Terror and Politics in Spain

...Irritation led to rivalry and recrimination: The National Police and Civil Guards exchanged accusations of incompetence after ETA's attempt to assassinate the King was uncovered this summer...

...and some French Socialists—remembering Franco's repressions —viewed ETA members as "freedom fighters...

...THE MAIN OPPOSITION Popular Party, not surprisingly, is reveling in the Prime Minister's difficulties...

...But when Gonzalez came to power he found himself caught between a Rightist clique of Army officers eager for a new Francoism and the terrorist Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA) organization, which demands independence for Euskadi, the Basque region of northern Spain...

...They are thought to have been linked with senior officers of the Civil Guards, a militarized police force...

...He has done much to modernize the country's institutions over the last 13 years...

...Economic weakness and disclosures of financial irregularities in high party circles, however, took a heavy toll in the 1993 balloting, requiring Gonzalez to form a minority government...

...Welfare and health services have improved...

...Gonzalez has repeatedly denied having any inside knowledge of GAL operations, and no link between him and the groups has been established...

...Deputy Prime Minister Nar-cis Serra, who was Defense Minister when the phones were bugged, has had to resign, as has his successor at the Defense Ministry...

...Gonzalez and Barrionuevo were so anxious to give the force respectable duties that they may have relied on it too heavily in their f ght against ETA...

...In a 1981 effort to impose authoritarian rule, rebel Civil Guards had seized Parliament and 350 of its Deputies...

...JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...

...ABC calls this report a scandalous attempt to stain Ga-lindo's "immaculate honor...

...The daily Mundo claims he received between 2 million and 5 million pesetas from secret government funds every time his men dismantled an ETA group...

...Expenditures on education have risen to better than 5 per cent of GDP (as compared with barely 1 per cent in the 1960s...

...Meanwhile, though, a Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzon, found evidence that at least two ETA suspects who died in police custody had been tortured...

...By early 1995, Garzon had jailed several government officials and was following a trail of allegations into the upper echelons of the Gonzalez administration: Ricardo Garcia Damborenea, a former Socialist leader now affiliated with the Right-of-Center Popular Party (PP), said that in the '80s he and others—including Gonzalez and at least one government minister—had made it a top priority to hit back at the ETA and jolt the French government into cooperating...

...He also discovered links between the police and the GAL...

...That a few Francoists remain in the PP—and more centrist parties—is clear from their defense of Civil Guard members said to have accommodated the GAL...

...Despite their anger about the GAL revelations and increasing criticism of the PSOE, they cannot bring themselves to trust the Popular Party, which was founded by an ex-Francoist minister...

...Moderate Basque regionalists are uneasy too...

...In 1982, after getting his party to abandon its Marxist orientation, he led it to the biggest ever Socialist victories in both houses of the Cortes and emerged as Prime Minister...

...The gap between rich and poor in Spain is the narrowest in the West—not least because family solidarity is so strong here that the high national level of unemployment (24 per cent) has not created the kind of personal distress that is common in other Western countries...

...But in the GAL's heyday he was in charge of a Civil Guard barracks where a young man thought to be an ETA sympathizer died in murky circumstances...

...Altogether, six ministers have had to step down in the past four years, and two members of Parliament who served in earlier Gonzalez governments have had to relinquish their seats...

...Several of them have begun cultivating the PP, but their leader, Jordi Pujol, head of Catalonia's autonomous administration, fears that a Right-of-Center government may challenge some of the wide-ranging powers he has coaxed out of Gonzalez over the years...

...Right-wing "death squads," known as Antiter-rorist Liberation Groups (GAL), began hunting down separatists only a few months after Gonzalez took off ice in December 1982...

...to lose so many looks like carelessness resulting from something like contempt for what the founders of the ruling party used to call "Socialist ethics...

...In addition, between 1990-92 the ETA's second-in-command, and three others thought to be part of its leadership, were arrested in France...

