History of the Basque Country

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The history of the Basque Country covers the period from the settlement of the Vasconic tribes at the northeastern end of the Cantabrian strip down to the modern post-industrial society of our own day. The article takes a broad conception of the Basque Country, as the territory in which Basque has been spoken: in the French Basque Country (Lower Navarre, Labourd and Soule) and in northern Spain (Álava, Gipuzkoa, Biscay and Navarre).

Some hypotheses suggest that the Basques have inhabited the area they occupy today since the Neolithic. As in every case where origins go back to times for which there are no records, there are numerous hypotheses about their origin, and to date none of them is conclusive or fully proven.

The fact that they possess an isolated language, unrelated to its neighbors and apparently unrelated to those that reached Europe with the Indo-European migrations, has turned the search for their origin, for that of the language and for the cultural and characteristic facts that may define them as a "people," into a challenge for many scholars, and has given rise to far more theses than is usual, many of them without any scientific rigor and others based on different evidence and finds.

Some wish to see in their language, Basque, the common thread that leads back to their origins and that, through its modifications and influences, shapes their relationship with other peoples and cultures which, over time, have passed through their lands, at times even replacing their language in different historical periods in some of the territories they have occupied.

Origin of the Basques

Main article: Origin of the Basques

The origin of the Basques remains the source of many hypotheses. The Basque language, Euskera, is for some authors the common thread that makes it possible to investigate their origins and that confirms, through its modifications and influences, the relations of the Basques with the peoples who have crossed their lands throughout history.

There are several hypotheses, more or less well founded and worked out, held on this question. Four are principally known:

• First hypothesis: Did the Basques appear with the arrival in Europe of the Cro-Magnon? Under this hypothesis several anthropological studies consider the Basques to be the oldest ethnic group in Europe, and the only one to survive the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. It is assumed that from the post-Neolithic they occupied an area corresponding to one similar to what is known as Euskal Herria (the BAC, Navarre and the French Basque Country). To this end, the studies draw on fields such as paleogenetic and linguistic research, the latter on the etymology of place names and words.

Studies carried out by the French National Center for Scientific Research in 2011 state that the maternal genetic "pool" of the Basque population is similar to that of its European neighbors, but that within haplogroup "H," the predominant line among the Basques, they identified six lines that are specific to the Franco-Cantabrian region, and specifically to the Basque-speaking populations. From this they deduce that the Basques separated from the pan-European gene "pool" 8,000 years ago, before the Indo-European arrival, giving arguments to the hypothesis of the continuity of the present population since Paleolithic and Mesolithic times.

• Second hypothesis: Are the Basques related to the Iberians? This is what the theory of Basque-Iberism defends, asserting that, in one way or another, there is a relationship between the Basque and Iberian languages, so that the Basque language would be the result of an evolution of Iberian or of a language of the same family as Iberian. The first to point out this possibility was Strabo who, in the 1st century BC (that is, when Iberian was still spoken in the Peninsula), stated that the Iberians and the Aquitanians were physically similar and spoke similar languages. In any case this hypothesis is complementary and does not exclude the first.

• Third hypothesis: Did the Basques arrive with the Indo-Europeans? One of the theories about the origin of the Basques is that they arrived in Aquitaine with the Indo-Europeans 7,000 years ago, not reaching the Iberian Peninsula until the 1st century BC.

There are examples of similar events. During the Germanic migrations that swept across Europe after the fall of Rome, almost all the tribes were Indo-European, except the Huns and the Avars.

• Fourth hypothesis: Did the Vascones occupy the present Basque Country in Late Antiquity or in the Early Middle Ages? This hypothesis, or theory of late Vasconization, is defended by scholars such as Arnaud Oihenart, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Manuel Gómez Moreno, Jürgen Untermann, Adolf Schulten and José Antonio Vaca de Osma; they consider that the Vascones occupied the lands of the present Basque Country in the time of the Visigoths. Two of the weightiest authorities in Basque historical linguistics, Luis Michelena and Joaquín Gorrochategui, partly agree with this theory, but add that this Vasconization took place over a substratum that was already Basque; that is, it was an event that unified the Basque tribes of the area, as can be seen from the numerous archaisms retained by the Biscayan dialect.

• Fifth hypothesis: Did Basque come to Spain from France in historical times? This hypothesis is defended by Larry Trask and by the Spanish philologists Francisco Villar Liébana and Blanca M. Prósper, who present it in their book "Vascos, celtas e indoeuropeos. Genes y lenguas" published by the University of Salamanca in 2005, and by Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, who does so in "Historia de las Lenguas de Europa" published in 2008.

Genetic analyses, especially the one promoted by the National Geographic Society with its Genographic Project, may add further elements for discovering the origin of the Basque population. As a greater number of Basques order analyses of their genetic samples, the identity of the Basque branch will become clearer within the context of the global genetic tree of migrations.

Theory of a common genetic origin of Basques, Irish, Welsh, Scots and English

Main article: Vasconic substrate theory

In 2001 a scientific study published by the English television network BBC revealed that Basques and Celts are "genetically blood brothers." This conclusion was reached by a team of researchers at University College London (UCL) who, after analyzing and comparing the genetic patterns of Basques, Celts of Wales and Celts of Ireland, concluded that they are "incredibly similar."

Proposed map of the extent of the Basque substratum.

According to the theory of Professor Stephen Oppenheimer of the University of Oxford, the researcher David Goldstein of University College London and the German linguist Theo Vennemann, the inhabitants of both Ireland and Great Britain (especially those of Wales and Scotland) would have their origin in the Basque Country, and their Basque ancestors would have traveled 16,000 years ago overland northward, crossing the Landes, Aquitaine and Brittany to the British Isles during the Ice Age, a time when the sea level was lower than today and the present British Isles were joined to the European continent, which would have made that migration possible.

Oppenheimer indicated that research was carried out on 10,000 inhabitants of the British Isles, and that between 95% and 58% of the genetic component of these volunteers coincided with that of the Basques, which overturned the theory that the inhabitants of the British Isles were direct genetic descendants of the Celts.

