Argala: The anti fascist ETA militant who changed the course of Spanish state history
On 21st December 1973 on a plush suburban street in Madrid the paths of two men of very different backgrounds crossed. The outcome would change the course of Spanish state history. One of those men was 24 year old José Miguel Beñaran Ordeñana, (known to his comrades as ‘Argala’ — meaning ‘Slim’ in Basque), a Basque Marxist, antifascist and member of the revolutionary armed group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA). The other was 70 year old Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, a fascist commander of the naval forces during the Spanish Civil War, close confidante of General Franco and recently appointed by him as Spanish Prime Minister. His assassination that December morning by an ETA unit led by Argala would rock the Spanish state and pose its greatest threat since the civil war.
Argala was born in 1949 just a decade after the end of the war when General Francisco Franco emerged victorious following the fascist coup against the Spanish Republic in July 1936. By the end of the civil war tens of thousands of political prisoners were held in gaols across the Spanish state, including up to 10,000 Basques, where they were subjected to torture and degrading treatment. Thousands more were subject to summary execution and buried in mass graves. Trade unions and political parties were prohibited, public demonstrations banned and military courts dispensed gruesome forms of vengeance.
The regime also sought to wipe out any manifestations of independence in the Basque Country, targeting in particular the Basque language (Euskera) and culture. The teaching of Euskera in schools was prohibited, as was its public use. Basque cultural societies were suppressed, and language publications banned. Argala was thus born into a State ruled by a brutal and vengeful dictatorship that sought to crush both left wing and nationalist opposition to its rule.
His home town of Arrigorriaga, located in the industrial heartland of Bilbao, was strongly associated with the mines and shipbuilding industry that dominated the quay sides of the city’s Nervion River. It had a proud history of trade union militancy. Two years either side of Argala’s birth, in 1947 and 1951, general strikes emerged from the Bilbao mines shutting down industry right across the southern Basque provinces. On both occasions the Franco regime responded with its customary brutality. A state of siege was declared in 1947 with hundreds of arrests and 15,000 workers summarily dismissed from their jobs. During the 1951 general strike armed police were deployed against workers and their supporters.
At home Argala spoke Spanish, recalling as a child that he never had a conversation with his grandmother, who only spoke Basque. However, his parents conversed in Spanish; his mother was a native Basque speaker, but his father, a member of the Basque Nationalist Party, could only speak Spanish. Following an early teenage foray with Catholic Action, perhaps as an act of rebellion against his Basque nationalist parents, Argala attended university where he studied engineering. There he was introduced to the ideas of Karl Marx, who he read voraciously. In 1968 at the age of nineteen he joined ETA, writing later:
“the armed struggle is the result of the convergence between national oppression and the class exploitation suffered by the workers under Franco’s dictatorship, a struggle that will inevitably develop until the demise of the dictatorship.”
Argala soon became active in the armed struggle. His first action involved an unsuccessful attempt to affect the escape of six Basque political prisoners being held under sentence of death in Burgos prison in December 1970. Argala and his comrades dug an underground tunnel up to the prison wall but the escape attempt failed. Nevertheless, following huge international pressure on the Franco regime, the death sentences were commuted. Argala remained an active militant.
In 1972 following an armed robbery and the torching of a hamlet in the towns of Bergara and Urnieta in the province of Gipuzkoa, along with the kidnapping of an industrialist during a strike in Eibar, the Spanish police named him as a wanted man. He went on the run. It was during this period that a plan to kidnap Carrero Blanco, who at the time was serving as Deputy Prime Minister, was hatched.
Argala travelled to Madrid and made contact with members of the Spanish Communist Party who provided information to him about the movements of Carrero Blanco, in particular his daily attendance at the San Francisco Borga church in the city. A unit was organised to keep Blanco under surveillance, which was given logistical support by a group of local communists, including life-long activist Eva Forest and her husband, the playwright, Alfonso Sastre. However, following Franco’s appointment of Blanco as Spanish Prime Minister in June 1973 and the subsequent increase in his security detail, the kidnap plan was dropped.
