Assassination Week #1: How ETA Launched Spain's First Astronaut

It's great because when we first thought of Assassination Week, we're like, how are we going to fill five episodes there? And then there's like so many more assassinations happened there were there were to the next day. Yeah, yeah, we've we've decided to stop imagining things into the ether and yeah, and so maybe Assassination Month. It's me who knows. Hey, well, here's the thing. If if people keep getting assassinated, we will do more assassination episodes. That is the way it works. Yep.

That's that is sadly part of our job. So we've already done one. I guess we did. We did shinzo Ab a little bit, but we're coming back to him. Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna do. We're gonna later because we have a lot more context information about the assassination now, but that that is later this week. So we have we have five episodes all about assassinations, most of which have happened or tried to happen this year. Most most of these are gonna be pretty pretty topical. Yeah, mine

is not so well. I mean, look, we got we gotta we we we we got, we got, we got to start with the historical assassination. We can't we we can't completely have it be just randomly jumping back and forward between times. There has to be some kind of logic. Well, the assassination is a logic. But yeah, today we're talking about Eta Basque nationalist leftist group and more specifically, I guess they're Operation Agro, the killing of Luis Carrero Blanco

in Spain in nineteen seventy three. It's like, obviously not very very current. It's often pointed to is like a very influential assassination, right, one that made a difference and made a change. Often it's called the only thing that ever did to advance the cause of Spanish democracy, which I think, like this is not and I'm sorry if you think that they're like based leftist terrorists. This is not not a generally as as an organization. We don't

like people who murder journalists. That's one of us dances. And so there's going to be a little bit of context around this that we need to give first. So maybe if we kick off with who they are and then we can talk about that assassination in particular. How familiar folks do we think with with Eta? What do

people know about him in US? Not at all? Yeah, people all eat Okay, I think well they're they're I think they're famous for this asascination and for having literally the worst outfits I've ever seen in my entire that that that the combination of like the face mask in the beret is like one of the most unfortunate things I've ever seen. It is hideous. It is you you've got just just wear the mask. It's cooler a batch. It's awful, truly dogshit. Okay, Chris, come in with the

fashion police early on. I say, where what you want. I think you will look great and really alienating ski mask and beret audience right at the start. So if you've if you've managed to, you know, stick around through that hate speech. We're going to talk about eta. They do, Yeah, they do like to wear a ski mask. It's part of an esthetic, isn't it though, Like that's an aesthetic

of like I guess eighties terrorism. That is like like woodland pattern kind of DPU camoufly, dBm camouflage, a cheap black schemask, balaclava and a berry like sometimes you can pick two of those things. But it's definitely like a vibe from that time period. M I wonder, I wonder why none of these groups worked. It must have nothing to do with the fashion, to be fair, the Zapatista's

big scheme mask. Maybe it's the bubble. Maybe the bubble is what sets then Yeah, no, it's it's it's the fact that yet you don't wear the barret on the scheme mask necess because they just wear the masks. Yeah, okay, Yeah, I think we're we're united, and I believe that the Zapatistas look cool and in many ways are cool. In fact, we're not talking about them today, we're talking about it. So it's an acronym, right, Um, it's an acronym in Scara or Basque. I don't I don't speak Basque. It's

a very hard language for me to learn. At least I'm not going to say it's a hard language too length. I think it depends on who you are, but it is and that I have historically struggled with understanding. It does have a generous smattering of xs, and so you know, if you're seeing it out there, good luck to you. I will try and pronounce things as respectfully as I can. I spent a lot of time in the Basque country by Graceeing. I really really love bast people. They're very nice.

I enjoy their food and their cider and their countryside. But today we're talking about this group Escot. It stands for you scadi to askatasuna, which means like Basque homeland and liberty, which they were going to call it ata, but in certain backdown dialects that means duck, so they moved away from that. That would have been so much funnier write you've been ducked, but they didn't do that.