90% of the genetic component of the Irish volunteers corresponded to that of the Basques, 80% of that of the Welsh, and 70% of that of the Scots and English. Thus two thirds of the inhabitants of those islands would share a common origin with the Basques. Later came the invasions of the British Isles by the Vikings and Normans, from whom their present inhabitants, especially the English and part of the Scots, would descend: 5% from the Vikings and 5% from the Normans.

According to Dan Bradley, a geneticist at Trinity College in Dublin, "there is a significant concordance between Irish and Basque genetic origins." In the words of that researcher, "when you look at all these elements together, a picture begins to emerge showing that all along the Atlantic coast of Europe (which includes more or less all the Celtic areas and the Pyrenean zone, including Euskal Herria) there are broad similarities both in the Y chromosome and in mitochondrial DNA and, to a certain extent, also in some blood groups: for example, group O. Among the various mitochondrial DNA haplogroups found in Europe, there would be a link between mtDNA haplogroup H, the Basque language, and a female line whose presence in the Iberian Peninsula and Sardinia would have left traces for some 15,000 years. Because it is constantly repeated, this means it is very unlikely to be an erroneous result, which shows us that there are certain similarities in the area. This requires an explanation, and it is very difficult to discover which is the correct one, because we are looking at the past and cannot go back to it. But there are some ideas. One of them is that long ago, when the Celtic populations of Western Europe arose, perhaps those settlers came from the south of the continent. The other possibility is that, in antiquity, the sea was not seen as an obstacle to communication but as an opportunity. If we look at the southwest of Ireland, its most accessible area by sea is via the southwest of the island of Great Britain, Brittany and the Bay of Biscay."

Antiquity

Main article: Romanization in Vasconia and Aquitania

If the valid hypothesis were that the Basques arrived in Europe with the Cro-Magnon, in prehistoric times a series of tribes speaking languages of a single linguistic family (what has come to be called Proto-Basque) and culturally related to one another would have been established all over Europe. If the valid one were that of the Vasconic expansion in the dark ages, the Basques would not have occupied all of what is today defined as Euskal Herria until the 6th or 5th century BC. The other hypotheses are intermediate. Today, however, it is not known which one is valid.

According to the Roman historians Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Pomponius Mela, Lucius Florus or Silius Italicus, the area was inhabited in pre-Roman times by various tribes whose language and affiliation are unknown to us. Only of the Aquitanians is there evidence that they spoke Basque. The distribution of tribes and the areas occupied by the Varduli, Caristii and Autrigones vary according to each historian. The distribution of Ptolemy, the most complete, was the following:

• Cantabri: he gave this name to the peoples living between the Sella River and the Asón.
• Autrigones, settled between the Asón River and the Nervión River.
• Caristii, settled between the Nervión River and the Deva in present-day Gipuzkoa.
• Varduli, who occupied present-day Gipuzkoa except for the Deva valley and the Bidasoa.
• Vascones, who occupied what is today Navarre, northwestern Aragon and northeastern La Rioja.
• Aquitanians, who lived between the Garonne River and the Pyrenees.
• Berones, who occupied the territory of present-day Rioja Alta, part of Rioja Alavesa and some enclaves in Burgos, western Navarre and northern Soria.

Others place the Cantabri and Vascones as border tribes, and for others only the Varduli lay between the Vascones and the Cantabri. Pliny says that Portus Amanus (the Roman Flaviobriga and present-day Castro-Urdiales) was a Vardulian city, which clearly contradicts Ptolemy's distribution. There are, however, various theories holding that the Vascones spread through the Basque provinces (hence the term vascongados) and that for that reason Basque is spoken there, and that they mixed with the Celts fleeing Roman pressure on the Ebro, creating the dialects of Basque.

The territories of these tribes were politically divided among different judicial conventus of Hispania and Gaul. The Vascones depended administratively on the conventus Caesaraugustanus, whose capital was present-day Zaragoza. The Varduli, Caristii and Autrigones depended on the conventus Cluniensis, whose seat was at Clunia, in the province of Burgos. And the Aquitanians were included in Gaul.

There is no further news of the Varduli, Caristii and Autrigones until, in the 9th century, Castile is mentioned for the first time, formerly called Bardulia.

Sertorian War

The Vasconic territory became deeply involved in the Sertorian War. In 77 BC Sertorius moved to the Ebro valley and set up his headquarters at Osca (present-day Huesca), and that same year, crossing the pass of Le Perthus, came Gnaeus Pompey, sent by Rome, who won the sympathy of many Vascones, especially in the Ebro area. This led nearby cities to take different sides: while Calagurris (present-day Calahorra) remained loyal to Sertorius, Gracurris sided with Rome, the Ebro area being the most convulsed by the clashes between the two sides.

In the winter of 75 BC Pompey founded the city of Pompaelo (present-day Pamplona). Sertorius was treacherously murdered at Osca in 72 BC, [the city] remaining as the last stronghold loyal to the ideal of Sertorius. This siege, conducted by Afranius, Pompey's general, lasted until 67 BC, driving its inhabitants to the extreme of having to resort to eating the corpses.

Roads

Five of the thirty-four roads of the Antonine Itinerary passed through Vasconic territory, the most important being road XXXIV, which linked Asturica (Astorga) with Burdigala (Bordeaux) passing through Velegia, Veleia and Pompaelo (Pamplona), along with the one running down the Ebro valley linking Deobriga with Caesaraugusta (Zaragoza) via Calagurris (Calahorra), Graccurris (Alfaro) and Cascantum (Cascante). Pompaelo was connected with the coast and the Pyrenean passes as well as with the Caesaraugusta road at Graccurris. Several secondary roads linked road XXXIV with the coastal ports of the Cantabrian Sea.