Given the difficulties presented, the unit instead hatched a daring plan to assassinate him as he returned from mass. Members of the unit subsequently rented an apartment along Blanco’s route to church, informing the landlord and neighbours that they were sculptors. They spent the next several months digging a tunnel from the basement of the apartment under the road.
On the morning of 20th December 1973 as Blanco’s chauffeur driven black Dodge car drove from church, Argala, who was standing on a ladder wearing overalls posing as an electrician, was given the signal to detonate a massive bomb. The explosion rocked the street, leaving a huge crater on the road and firing the car 60 meters into the air and over an adjoining five-storey building before it crashed into the inner courtyard.
Blanco, his chauffeur, and the police inspector body guard were all killed. It was a spectacular operation, the first carried out by ETA outside of the Basque Country and just the second planned assassination by the organisation since its founding in 1959 — the first being of San Sebastian police chief, renowned torturer and Nazi collaborator Melitón Manzanas in 1968. It catapulted the organisation to international attention and created a major crisis for the Franco regime.
Following the successful operation panic ensued within the Spanish state. The government immediately declared three days of mourning, closing all places of entertainment. All public buildings in Madrid were shut down, while the Palace of Justice, where a trial of ten leading opponents of the Franco regime, accused of unlawful assembly, had opened that morning, was surrounded by a massive force of armed police. (All ten were subsequently convicted and given savage prison sentences of between 12 years and 20 years).
Later that night in an incident that was initially covered up by police, who claimed they had shot one of the suspects, Pedro Barrios, a 19 year old waiter from Madrid, was shot by police as he made his way home from work in a local restaurant. He died of his injuries two weeks later. Another young man was shot dead by police in the Basque city of Donostia (San Sebastian).
A massive police hunt was initiated and Spanish police named and published the photographs of six men it said were responsible for the attack. A decree was passed granting police immunity from prosecution for the shooting of civilians they suspected of involvement in ‘subversive activities’. It effectively gave police a licence to kill. The Guardian newspaper described the decree as “the gravest potential threat to democratic opponents of the regime since the days of the civil war” and concluded that “it could almost be interpreted as permission to murder for motives of personal or political revenge.”
There was also collective punishment of Basques with severe restrictions placed on the right to travel — Basques from the provinces of Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa were ordered to return with their passports to the place of issue for ‘revision’ if they wished to leave the state. There were numerous police raids and hundreds of arrests. Speculation mounted that martial law would be declared. In the event the military decided against using emergency powers, but had sufficient sweeping powers to carry out the same effect.
In Madrid, a priest was arrested and fined a quarter of a million pesetas for refusing a demand from members of the notorious right wing organisation, Warriors of Christ the King, to say prayers for the soul of Carrero Blanco. The Guardian newspaper’s Madrid correspondent, Bill Cemlyn Jones, reported:
“the assassination and the reaction here have posed the greatest threat to the Franco regime since it fought its way to power.”
A feature in the Irish Times headlined “1973 assassination bomb hit Spanish fascism hard” judged the ETA attack as an event that “changed Spanish history.” The operation, it continued, had the effect of:
“eliminating the man who was the main pillar of Franco’s elaborate plans for prolonging his regime beyond his death.”
Franco, a man who had visited death and misery on so many, was said to have been profoundly shocked by Carrero Blanco’s assassination and was too upset to attend the funeral. Amongst the international figures who extended their sympathy to him was United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger who just three months earlier had assisted the military coup against Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende, bringing to power the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
At a press conference the following week in the French city of Bordeaux, four hooded members of ETA claimed responsibility for the assassination of Carrero Blanco on behalf of the organisation. Details of the meticulously planned operation were provided, which they said involved the unit digging a 24ft tunnel under the road from a cellar of the flat they had rented on Claudio Coello Street, at the end of which were nine foot wings on each side packed with 100lb of explosives. The charge was detonated electronically using a 700ft cable which was passed back through the cellar and along the pavement of an adjoining street. They denied that those named by the Spanish police were involved in the operation claiming that the unit had made its escape by car to Portugal and then by boat to France.