They right from the get go they were about like like this dual process right of politics and political violence. Their slogan means keep up on both sides, and their logo is like a snake wrapped around the acts. The snake is politics the actors access I guess political violence, terrorism,

whatever you want to call it. And over the years of action, they killed people so that they were pretty serious terrorist group, right, Like I can't I don't know how many people the ira A killed, but I'm thinking of groups in there. I don't think it would be that many killed. Like I think they killed like over a thousand. Okay, Well, I mean I said, like the entire troubles killed thirty so it's like a not in

significant fraction of that. Yeah, I mean the British government did a decent amount of that and definitely yeah, but like it's a not in significant fraction of the total number of people who died in the troubles, So they're not like nothing, no, but like it's only up there. And look, this is much of a similar thing as we're going to see right where the Spanish state killed a lot of people too, and sort of armed groups

acting in sort of coalition with the Spanish state. It's the safest way to say that, but certainly with the complicity of the Spanish state played a large part in this, this dirty war that ETA conducted with the Spanish state. Right, and to understand them, you have to understand a little bit about Basque nationalism, early Basque nationalism. We we can like find the guy who really constructs the idea of

a Basque nation, right, and Sabina is the guy. Um he takes what is like a language, it's a very old language, right, predates Latin and places where that language is spoken, and takes it from like these are the areas where this language is spoken to, like this is our nation. And all nations are created, right, Like nations don't come from the primordial soup, Like we don't evolve

into one nation or another an abrogation. Yeah yeah, yeah, they they're constructed by like entrepreneurs identity, which war leads to some kind of false consciousness, one might say, to maybe distract people from other things. But that's the right Zapatistas watches, that's the yeah, yeah, we're coming for you

with a work mob. We're going to cancel you. Nations begin to exist when religion losers a claim on university nandas in the speed and we don't need to go into the history of nationalism particularly, it's important people to know where the Basque land is. So the Basque Land is in the northwest of Spain and the southwest of France. Right, it's these provinces where historically they're mountainous provinces. People there

were often shepherds. You'll often find Basque people in the United States like growing wine or doing cheap herding, and that's their sort of historical images themselves. And they speak this Basque language. Right. So ETA come onto the scene as a Basque nationalist leftist group, Like they sort of have some elements of Marxism, but they're obviously like nationalist. Um. They they center, they don't center Catholicism, which is what

previous Basque nationalisms have done. Right, Previous Basque nationalisms have been elite constructs that centered language, poetry and the Catholic identity. Don't do that. They have this that's where they're slightly better. Yeah, yeah, right there. They're better than like the Carlists, who are like things went wrong when Spain moved away from this line of royal secession and we need to go back to that and like extreme religious totalitarianism and a monarchy.

Like they're better than that. I feel pretty comfortable saying that. And they've done some cool stuff that they used to kidnap bosses who refused to negotiate with striking workers, which like I know, watch out rail rail company owners. But they they definitely have like a leftist lean, right, they have this sort of pan third world is idea, this pan sort of colonized people idea. They begin assassinating people when they take revenge for this guy who's called Chabby

at stabata Um. You can look at that name if you want to see some ex is in the name. But they they kill the local chief of police. Right. What happened is Barrietta, and this was a guy we're killed by a policeman. The police stop them at a roadblock, they run away the police, the police shoot them. In response, they kidnapped the local chief of police who has probably been torturing people. Right like that, you have to understand that all this is happening in the context of a

Spanish state, which is extremely violent and repressive. And they kill this guy right with this Franco right, yes, no so,

but they begin under Franco. Right, so they and their support probably peaks under Franco, right, like they What what we're going to see is actually they are somewhat integral to not bringing down the Franco regime, and in a sense, Spain never does bring down the Franco regime, right and I want to get into that a little bit, but in destabilizing the Franco regime, and they certainly there was more support for this kind of political violence when the

state is so obviously like undemocratic, unjust and incredibly violent towards people, right, so they when they're killing members as a guard Seville, these are people who are torturing prisoners, right A. Prisoners pretty often when they're captured, turn up tortured in court, like very obviously that they have been victims of beatings and physical violence, right, A lot of things you'll see. They also kidnapped this guy, forget it.