Presence in the Roman army

The presence of Vascones in the Roman army is attested at least since the 1st century BC, in cohorts as well as in the legions and among the praetorians. The existence of cohorts of Vascones is likewise known; the Cohors II Vasconum Civium Romanorum was stationed in Germania. This cohort was later posted to Britannia and, in the year 156, to Mauretania Tingitana. Augustus had a personal guard made up of Vascones and Calagurritan Berones, who were discharged after defeating Mark Antony. The custom of personal guards made up of Hispani was very common among generals, owing to their fides and devotio toward their chief.

Middle Ages

There is almost no historical news of the Vasconic territory (nor of almost the whole Cantabrian coast) after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the invasion of the Germanic peoples.

The fact is that, from being an isolated area within a great empire, the Vascones came to find themselves in the border zone between two warlike neighbors: the Frankish and Visigothic kingdoms. This area became a territory of high strategic value coveted by both contenders.

The rugged Basque territory is ideal for banditry and guerrilla warfare, so it is possible that the Basques survived despite their oppressive neighbors. They simply went into the mountains and waited there until the threat disappeared.

The fall of the Roman Empire gave way to the settlements and later kingdoms of the Visigoths and Franks, and to the establishment in France of the Duchy of Vasconia. This duchy, created by the Frankish kings, occupied Roman Novempopulania, in Gaul, and came to have a certain independence from the Franks when it joined the Duchy of Aquitaine.

In the Peninsula, the Gothic king Leovigild founded Victoriacum, believed to be present-day Bitoriano, a village today belonging to the cuadrilla of Zuia (Álava), in the year 581. The case of Pamplona is a politically controversial subject. Despite its having been an episcopal see of the Visigothic church, active intermittently, and the confirmation of reports of a Visigothic presence in certain periods (Leovigild in 581, the presence of a bishop of Pamplona at the Toledan council of 589, the renewal of the walls by Wamba in 674, etc.), the main necropolis discovered in Pamplona, confusingly called "Visigothic," points to a predominantly Basque-Aquitanian element.

Domuit vascones

Domuit vascones is a Latin expression translated as "he subdued the Vascones." A certain historiography asserts that this phrase was applied to all the Gothic kings in their chronicles, which would mean that in reality they did not manage to subdue the Vascones, but various historians have questioned whether the expression comes from ancient chronicles, since it has not been found in any of them.

According to the historian Armando Besga, the phrase may date from 1931, when Friar Bernardino de Estella wrote in one of the classics of nationalist historiography, the Historia Vasca:

In the Chronicles of the Visigothic kings a constantly repeated phrase is found: Domuit vascones (he subjugated the Vascones). Defeating the Basques was the idea cherished by almost all the Visigothic kings. But that phrase, always repeated when speaking of the same people, clearly indicates that they never managed to subdue the Basque tribes. Recciarius, Euric, Leovigild, Reccared, Gundemar, Sisebut, Suintila and Wamba fought against them, all of whom made attempts on the independence of Euzkadi.

However, those chronicles of the Gothic kings never existed, nor did Isidore of Seville, to whom they are also attributed, ever write those words. As Armando Besga, a doctor of the University of Deusto, sums up, "incredible as it may seem, the truth is that the famous expression domuit vascones does not appear even once in the sources from the period of the Germanic kingdoms, which shows how a part of the history of the Vascones has been made which, moreover, has had a great deal of resonance."

Recently, Miguel Izu has offered another explanation of the origin of this phrase, which he dates to 1877. Francisco Navarro Villoslada, in the introduction to Amaya o los vascos en el siglo VIII, writes:

It is recorded that Recciarius, Euric, Leovigild, Reccared, Gundemar, Sisebut, Suintila, Recceswinth and Wamba subjected the Vascones, a phrase which, constantly repeated over the space of three centuries, comes to mean precisely the opposite of what it sounds like [...] We cannot help marveling that some critics take seriously the phrase domuit vascones, which the Goths had as if on a rubber stamp to add to the name of each new Toledan monarch.

According to Izu, with that Latin locution Navarro Villoslada probably took a literary license to summarize the historical reports on the wars between Goths and Vascones and to reflect his idea, taken from authors such as José de Moret or Fermín Gonzalo Morón, that the Vascones were never subjugated; but the expression was taken as historical fact by later authors and embellished with other equally fictitious data. Fuerista authors such as Arturo Campión, Hermilio de Oloriz, Eugenio Urroz, and later the aforementioned Bernardino de Estella, spread the supposed quotation.

The Islamic invasion

In the 8th century, after the Muslim invasion coming from the south, only the northern coastal strip remained out of its reach owing to its difficult terrain and its scant interest for the conquerors, despite their having subjugated it (Asturias and Cantabria). Little is known of the coastal and western areas that are today Basque during this period.

The Muslims reached what is today Navarre almost immediately after entering the Peninsula, in 714, and that same year Pamplona capitulated by agreement with the attacking forces. The Muslims thus controlled the Pyrenean pass, which they used to launch military expeditions across the Pyrenees.

The first reports of resistance in the area on the edge of the Western and Central Pyrenees date from the period after the Muslim defeat at Poitiers, when we hear of a "Frankish" vanguard (probably Basque-Aquitanian, 734) in possession of Pamplona, as well as of a later attack by Abd al-Malik on the other side of the Pyrenees and his subsequent defeat by its inhabitants.

Roncesvalles

The Iberian Peninsula in the year 750

The Iberian Peninsula in the year 814

Main article: Battle of Roncevaux Pass

In 778, Charlemagne's army suffered a severe setback at Roncesvalles, giving rise to the famous "Song of Roland." Who the attackers were is unknown, and historians work with three hypotheses. The first says a coalition of Vascones and Muslims; the second, a combination of Vascones from both slopes of the Pyrenees; and the third, trans-Pyrenean Vascones unhappy with the strengthening of the Frankish regime in Aquitaine. There are others, such as that they were only Muslims, which is what the French Song of Roland sings.

