Julen Madariaga, one of the main founders of the Basque separatist group Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA, Basque Country and Freedom), died on Monday April 5 in Saint-Pée-sur-Nivelle (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), in the French Basque Country , at the age of 88. His last public appearances were in 2014, when he published his memoirs, Egiari zor (“I owe to the truth”, ed. Erein, untranslated), in which he returned to the origins of ETA, as a movement of armed struggle against Francoism, and addressed its gradual break with the strategy employed by the group terrorist in the mid-1990s.
Born October 11, 1932 in Bilbao, this son of an activist from the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) was immersed in politics very early on. He spent part of his childhood in Chile, where his family had gone into exile during the civil war (1936-1939), before returning in 1942 to the Basque Country. During his law studies at the University of Deusto, in Bilbao, and before taking his doctorate in Cambridge (England), in 1952 he founded the underground organization Ekin, with other young nationalist academics, with the aim of to defend the Basque language and popular culture under the Franco dictatorship.
First created as a sort of “youth” branch of the PNV, Ekin subsequently distinguished himself, deeming his opposition to Francoism to be too timid. In 1959, several of its members, including Julen Madariaga, founded the ETA, whose first violent action took place in 1961, with the attack on a convoy of former Franco soldiers celebrating the twenty-five years of the coup d ‘ State of 1936. It is the beginning of forty years of terrorist actions making more than 800 dead and tens of thousands of wounded in Spain, until the definitive end of the armed actions of the ETA, in 2011, and its dissolution, in 2018. It is also the first arrest of Julen Madariaga, who therefore leads his clandestine struggle between Spain and France.
Imprisoned in France
Despite the advent of democracy, after the death of Franco in 1975, the amnesty law of 1977 and the approval of the Constitution of 1978, Julen Madariaga maintains radical postulates within ETA. He contributed to the creation of his political showcase, Herri Batasuna, in 1978, and then considered the armed struggle as ” absolutely necessary “, to obtain self-determination and independence for the Basque Country.
It was only after the failure of conversations in Algiers, between the Spanish government and ETA, in 1989, when he himself found himself imprisoned in France, sentenced to four years in prison for collaboration with ETA, that it begins to distance itself from the strategy of the terrorist organization. In 1993, back in Bilbao, where he worked as a lawyer, he decided to give up arms.
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