He's one of the founders of Vox, and they kept him in a seller for months and months and months and months. They like, I don't I don't like Vox, but they also don't like lucking people and sellers, So two things can be bad. And Vox is a right wing populist Spanish party, if people aren't familiar. They also did a lot of extortion. They also did a lot of extorting local businesses, right they called it the Revolutionary tax. So they got into some sort of more classic kind

of organized crime stuff there. And but the assassination we want to talk about today is so the way they do this is they rent this flat right there, that's an apartment for American listeners. And they rent this flat claimed to be students, like sculpting students, right, like they were art students, were into sculpture. That's that's why we're covered in dust every day and we and we wear

these overrules. And for five months they spend every day digging a tunnel underneath the road by their flat, right, and in that tunnel they packs of explosive. And what they're doing there is they're waiting for this guy, Luis Carrero Blanco to come in his car, which he travels in every day, right, and they're gonna explode that explosive and they're going to kill him. The reason they want to kill him is because they say that he is the the best example of pure fascism. Right. He's a

former admiral, he's Spain's sort of prime minister. He's Franco's chosen successor, right, so he's going to take over from Franco. And so by killing him, they're able to destabilize the whole Franco Regimer. Franco cries in public when he finds out cal Blanco is dead, and so spoiler alert, career Blanco is extremely dead. The way they did this is they dressed up as electricians, which is also a lot of dressing up in this which is kind of fun.

And they painted a little line on a wall to be like, Okay, when the car gets to here, we explode it. So the car gets to there, they explode it. They launched this car over a church and it lands on the second floor terraces on the other side. Sometimes this is called like the Basque Space program or Luis Carrero Blanco is referred to as Spain's first astronaut. Yeah, you can find a picture of it. It is his

hysterical the core like it's just it just goes. So yeah, it's it's periodically in Spain, like someone will be prosecuted for making this joke. This Spain's first astronaut joke. And so it happened someone pretty recently and she had really made it a thing of making jokes. Actually, I think his I think it's his grandchildren have noted that it's a problematic restriction of free speech that the people keep

getting prosecuted for this. And the court recently found that they weren't mocking his family or his memory, but they were just pointing the objectively funny way in which he died, which, you know, great for the court to agree that it was objectively funny that a terrible fucking person died by being blown literally sky high, and it's his driver and his bodyguard were also killed. Shouldn't be a bodyguard for a piece of shit. But they THETA guys had disguised

themselves of electricans. After the bomb went off, they ran around shouting, Oh no, we've hit a gas pipe, like

there's been a gas explosion. Every everybody clear out. YEA was yeah, so pretty pretty entertaining stuff, acting as their side passion, I guess, and and like the reason they did if they did a pressor not longer afterwards, wearing their outfits, which some of you may find offensive, and they they cited like his irreplaceable place in the hierarchy right and him being this they called him a pure

Franco list and oddly like ETA were not. At this point, they were less unpopular than they became later because they weren't doing quite as much extortion and they hadn't been engaging in quite as many murders of journalists, right and and you used to see this. I'll get to that later. Actually, they got grudging praise from almost everyone for doing this, right and because it really does destabilize and kind of

keep their legs out from under the Franco regime. And it makes Franco cry, which I think is a laudable goal, like it's good to Franco cry Franco crime or so they well it kind of it kind of it kind of astomizes the Franco a state, right between people who are like this bunker tendency who want to go hardcore and crack down, and those who are like, we don't have the ability to crack down, like we'll lose all popular support if we do that, and it really sort

of vaporizes the consensus for what to do after Franco dies, which he does a few years later. I want to point out that people will you'll read these articles on like the popular news websites or like you know, like hot take websites where they're like, oh, this carbon launched Spain it's a democracy. I don't do that. I think first of all, the major r with that is the

idea that Spain quote unquote transition to democracy. When you have a pacted transition where the people who did the war crimes in the previous regime specifically not prosecuted an

exempt from prosecution, that's not what democracy looks like. I think the most accurate way of just driving west Spain is is a post dictator like a post dictatorship, and Spain is still there now that we see that with these prosecutions for mocking him, right with the fact that there are people in Spain who are still in prison from mocking the crown, like, that's not what democracies do.