It is believed that after the aborted taking of Zaragoza, the Emperor, fearing to expose the safety of the Frankish Army, which had reunited after the takings of Pamplona and Barcelona, in its rear, decided then and there to return to France through the area least exposed to an encounter with Cordoban forces from the Levant. After crossing the Pyrenees, the most likely thing, as they had already done elsewhere and would later attempt in that very place, was to establish some garrison in Pamplona as a march or military outpost, to protect the passes and the main pass from then on against Muslim access, or from which to launch another attempt. It would be this "Rearguard" and its noble commander, perhaps the duke on the Breton border, Hruodland, Roland or Roland, precisely because he too was experienced in border areas, who razed Pamplona or were massacred after Roncesvalles, though not necessarily at the pass itself. This would not deter the Franks from occupying the stronghold permanently in future incursions.

The Basque version is as follows:

After the Franks of Charlemagne invaded the north of Spain, they returned to France plundering the Basque Country and burning Pamplona. In response, the Basques intercepted the Frankish army as it was crossing the mountain pass of Roncesvalles. Despite their poor weaponry and the small number of combatants, the Basques destroyed a large part of the Frankish forces.

The Battle of Roncesvalles

All the peoples near the Pyrenees received help from Charlemagne so that they could consolidate themselves, since it was in the Franks' interest that the Christians of the Pyrenees be strong enough to hold the Muslims in check. It seems that the Emperor Charlemagne was offered the personal surrender of the stronghold of Zaragoza, but this was not carried out, and the Emperor interpreted it as treason and arrested the negotiator, one Suleiman, who was the Muslim governor of Barcelona. He then headed back toward Pamplona with both armies. On the way, Suleiman was freed by his sons with their troops, in a swift surprise operation directed at the rearguard of the army, where their father was traveling as a prisoner.

When the Emperor reached Pamplona, hurriedly and fearing more Muslim attacks on his rearguard, he collected the garrison he had left there on his outward journey, wrecked and burned the city, and set off for France. At Roncesvalles, already near France, he was ambushed by a group of Vascones who attacked his rearguard, inflicting serious damage. This skirmish became famous because many French nobles died, among them the famous Roland, Margrave of the Breton March; these nobles were traveling at the rear of Charlemagne's army.

It was the only great defeat Charlemagne suffered in his whole career. The Franks immortalized it in French in the Song of Roland, one of the most important pieces of medieval poetry. Charlemagne personally, however, never suffered defeats, and although his Frankish armies suffered losses on many fronts (Saxony, Denmark, Hungary), in the end his Empire remained intact and grew.

The Reconquista

Main article: Reconquista

When the first revolts of the Cantabrian coast took place around 722 (Battle of Covadonga, expulsion of the governor Munuza), the western peninsular territories were soon incorporated into the Kingdom of Asturias, while the eastern peninsular territories and the continental ones remained semi-autonomous within the Duchy of Vasconia (itself included within the Basque-Aquitanian alliance). After the conquest of Aquitaine by Pepin the Short, Charlemagne went on annexing Pyrenean territories to his incipient empire, which formed part of the Hispanic March.

In the first quarter of the 9th century, Íñigo Arista founded the Kingdom of Pamplona from the Navarrese part of the Hispanic March.

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  The Iberian Peninsula in the year 910
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  The Iberian Peninsula in the year 1000
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  The Iberian Peninsula in the year 1035
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  The Iberian Peninsula in the year 1037
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  The Iberian Peninsula in the year 1150
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  The Iberian Peninsula in the year 1190
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  The Iberian Peninsula in the year 1360
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  The Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century

The Basques took an active part in the Reconquista. The border lands of Álava were occupied, and the kings called on the Basques to settle new territories.

They took part in the Castilian expeditions, and the sailors of the Basque provinces took an active part in the conquest of Andalusia.

Evolution of society

Throughout the Middle Ages a very complex society had been taking shape, in which the feudal lineages had been losing importance in favor of the activities and social sectors linked to the villas. These were urban population centers established by virtue of a settlement charter granted by the King or by the Lord, which set out the rights and duties of their residents, mostly devoted to activities related to trade and industry. The process, which began at the end of the 11th century in Navarre, accelerated in the following centuries until culminating in the last years of the 13th century with the founding of numerous Biscayan villas. Most of the settlement charters were inspired by the municipal fueros of Jaca, of 1063, and of Logroño, granted in 1095. Both, besides guaranteeing freedom of trade within the villa, granted their inhabitants important judicial guarantees that protected them from the arbitrariness of the feudal justice that prevailed in the countryside.

Conflict with the interests of the Parientes Mayores or Ahaide Nagusiak, heads of the old lineages that dominated the rural world, was not long in coming and led to the so-called War of the Bands, the manifestation of a conflict that occurred around the same time (14th and 15th centuries) in other parts of Europe and that merely expressed the tensions that accompanied the birth of the Modern World.

Evolution of the different territories

From the political-institutional point of view, Álava, Gipuzkoa and Biscay, after oscillating throughout the Middle Ages between the Navarrese and Castilian orbits, were integrated into the Crown of Castile at different moments in history, retaining their own laws and institutions. Navarre, for its part, had its own evolution as an independent kingdom, straddling Castile, Aragon and France, but its weakness among such powerful neighbors, especially after the unification of the Crowns of Aragon and Castile under the Catholic Monarchs and the complicated game of international alliances and interests woven by Ferdinand, led to the occupation of the peninsular part of the Kingdom of Navarre by a Castilian army in 1512 and its forced incorporation into Castile. Only the Merindad of Ultrapuertos theoretically remained an independent kingdom, with its capital at Pau, although subject to the Kings of France until a descendant of the last kings of Navarre became Henry IV, King of France and Navarre and founder of the Bourbon Dynasty.

