessively violent torture and murder of José Antonio Lasa and José Ignacio Zabala by GAL, and in a public relations coup which achieved the classic terrorist objective of compelling the State into delegitimizing actions. Many other public figures - notably, the Catalonian philosopher and independence activist Lluís Maria Xirinacs - took this occasion to award ETA the moral high ground, stating
ETA places bombs on sites where they can harm people not in the military and not related to their oppressors, yet warns in advance. Do you know how much it costs, in secrecy, to find dynamite, pay for it or steal it, transport it, place it, and, finally, when you have everything ready, give notice that it will go off? Answer me, why [give an advance warning]?1
Every active and aspiring practitioner of political violence surely knows that modern warfare consists in controlling centers of narrative gravity as much as it does on the so-called “kinetic” aspects of combat, and so watching Ternera’s performance here often gives one the impression of a man who is psychically exhausted by his commitments. He continually passes up opportunities to counter Évole’s stated suspicion that his regrets over civilian deaths (i.e. the children killed in the Zaragoza barracks bombing) are not ethically motivated pangs of guilt, but rather regrets over strategic miscalculations. In one telling moment, Ternera even corrects himself when using the phrase “irreversible victims,” changing it to “irreversible outcomes”. Then again, he would know as well as anyone that ETA’s stated strategy of “action-repression-action” (a minor update on the classic strategy suggested in Johann Most’s Philosophy of the Bomb) practically welcomed acts of disproportionate cruelty as a means of gaining the aforementioned moral high ground, and this does complicate things.
Ultimately, Face to Face… comes up short in one key respect: insofar as this is a film with a clear moral compass, it never completely answers the question of how Ternera qualitatively differs from any other human being who would be placed in similar circumstances. It is here that fictional works inspired by real events actually manage to be much more exploratory - see, for example, something like Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, inspired by actions of the IRA that parallel those of ETA within the same era. It is a book often critiqued for its arid quality, but it is precisely this which makes it a convincing portrayal of the ambiguity essential to the lifestyle of the radicalized “urban guerrilla”.
The characters in Lessing’s book, animated by a nervous and desperate compulsion to do something that will “pull down” the rotten fascist-imperialist system, continually struggle to reconcile their visions of historical destiny with mundane reality. Indeed, grappling with mundane, domestic reality ends up taking on a more heroic quality than any public actions they eventually commit to: Alice, the tragic heroine of the novel, spends most of the narrative simply battling with British bureaucracy in order to legitimize her comrades’ squatted home and to furnish it with the rudiments of modern living (plumbing, electricity). The dissemination of the terrorist’s “propaganda by deed” seems secondary to the futile efforts to unite a disparate group of radicals into a cohesive family unit, and to make this idealized group of “cadres” fill the unhappy void opened up by their less-than-ideal relationships with biological parents and significant others.
Lessing’s narrative is nearly the inverse of what we see in this documentary: one man’s life as a staccato sequence of violent ruptures interspersed with events of lesser, or no, importance. Sure, it could always be argued that there is no need to “humanize” this austere and dutiful man of violence, but that very act of humanization should be further examined by those whose business it is to “de-radicalize”. I have no qualification as an expert on that process, but I do feel that it might be better achieved through disallowing the easy dichotomy between a dehumanized enemy and a super-humanized resistance. The lives of European “urban guerrilla” militants, as they actually existed during the heyday of ETA, were typified by a drabness not often relayed in documentary format: the explosions that they hoped would attract new recruits to their banner were the exception to a lifestyle of mandated, inconspicuous ordinariness in public, and, in private, endless theoretical debates over issues with “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” levels of obscurantism.
With this in mind, a final anecdote from ETA’s turbulent history is worth relaying here: namely, a 1997 assassination attempt on King Juan Carlos at the grand opening of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum. Had this succeeded, it would have gone down in history as one of the most impactful actions in the modern history of asymmetrical warfare. This particular operation was foiled, however, when police noticed an ETA band attempted to set a bomb in an outdoor flower sculpture by Jeff Koons. The king’s life being “saved,” in a way, by a major art world fixture, is perversely funny when considering the many ways in which terrorism aspires to the condition of major-league art (i.e. propagation via scandal and spectacle, or a purity of vision that demands perpetual hostility against the status quo). Again, this is a romantic idealization which this documentary could do more to disrupt: the terrorist may define himself or herself by brief spasms of explosive vengeance, but these are generally supported by lengthy spells of monotony, and by an inability to be completely separate from small-scale human interactions while attempting the large-scale “liberation” of humanity.
http://en-retranca.blogspot.com/2009/08/extracto-de-discurso-del-difunto.html. Translation by the author.