Good thing that could never happen in Britain. Yeah, yeah, okay, you won't find you won't find me defending that either, But we don't. We don't make a big industry of talking about Britain's transition to democracy. Maybe don't talk about transitions at all, given the powerful turf discourse in Britain.

But yeah, I think it's problematic that that folks talk about this like, yeah, it spin his fixed, like Spain has some dark ship that it needs to process like it was not until the middle of the last decade that we started exhuming the graves from the civil war. And that's still highly contentious, right, you still have a

political party that doesn't want do that. Spain is still processing the fact that the Catholic Church took babies away from people who had considered to be leftist and gave them to people who it considered to be more appropriate to raise them. It's called Nino bios if you want to look it up. Yes, Spain not transitioning to to democracy.

And I want to make like that very clear. Some of the other ship that Etta does is really this is where they start to lose any any claim to being like a liberation movement, right Like they bombed anpair Core that's like bombing a target for American folks in Barcelona and they killed twenty one people. Now I will say this isn't this is exemplary bad policing. They called the cops and we're like, hey, we've put a bomb Underneas the supermarket. You will ought to clear it out.

And the cops were like, I can't tell if that's a real threat or not. And as a result, did do anything and as a result the bomb went off. I think he's a supermarket and twenty one people died. Right, They also did a newspaper in Catalonia beforehand. Reporters Without Borders still for a long time classified Spain as a place that was hostile to journalists because of the attacks

on journalists by Etta. Right. Also, the state isn't hostile to journalism, but I want to point out that they killed journalists, they killed university professors who disagreed with them, they killed local counselors, and it was some of these, like these very unpopular murders which really sort of strip support from them. And one thing that the Spanish state did.

A couple of things the Spanish state did that really were extremely repressive against Etta was they would move Basque prisoners out of the Basque homeland and sort of hold them thousands of miles away from their families, like in the Canary Islands and ship like they're probably closer to Africa than you are to to your your home country when they do that, right, and you would often see I don't know if maybe you guys have seen this. It's a white flag. It's got an outline of the basquetland.

It's got an arrow and it says aria, have you seen that like protests? Now if you if you've been at the protests, I is that like you know, in like the early two thousands in Europe, you would see that flag a lot. It just means Basque prisoners to the Basque homeland. Like a lot of people got behind that who might not have got behind other things that ETA did, right, but it does seem deeply inhumane to move these people so far away from their families. It's

sort of an extra punishment. The Spanish state also had this thing called gal gal Is groupo anti terroristadi li braction so I guess like anti terrorists liberation group. And these were desquads right, These were discord dated and inverted by the police. Etta enjoyed like a safe space in France, I guess, or like at freedom for prosecution. Certainly under Franco. France was like, you know what, Franco really sucks, So you guys go ahead and send it. Do your terrorism

about a clauvist. I'm sure the French also objected to their beret style, but this is this same space. It's basically what they said, Yeah, yeah, this is like a whole thing with Midterrand in France in the seventies, like France kind of became this weird like like they basically had this, they had this open policy. Were like there was a bunch of well, they're there're a bunch of people in Italy who got like falsely accused of like being the Red Brigades. What's that guy's name, the guy

negri An Toto who's like a kind of famous. This theory kind of sucks by the end, but like they arrest him for like being a terrorist, and then he gets himself elected to parliament so we can get parliamentary immunity, and then flees the country to France. Yea, yeah, this was a weird time. Was in Carlos Jackal also in Paris for a while. Yeah, yeah, you love it, france open door policy to terrorists, Like this is this is this is the only cool thing France has done since