Navarre

Main article: Kingdom of Navarre

In the 9th century the Kingdom of Pamplona arose under the influence of the Frankish kingdom, whose rulers created the Hispanic March, stretching from present-day Navarre to the Mediterranean, as a buffer against the Muslims and as a means of greater influence in the area. Íñigo Arista (816-852) was elected chief (buruzagi) to fight the Franks and was crowned king of Pamplona. This kingdom, later transformed into the Kingdom of Navarre, allied itself with the Muwallad kingdom (converted natives) of the Banu Qasi (descendants of the Hispano-Latin Count Cassius), whose capital was Tudela and which did not depend on Córdoba; they sealed their alliance through cross marriages. The Kingdom of Pamplona extended southward as far as the Ebro River.

In the second half of the 9th century and in the 10th century the Kingdom of Pamplona was established which, like the counties resulting from the division of the Hispanic March and like the Kingdom of Asturias, took shape as an element, sometimes of opposition and sometimes of cooperation with the Islamic zone, installed on the territory of the Visigothic monarchy; Navarrese relations with the Muwallad family of the Banu Qasi were very close in its early days.

There are some works that attempt to approach the daily life of the Basques in the Middle Ages.

Sancho Garcés, together with Ordoño II of León, conquered Nájera, and in 924 his son García Sánchez created the Kingdom of Nájera-Pamplona, carrying out a work of repopulation and of fostering the new lands and the monasteries existing there.

Sancho Garcés II, his successor, and García Sánchez II "the Tremulous" were forced to capitulate before Almanzor and to pay tribute to the Caliphate of Córdoba.

Under Sancho III the Great (1004-1035) the Kingdom of Nájera-Pamplona reached its greatest territorial extent, covering almost the entire northern third of the Peninsula. In the reorganization of the kingdom he is believed to have created the viscounty of Labourd, between 1021 and 1023, with the viscount residing in Bayonne, and that of Baztan around 1025.

Some authors maintain that, on the death of Sancho William, Duke of Vasconia, on October 4, 1032, he extended his authority over the old trans-Pyrenean Vasconia lying between the Pyrenees and the Garonne, as he began to be referred to in his documents. Other authors, such as Armando Besga, hold the opposite view:

To the north, the frontier of the Pamplonese kingdom is clear, the Pyrenees (in case the authority of the Navarrese kings extended as far as the Baztan, which is most likely, but which cannot be proven until 1066), and it did not change. It is not true, despite all the times it has been said, that Sancho III achieved dominion over Gascony (the only Vasconia of the time, that is, the territory between the Pyrenees and the Garonne, in which the population we may consider Basque by its language was only a minority). The Navarrese king merely sought in 1032 to succeed the Duke of Gascony Sancho William, who had died without issue, which sufficed for him to be cited in some documents as reigning in Gascony. But the truth is that the inheritance fell to Odo.

It can be said that Sancho III created the first Hispanic Empire, and he was called Rex Ibericus and Rex Navarrae Hispaniarum.

Before dying (1035) he divided his territories among his sons: his firstborn, García, reigned in Pamplona and inherited some lands in Aragon and Castile; Ferdinand obtained a large part of the County of Castile; Ramiro received lands in Aragon and Navarre, and Gonzalo in Sobrarbe and other distant parts of Aragon. From this division arose the new political structure of the 12th century, with the kingdoms of Navarre, Aragon and Castile.

The Kingdom of Nájera-Pamplona was incorporated into the Aragonese crown between 1076 and 1134, from which it separated in the reign of García Ramírez.

In that of Sancho the Wise (1150-1194) it came to be called the Kingdom of Navarre, and territorial losses continued.

In 1200, under the reign of Sancho the Strong (1194-1234), it lost Álava, Gipuzkoa and the Duranguesado, which were conquered by the Castilian monarch Alfonso VIII, helped by a large part of the lower nobility of Álava (they managed to take Vitoria after a long siege lasting seven months, with an army made up mostly of Alavese) and commanded by the Lord of Biscay. In Gipuzkoa, he negotiated its integration into Castile, taking advantage of the people's disagreements with the nobility (the Castilian king would found numerous villas in compensation), and the Duranguesado, once annexed, was handed over to the Lord of Biscay as a reward for the services rendered at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa.

Navarre, now separated from the other peninsular Basque territories, was forced to direct its policy of expansion toward the north and east, to the French territories of Ultrapuertos and the border strip with Aragon.

The pressure of Castile and Aragon meant that, seeking the survival of the kingdom, on the death of Sancho VII the Strong in 1234 without issue, it entered the orbit of France with the installation of the house of Champagne (1234-1274) and later of the Capetians (1274-1328).

The house of Évreux (1328-1425) inaugurated a period of interesting peninsular and European relations, above all under Charles II. Charles III the Noble (1387-1425) stands out for the material and cultural prosperity that developed; unlike his predecessors, he lived and governed in Navarre, focusing on domestic policy. Laws such as the Privilege of the Union (which ended the war between the burghs of Pamplona) and the General Fuero of Navarre won him the esteem of the Navarrese.

Biscay

Main article: Lordship of Biscay

At the start of the Reconquista, according to the Chronicle of Alfonso III, part of the territories of present-day Biscay came under the influence of the Kingdom of Asturias; these were the areas of Carranza, Sopuerta and west of the Nervión, and had been repopulated with people fleeing the Muslim invasion, whereas in the so-called "core Biscay" no settlements of this kind were recorded. It is not known under what jurisdiction the other Biscayan territories lay. As the Codex of Roda indicates, around 920 there is record of the marriage between a son of a Biscayan count, Count Momo, and the daughter of the king of Pamplona Sancho Garcés I.

After the annexation of the County of Castile by Sancho III the Great (1029), Biscay came under Navarrese influence. In 1040 the Lord of Biscay was Íñigo López Ezquerra, first Lord of Biscay, who governed core Biscay (without the Encartaciones or the Duranguesado). The regicide of Peñalén in 1076 (where the king of Pamplona-Nájera Sancho Garcés IV was murdered) marked a turning point, signaling the disintegration of the Pamplonese kingdom. Íñigo López placed himself under the political influence of the Castilian king Alfonso VI, thus becoming linked to Castile. In gratitude he was named first Lord of Biscay, a title granted on a hereditary basis.

