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A bigger blow long-term may have been the Sept. 13 arrests in Spain — on orders of the country's best-known judge, Baltasar Garzòn — of 20 people belonging to the pro-independence group Ekin. Spanish police allege some of its members are top ETA strategists and fund raisers. Eighteen of those arrested have been charged with belonging to an illegal organization.
Meanwhile, the government in Madrid is in the process of toughening its antiterrorism measures. Justice Minister Angel Acebes plans a new law aimed at the youths ETA uses for lower-level attacks, what in the Basque language is called kale borroka, or street violence. This occurs almost daily in the Basque region, with masked youths hurling fire bombs and smashing shop windows. Under the projected law minors aged 14 to 18 could be held in internment centers for up to 10 years. Other proposals would make it a crime to justify terrorism or to humiliate its victims.
But the idea that the government can fight ETA's fire with some of its own is not convincing to many opponents of terrorism, particularly within the Basque region. Xabier Arzalluz is president of the nonviolent Basque Nationalist Party, a former ally of the Popular Party in the Madrid parliament. He and Aznar are now bitter enemies because Arzalluz favors dialogue with ETA's political representatives. History shows, said Arzalluz after Arregui's arrest in France, that captured ETA leaders are promptly replaced by someone picked beforehand for such an eventuality.
ETA also has a deep well of recruits among the region's high number of unemployed youths. It was probably not by chance that of the four "commandos" blown up by their own bomb in Bilbao, only one was a veteran; the others were young cachorros, or puppies, in their early 20s, learning the terrorist trade. Before they got that far, it is likely they would have been educated in kale borroka.
A young Spaniard who went to university in Bilbao and has lived there for seven years says he can understand the frustration of many Basques. He notes that unemployment is as high as 40% in some areas, adding, "I think we haven't really respected their culture, historically and even today." A 24-year-old economist in an office in Bilbao says he abhors violence, but most of his young Basque friends think "the solution is to talk, as Tony Blair did with the I.R.A." He admits: "It's very difficult to sit down and talk with an assassin, but I think this is the only solution."
The Madrid government insists that talking with ETA's representatives would be unacceptably repugnant — what Albert Camus called "siding with the pestilence." Faced with such obduracy, ETA has little trouble sending, if not a veteran, then a cachorro to put a bullet into the head of a man who has just kissed his wife and children and is heading for a day at the office. A stranger in the street.