...Its young leader, Jose Maria Az-nar, feels he, and not Gonzalez, ought to be governing Spain, especially after the PP received the largest share of the vote (40.6 per cent) in last year's European Parliament contest...

...A new, scandal-free conservative government may be able to tackle this more easily than the Socialists...

...Four years later the PSOE did almost as well and Felipe, as everyone calls the handsome, articulate head of the government, brought Spain into the European Union and then nato...

...it annoyed many officers in the civilian National Police who wanted to see the Civil Guard demilitarized and the two outfits unified...

...To lose one minister may be regarded as a misfortune...

...A recent United Nations comparative survey considers Spain a better country to live in than Britain...

...The first sign of slippage appeared in 1989, when the Socialists lost majority control of the Congress of Deputies by one seat but retained dominance of the Senate...

...Not only did this result in excesses such as the GAL...

...Certainly, the freedom with which magistrates and journalists are being allowed to investigate undercover activities and the misappropriation of funds is a credit to Spanish democracy, and to Gonzalez' record as Prime Minister—even if these scandals result in his losing the next election...

...Defense Minister Narcis Serra quickly pushed through reforms that tightened civilian control of the Armed Forces...

...Talks also were initiated with the ETA, and when they collapsed tough antiter-rorist measures were instituted...

...The coup was foiled and democracy restored, largely by King Juan Carlos...

...He has therefore pressed for the election of a new Cortes this autumn...

...This summer, a French tip-off enabled Spanish police to arrest an ETA unit allegedly plotting to assassinate King Juan Carlos in Mallorca...

...Now he is being pressured to call early elections next year and will clearly be the underdog...

...The Prime Minister's latest troubles stem from allegations that in the 1980s his defense and interior ministers, along with a third prominent Socialist, allowed or perhaps masterminded, a "dirty war" against Spain's Basque separatists...

...It was against this backdrop that the GAL began operating in Spain's and especially France's Basque regions, kidnapping and killing suspected ETA members...

...Still, any future government will owe Gonzalez a debt...

...Sooner or later, Spain's police operations must be modernized...

...In Franco's day the Civil Guards?whose brutality accounts for the Basque view of them as an occupying army?were charged mainly with tracking down opponents of the regime...

...But he has been further weakened by financial scandals involving senior Socialists, and by revelations earlier this summer that a few years ago a military officer tapped the telephones of the King and other prominent Spaniards...

...His political enemies accuse him of trying to buy time...

...GONZALEZ ON THE BRINK Terror and Politics in Spain BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL BARCELONA FELIPE GONZALEZ, who became General Secretary of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Parry (PSOE) in 1974 at age 32, is this country's most prominent post-Franco political figure...

...A former director-general for security and an ex-chief of police in Bilbao admitted helping to plan the anti-terrorist groups' operations, and insisted the buck did not stop with them: Both men incriminated Jose Barrionuevo, who was Gonzalez' Interior Minister from 1982 until 1988...

...Paris feared ETA reprisals...

...Bui nine of its 27 victims in southern France in the mid- '80s proved to have nothing to do with terrorism...

...Even though the telephone-tapping affair cost him the support of the Catalan re-gionalists, for instance, it is unlikely that their deputies will vote against him in Parliament...

...The GAL vanished after the French authorities began to cooperate seriously with Spanish officials...

...The action to suppress separatist violence was undercut by the refusal of France's then Socialist government to root out ETA units attacking Spain from bases in the Basque southwest...

...Nevertheless, not all of them are quite ready to see him go...

...Aznar comes across as a moderate?perhaps the reason for the ETA's assassination attempt last April—but without him the party would probably swing toward the far Right, opening the way to a return of antidemocratic tactics and revival of popular support for the ETA...

...The Catholic conservative daily ABC is championing recently promoted Civil Guard General Antonio Rodriguez Ga-lindo, who played a leading role in the war on terrorists in the 1980s...

...Constitutionally, that does not have to be held until mid-1997, yet as a compromise Gonzalez is suggesting March 1996: Spain currently holds the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union, and he does not want this overshadowed by domestic infighting...