Lope Íñiguez, son of Íñigo López, gathered in his hands the Lordship of Biscay, the Alavese county and the Gipuzkoan tenancy, which he held until 1093. His son, Diego López I, acquired the tenancy of Haro and added the locative Haro to his surname.

In 1135 core Biscay returned to the Navarrese orbit in the context of the wars that arose from the marital breakup of the daughter of Alfonso VI of Castile, Urraca, with the Navarrese king Alfonso I the Battler. The lordship sided with Castile, but the Battler was triumphant in 1124 and it passed under his dominion.

Sancho VII the Strong lost dominion over Biscay in 1180, when it passed definitively to Castile, the Lord of Biscay being Diego López II de Haro, who turned it into a jurisdictional, patrimonial and hereditary lordship.

The Encartaciones remained in the Kingdom of Castile and were incorporated into Biscay in different phases: Santurce and Solajuela in the 11th century, Somorrostro and Carranza in the 12th, Lanestosa in the 13th and Valmaseda in the 14th. The Duranguesado remained in the Kingdom of Navarre until it became Castilian in 1200. Alfonso VIII of Castile ceded it in 1212 to the Lord of Biscay, Diego López II de Haro, as a reward for the services rendered at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa.

Álava

Initially in the Kingdom of Asturias and, in the case of Álava, later in that of León, it was absorbed by the Kingdom of Navarre and, in 1200, became part of the Kingdom of Castile after the conquest of Vitoria by Alfonso VIII, as can be seen in the Castilian records entitled "Narración de la Toma de Vitoria y Guipúzcoa Año 1199." According to these, the taking of Vitoria would have been carried out by a large part of the population that today would form the province of Álava, which would be due to the support of the lower nobility of Álava. The troops were commanded by the Lord of Biscay.

Álava's passage to dependence on the Castilian Crown took place in 1332 with the pact known as the voluntaria entrega (voluntary surrender) made between the Brotherhood of Arriaga and King Alfonso XI of Castile. This pact laid the foundations of the political future of the territory and of its fuero. The Brotherhood submitted 21 petitions to the King, which he accepted. This established a sovereignty shared between the monarch and the lords of the feudal system.

Gipuzkoa

Gipuzkoa, like Álava, became part of the Kingdom of Castile in 1200. In this case the Castilian king used a strategy opposite to the Alavese one and, instead of securing the loyalty of the nobility, secured the loyalty of the population subject to the nobility; hence the Castilian kings created numerous villas (towns where the mayor had civil and criminal jurisdiction). Thus, in just 30 years the kings of Castile created more than four villas.

There is no record of any agreement between the lords of Gipuzkoa and the Castilian king. This matter has been much debated without it being possible to establish it reliably. According to the capitulations of 1200, the Gipuzkoans became vassals of the King of Castile, integrating voluntarily. Another version holds that Gipuzkoa confederated with Castile, so that its inhabitants were not royal vassals.

The sailors of Gipuzkoa and Biscay, joined with their Cantabrian neighbors in the Hermandad de las Marismas, maintained trade relations with Flanders and had constant clashes with the merchants of Bayonne, often leading to looting and armed confrontations. The power of this brotherhood was such that it allowed itself to make pacts with the kings of England.

French Basque Country

The French Basque territories were integrated into the Carolingian County of Gascony in 781 and into the Duchy of Aquitaine in 1063. As part of Aquitaine, they came to depend on the Crown of England in 1152.

Present-day Lower Navarre was handed over to the Kingdom of Navarre in the mid-11th century. This measure was not accepted by the local barons, who remained in rebellion until in 1191 Richard the Lionheart handed it back to the King of Navarre.

Bayonne was dominated by the Normans between 846 and 982.

Early Modern period

Dantzari.

Navarre

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, with the death of Charles III "the Noble," dynastic instability set in with the houses of Foix and Albret. John II of Aragon was king of Navarre until the death of his wife and holder of the crown, Blanche I of Navarre. On her death the throne was disputed between her widower John II and her son Charles of Viana by two Navarrese factions. The Agramontese faction supported John II of Aragon, while the Beaumontese supported the Prince of Viana. Although the latter won, he died in strange circumstances and the throne fell to his sister Eleanor of Foix, while John II, by remarrying, lost his rights to the Navarrese throne. Ferdinand the Catholic (son of John II of Aragon) managed to occupy Navarre militarily, this time with the help of the Beaumontese faction, while, unlike in the previous war, the Agramontese faction supported the monarchs of Navarre, John of Albret and Catherine of Foix.

In 1512 a Castilian army entered Navarre from the west under the command of Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo, 2nd Duke of Alba, and most of the Kingdom of Navarre was invaded militarily. Beforehand, the Aragonese monarch had obtained from Pope Julius II the proclamation of a bull, the Pastor Ille Caelestis, which excommunicated the allies of the French king as enemies of the Holy League. The signing of the Treaty of Blois, by which the Navarrese monarchs sought to secure neutrality in the war between France and Castile, served Ferdinand the Catholic as a pretext to invade Navarre as a supposed ally of the French.

Later, in a second bull, in 1513, called Exigit Contumacium, the house of Albret was dispossessed of its kingdom and the Navarrese subjects were released from their oath of fealty to their monarchs, the kingdom being left at the mercy of whoever took it first.

(...) the aforementioned John and Catherine, excommunicated, anathematized, accursed, authors of schism and heresy, guilty of lèse-majesté against God and of eternal punishment, and deprived and stripped of every royal title, honor and dignity, handing over their kingdoms, dominions and goods to those who have captured or shall capture them, expropriated by a most just and most sacrosanct war, we announce and declare that the title and dignity of Kingdom, not only of the Kingdom of Navarre, Duchies, Counties and the rest of their temporal Dominions but of all their goods snatched from the hands of John and Catherine, which have been or shall in future be taken from them, in accordance with an entirely just right.