Some sections of the Spanish media speculated that the IRA had provided ETA with the explosives used to kill Carrero Blanco. The Madrid daily newspaper ABC claimed that a meeting was held between leading members of the IRA and ETA in a hotel in Andorra in September where the IRA agreed to supply the explosives for the attack. The reports, while speculative, were not without substance. In an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel about the operation an ETA leader stated that from the organisation’s point of view rather than kill Franco “it seemed more important to us to do away with the person who more than any other depicts the continuing of the Franco regime.”
The spokesperson went on to state that there were “very good relations between the IRA and ETA.” However, possibly the strongest hint came in a 1974 interview by journalist Kevin Chalkley with a member of the unit that carried out the attack. Inaki Perez Beotegui, known as ‘Wilson’, confirmed that ETA had very close connections with the IRA, with meetings taking place regularly between representatives of both organisations in Algiers, Paris and Brussels. He also confirmed that the IRA had provided ETA members with training in the construction of bombs.
While the police hunt for the suspects continued and the Spanish placed significant diplomatic pressure on the French government to extradite Basque suspects who were living on the French side of the border, a demand the French refused, Argala remained at liberty. Others, including Eva Forest, who had provided logistical support for Argala’s unit were arrested and charged with complicity in the assassination. Argala remained active and in December 1974 he was named by police as a suspect in the shooting dead of two Guardia Civil in the town of Urduliz close to Bilbao.
Following the death of Franco in 1975 and the Spanish state’s ‘transition to democracy’ an amnesty for all political prisoners was declared in 1977, of which the killing of Carrero Blanco was subject. Eva Forest and those charged along with her were subsequently released. Under the pseudonym Julen Agirre, she wrote an account of the assassination of Carrero Blanco — Operation Ogro: The Execution of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. She settled in the Basque town of Hondarribia and in 1989 was elected to the Spanish senate as a member of the Basque pro-independence left coalition, Herri Batasuna.
As part of the same amnesty deal a ‘pact of forgetting’ was also agreed, which absolved the Spanish state of it civil war and post civil war crimes, during which tens of thousands were killed, tortured, sent to labour camps and forced into exile. Thousands of these victims of fascism still lie in unmarked mass graves. Notwithstanding this pact, there were many within the state apparatus who resented the amnesty deal and elements within the Spanish navy were tasked with plotting revenge for the killing of their chief naval officer. Argala was their prime target.
By 1978 Argala was head of ETA militar (the organisation had split in 1974) and was operating from a base in the northern Basque Country, where the French government continued to refuse Spanish demands to extradite ETA suspects. However, he had been imprisoned on a number of occasions by the French and at one point, in October 1976, he was expelled to the island of Yeu where he and his partner, Asunción Arana, married.
Argala had been key to developing the movement’s political ideas and strategy. He considered ETA as merely a tool for the empowerment of the people, arguing that:
“It is not about ETA solving everyone’s problems. Neither ETA, nor KAS, nor Herri Batasuna, nor any political formation, however great, can solve the problems of the Basque working class. Only the Basque working class can solve its problems. Only an organized people can achieve its objectives.”
On the morning of 21st December 1978, five years almost to the day of Carrero Blanco’s assassination in Madrid, Argala left his home in the Basque coastal town of Angelu (Anglet in the French language) and climbed into his car. As he turned the ignition a massive bomb exploded tearing the car apart. Argala was killed instantly. He was 29 years of age. The bomb attack was planned to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the death of Carrero Blanco on 20th December. However, Argala was sick that day and did not leave his home.