Like yeah, yeah, you're not wrong. They invented parkour. When was that, Oh that was like in the resident xt Okay, there you go. Okay, so the second cool thing, you're going to hand that to them? Yeah, they'll tend that to the entire country of Reds. Yeah, maybe not actually, given their treatment of migrant deaspirts in recent years. And sometimes the firefighters will go out and beat the ship into the police. That's true. Do you think we all have to give that to them? I wanted to maybe

end with this quote from Supercomman Anti Marcos. So we've talked a little bit about So this is from a piece code I shipped upon this, I shipped upon the Revolutionary Vanguards of the Earth. Yeah, it's something. Yeah. All the titles are like having problems translating total in bundo, which is like yeah, if you I couldn't find it written in the original Spanish. Maybe that's just because I was googling wrong and I didn't put a lot of

time in it. But I found so many of the Zapatist text of preserves better in these weird English translations. And I don't know if they're written in English, it's supposed to be posible. They're written in English the first time. I don't. I don't think this one. I think I think these. I think this particular one is a translation. Okay, but yeah, yeah, yeah, I've tried to find in Spanish. Actually, But so I'm just going to go with a translation. I think it's probably from lib Calm or a similar

website with like aging red and black asthetic vibes. But I love those websites, so it's had a bit on I hope you'll enjoy it. We don't see why we should have like the ETA or kind of like reaching out in solidarity and the Zapatis just has previously been like Now, dude, we are not the same. You're not just like ascetic society. We are not the same people. We don't see why we would ask you what we should do or how we should do it. What are

you going to teach us to kill? You a list who speak badly about the struggle to justify the death of children for the reason of the cause. We don't need or want your support or solidarity. We already have the support and solidarity of many people in Mexico and the world. Our struggle has a code of honor inherited from our guerrilla ancestors, and it contains, among other things, respect of civilian lives, even though they may occupy government positions that oppress us. We don't use crime to get

resources for ourselves. We don't rob, not even a snack store. We don't respond to words with fire, even though many hurt us or lie to us. One could think that to renounce these traditionally revolutionary methods is renouncing the advancements of our struggle. But in the faint light of our history, it seems that we have advanced more than those who resort to such arguments. Like, I deeply enjoy this critique,

you can look it up. Was big on killing people who are tangently related to the regime in any way, which I don't agree with. We should also add that they more or less definitively stopped doing stuff in eighteen and that they had a press conference, and in their press conference, actually Arenaldo Teggi, who was a former member, said that they wanted to express a sorry for the pain and suffering other people have endured. He goes on, like, we feel their pain, and that sincere feeling leads us

to affirm that it should never have happened. Sure, buddy, you want to say sorry because you did terrorism. But I do think that, like we should, we're talking about assassination. Is gonna be talking about assassinations a week. There are ways to do leftist political struggle that are not killing random civilians and their friends and family members and bombing supermarkets,

and those are the better ways. But making Franco cries good sending Franco's successor into near Earth orbit is pretty funny. So we we enjoyed that one at least, if not, I think it is worth pointing out, like we weighed this pretty obvious by by that line. But it does not get a free space, a free bask homeland. The Zappatistas have actually taken and still controlled territory, a thing that none of these weird thrilla groups ever pulled off.

So you know, yeah, they don't even get majority support really at any point. Like occasionally there will be people who are like, yeah, you know what, Like I agree with some of what they say, but their tactics are deeply flawed. You know, these keeping people, like torturing people. That kind of thing in the context of the dirty war with the state is important. But yeah, they don't succeed, right, And I don't think you do succeed by by extorting

the people you're claiming to liberate. That generally doesn't work well. So up the Zappatistas, I guess, Yeah, that seems like a good place to end. Yep, cool, yeah, this is this has what may could happen here and join us tomorrow from more assassinations and also the day after that, the day after that and the day after that. Yep, don't wait, m it could happen here as a production

of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could Happen here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.