According to some historians, such as Arturo Campión, this bull was false, while many other historians maintain the authenticity of the papal bull, such as the Navarrese historian Víctor Pradera in his book "Fernando el Católico y los falsarios de la historia," whose version has since been corroborated by several historians, such as José Mª Lacarra, Boissonade, Jaime del Burgo or Luis Suárez Fernández. Other authors, such as Jon Oria, do not doubt the authenticity of the bulls but argue that they show "signs of manipulation" carried out by the papacy or by Aragon.

The importance of this bull lies in the fact that at the time it was not a "just cause" for war for a king to conquer another Catholic kingdom, but once the bull was promulgated, the monarchs of Navarre were considered "princes," dispossessed of their territories, and their subjects were exempted from obeying them, so that the Castilian king could "justly" take possession of their territories.

In 1513 the Cortes of Navarre, with only the Beaumontese present, named Ferdinand king of Navarre. In 1515 the Cortes of Castile annexed Navarre to the Crown of Castile by the Treaty of Burgos, with a special foral regime. No Navarrese was present at this meeting.

Subsequently, first John of Albret and Henry II of Navarre tried to recover Navarre on three occasions, in 1512, in 1516 and in 1521, when Charles I of Spain was already reigning. On this last occasion the whole kingdom was recovered in a short time, thanks to the general uprising of the Navarrese throughout Navarre. Later, on June 30, 1521, came the Battle of Noáin, where the defeat of the Franco-Navarrese troops decided the fate of Navarre. There were still two pockets of resistance: one at the Battle of Amaiur (1522), where a monolith today commemorates the battle and the end of Navarre's independence, and another, until February 1524, at the castle of Fuenterrabía.

In 1524 peninsular Navarre, while remaining a kingdom, was consolidated within the Crown of Castile. Charles I withdrew definitively from Lower Navarre in 1530, after his incursions into that territory proved fruitless, although no peace treaty was ever signed between Castile and Navarre.

Lower Navarre

The Kingdom of Navarre under the rule of the house of Foix was reduced to the territories north of the Pyrenees (Lower Navarre). In 1594 Henry of Navarre was crowned king of France after his conversion to Catholicism, being the first Bourbon to accede to the French throne (it was then that he spoke the famous phrase Paris is well worth a Mass, emphasizing the motive of his conversion). From Henry IV to Louis XVI the kings of France took the title of King of France and of Navarre.

After the French Revolution the Kingdom of Navarre was dissolved into the French Republic.

The Navarrese lands were thus divided between Spain and France, as they remain today.

The Basque provinces

The Basques of Gipuzkoa, Biscay and Álava, who were already integrated into the Crown of Castile, continued with a broad degree of self-government: the fueros gave each Basque region local laws, taxes and independent courts. These fueros were different for each region. For example, in the Lordship of Biscay they were different for the Encartaciones, the Tierra Llana (which had the so-called fuero of Biscay), the city (Orduña) and the villas (which had their own fueros, that of Bilbao and Bermeo being the Fuero of Logroño). The Biscayans and Gipuzkoans received from the King universal hidalguía, which meant that both were considered hidalgos by virtue of being Biscayan or Gipuzkoan.

Their history is bound up with that of the rest of Spain, and they had an important share in the conquest and settlement of America. The Casa de Contratación preferred ships from the Cantabrian shipyards for the fleets of the Indies, owing to their solidity and good seagoing qualities.

They also took part in almost all the naval actions of the incipient Spanish Navy, such as the expeditions to Italy of the Great Captain, the Battle of Terceira Island, the Invincible Armada, etc.

They collaborated with the troops of Ferdinand the Catholic in the Conquest of Navarre and in the military actions that followed from it.

Toward the end of the 16th century, Basque sailors taught the Dutch the use of the harpoon for whaling.

The French Revolution led Spain into the War of Roussillon or War of the Convention (1793), during which, after some initial Spanish successes in which Roussillon was taken, the French troops under General Dugommier managed to recover Roussillon in the campaigns of 1794 and 1795 after the battles of Le Tech (April 28), Albères (April 30) and Le Boulou (May 1), and penetrated into Catalonia, the Basque provinces and Navarre, going so far as to occupy Miranda de Ebro.

On August 2, 1794, the French troops surrounded the Basque provinces and in 36 hours reached San Sebastián without meeting resistance. Manuel Godoy (Manuel Godoy, Memorias del Príncipe de la Paz) says:

The occupation of San Sebastián was not a feat of arms. Several Gipuzkoan petty politicians allowed themselves to be seduced by General Adrien de Moncey, who promised them to turn the province into an independent Republic. These credulous men... handed the city over to the French...

— Manuel Godoy

Days later the Biscayans and Alavese surrendered en masse, and on August 26 the mayor declared not the promised republic but total submission to France, since when it was demanded, Salbert Pinet, Napoleon's commissioner, ordered the imprisonment of 40 of them.

The signing of the Peace of Basel (July 22, 1795) brought the conflict to an end. It established that, in exchange for the withdrawal of the French troops from the Basque lands, the Island of Santo Domingo was to be handed over, and for the release of the 40 imprisoned Gipuzkoans France was in addition granted certain rights over Andalusian horses and sheep for 5 years.

French Basque Country

The Protestant Reformation was accepted by some of the Basques, supported by Margaret of Angoulême and her daughter Jeanne d'Albret, queens of Lower Navarre. The Basque Huguenot Joannes Leizarraga translated the New Testament in 1571 into the Linguæ Navarrorum, that is, into Basque.

In the 16th century a Basque-speaking bourgeoisie printed books in Basque in Bayonne, almost all on Christian subjects. However, since Protestantism was persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition and, in the northeast, the Protestant Navarrese king converted to Catholicism to become King Henry IV of France, both the Reformation and the publication of Basque texts were short-lived.