The assassination squad of eight men included a Spanish marine, a member of the Guardia Civil, two Spanish army officers, and an air force official. To assist in logistics and surveillance they recruited a member of the French secret service (Jean Pierre Cherid), a member of the Argentinian fascist group, Triple A, and an Italian fascist.
The squad was led by a Spanish naval captain, Pedro Martinez. Some years later Martinez organised, under the direction of senior Spanish government ministers, including Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, a group of mercenaries into the GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación). This notorious group undertook a campaign of shootings, bombings and kidnappings against the Basque refugee community living in the northern Basque Country (in the French state).
Between 1983 and 1987 a total of 27 people were killed by the GAL. The purpose of the campaign was to spread terror amongst the refugee community and to put pressure on the French government to dispense with its policy of refusing to extradite ETA suspects to the Spanish state. In 1984, during the height of the GAL operations, the French Secret Service agent Jean Pierre Cherid, who was part of the squad that killed Argala, was himself killed in a premature explosion intended to target an ETA member.
Among the remains found on his body was a telephone list that included members of Spanish Interior Ministry’s Centre of Special Operations, and a Guardia Civil officer. Also found was a Guardia Civil identity card with Cherid’s photograph and a false name. Following his death his wife collected a pension from the Spanish Interior Ministry.
Not satisfied with killing Argala, the Spanish state also sought to prevent his community from paying their respects to a man considered a hero of the anti fascist resistance. Prior to the return of Argala’s remains to his home town of Arrigorriaga, the Guardia Civil surrounded the town and prohibited the funeral procession from entering.
There were tense scenes as local people jostled with police. A popular assembly was called where it was agreed that aside from family and close friends, the remainder of the town would remain indoors. It was reported that as Argala’s coffin entered Arrigorriaga the Basque national flag, the ikurriña, flew at half-mast from the town hall while three Spanish policemen saluted the coffin as it passed.
Telesforo Monzón, a veteran of the Basque nationalist left, who had been exiled for more than 40 years from the time of the Spanish Civil War and was a founding member of Herri Batasuna, described the impact of the death of his close friend and comrade:
“Do not be deceived. The vacuum of Argala we all feel, but it is nothing more than a simple spring exhausted. From there arise many others and the torrent will become overwhelming.”
*There is an interesting footnote related to the deaths of both Argala and Carrero Blanco which is instructive as to the nature of the current Spanish state and the vestiges of fascism that continue to exist within it.
In 2006, the Spanish national court sentenced Arnaldo Otegi, leader of the Basque pro-independence left political party Sortu, to 15 months in prison for what the prosecutor termed “glorifying terrorism”. The charge was pressed following Otegi’s address at a public memorial in 2003 marking the 25th anniversary of Argala’s death. Earlier this year, the same court sentenced 21 year old Cassandra Vera to one year in prison for “glorifying terrorism” after she tweeted such comments as “ETA combined a policy against the use of official vehicles with a space programme” about the assassination of Carrero Blanco.
Not only are both cases gross abuses of the right to freedom of expression, but it is worth considering them in the following context. For almost 80 years the Spanish state maintained a prominent memorial in Madrid’s largest cemetery to members of the Nazi Condor Legion, which was inscribed in Spanish and German - “Here rest German pilots who fell in the fight for a free Spain. German aviators who died for God and for Spain. Present!” The Condor Legion was responsible for the 1937 bombing of the Basque town of Gernika that killed over 1,500 civilians. The memorial was only removed in April 2017 at the request of the German embassy on the 80th anniversary of the bombing.
As one of Ireland’s greatest novelists and a former IRA volunteer Brendan Behan once wrily commented, “the man with the small bomb is a terrorist, the man with the big bomb is a statesman.”
Stewart Reddin is a member of the Gernika 80 Committee and the Stoneybatter & Smithfield People’s History Project. He has contributed articles to two recent publications on Basque history: Massacre in Gasteiz: The Basque Country’s Bloody Sunday and Gernika 80 Then & Now — 80 Years of Basque-Irish anti-fascist struggles. Copies of both are still available.