Heresies in the 16th century

In the 16th century hunger and misery took hold of the French Basque Country, and a period of persecution of supposed witches also began throughout the territory. The accusations made in the Parlement of Bordeaux led to the sending of the councilor Pierre de Lancre to Labourd. Extracting confessions by torture, he had some 200 women, children and priests burned. Pierre de Lancre was responsible for the witch hunt in Labourd. He thought that women are sinful by nature, and so dangerous that a single judge would never be capable of judging a woman, because men are weak. He said that a court made up of many men would be needed.

However, after overcoming the disasters suffered, in the 17th century a kind of renaissance was experienced. Among other things, Rabelais published his Gargantua and Pantagruel and Bernat Dechepare wrote the first printed text in Basque.

The French Revolution

The self-government of the northern Basque provinces came to an end with the French Revolution, which centralized government and abolished each and every one of the local privileges guaranteed by the Ancien Régime. Some Basques were forced to take counterrevolutionary positions, while others, such as Dominique Joseph Garat, took an active part in the Revolution.

The 19th century

The Napoleonic Invasion of Spain

Main article: Napoleonic Invasion of Spain

Later, when the Napoleonic armies invaded Spain and the Kingdom of Navarre, they met strong resistance almost from the start, although it has been customary to assume the opposite. Because the French entered the territory as allies of the Spanish government, they were well received. The first troops crossed the Bidasoa in the autumn of 1807, theoretically bound for Portugal. After a couple of months the French began to occupy the whole Basque territory, provoking growing distrust. The turning point was the treacherous seizure of the Citadel of Pamplona in February 1808. From that moment, small-scale guerrilla actions against the French began, a pattern of conduct repeated in other Spanish provinces. Guerrilla leaders emerged, such as Gaspar de Jáuregui "the Shepherd," who came to command three thousand men and reached the rank of colonel, and who was joined by the young Zumalacárregui, later one of the leading figures of the Carlist wars. Of the four initial battalions in the war against the Napoleonic Invasion, one was solely Basque.

Later, the guerrilla movement against Napoleon also arose in the Basque Country and Navarre; in Gipuzkoa the figure of the Cura Santa Cruz stands out, and in Navarre that of Francisco Espoz y Mina.

The last part of Spain held by the French was the Basque provinces (see: Battle of Vitoria). The invasion ended on August 31, 1813 with the expulsion of the French from San Sebastián by the allied Anglo-Portuguese army which, as it had done before, proceeded to commit the so-called burning of San Sebastián, the city being sacked by the Anglo-Portuguese troops for three days, the civilian population suffering the consequences of the robberies, murders and rapes committed, and the city then being burned and destroyed. That same day the so-called Battle of San Marcial took place at Irun on the heights of the same name, pitting the Spanish Sixth Army under General Freire against Napoleonic troops under Marshal Soult. After a whole day of bloody fighting the battle ended in victory for Spanish arms. In that battle the two battalions of volunteers of Gipuzkoa distinguished themselves by recovering the area around the hermitage of San Marcial when the enemy was about to gain the counterscarp of those heights and overrun the center of the Sixth Army's deployment. These battalions suffered casualties that reached 50% in some companies.

The Carlist Wars

Main article: Carlism

Political Spain in 1854, after the First Carlist War.

During the several civil wars Spain suffered in the 19th century, the fueros were defended by the traditionalist and nominally absolutist Carlists, while the eventually victorious constitutionalist forces opposed them.

The Carlists claimed the crown of Spain for Carlos, who had promised to defend the Basque and Navarrese foral system.

As a result of the influence of the Catholic Church, and fearing that under the leveling liberal constitution the fueros would be eliminated, the Spanish Basques of the rural areas joined the traditionalist army en masse, which was paid for to a large extent by the governments of the Basque provinces. Thus, in a dialogue in Un Faccioso más y algunos Frailes menos, the author, Benito Pérez Galdós, puts in the mouth of one of his characters:

"....Señor Don Carlos Navarro, our brave friend, arrived the night before last from his excursion through the kingdom of Navarre and through Álava and Biscay. He is a fine fellow. He says that in all that religious country even the stones have hearts to beat for Don Carlos, even the pumpkins will put out hands to grab rifles. The bells there, when they ring for Mass, say «no more Masons» and the day there is war the men of that land will be capable of conquering Europe while the women conquer the rest of Spain... Good, very good... So you wish to see that gentleman? I warn you that he is in hiding...."

On the other hand, the forces of the Isabelline army had vital support in the large cities (such as Bilbao), as well as from the British (whose Irish legion, the "Tercio," was practically annihilated by the Carlists at the Battle of Oriamendi), from the French (with an important Algerian legion) and from Portuguese legions, since these governments supported Isabella against the Carlists.

During the First Carlist War, as the differences between the Apostolic faction (the official faction) and the Navarrese faction (the Basque-based faction) grew among the Carlists, the latter signed an armistice in which the Isabellines promised to maintain the fueros. The Convention of Vergara, signed on August 31, 1839, and staged with the embrace between the generals Espartero, a liberal, and Maroto, a Carlist, before the battalions of both armies, put an end to hostilities. In its Article 1, the Convention literally said: Captain General Don Baldomero Espartero will earnestly recommend to the Government the fulfillment of his offer to commit himself formally to propose to the Cortes the concession or modification of the Fueros.... The rest of the articles regulated the conditions under which the Carlist soldiers could return home and their officers join the liberal army.

Despite such ambiguous wording, so little binding on the commander of the victorious army, on October 25, 1839, the Queen sanctioned a Law whose Article 1 confirmed the Fueros of the Basque Provinces and of Navarre without prejudice to the constitutional unity of the Monarchy. Article 2 committed the Government to hear the representatives of the Provinces before proceeding with the modifications considered necessary. Notwithstanding the threat that such wording might pose to the continuity of the foral system, the dominant elite in the Country (made up of the fuerista liberals who dominated the urban centers and of the agricultural landowners who, despite their conservative ideology, managed to adapt to the end of the Ancien Régime) considered the Fueros confirmed in all their particulars and devoted their best efforts first to delaying and then to preventing negotiations with the Central Government for the planned foral modification. From then on, this law would be called by the representatives of the Provinces the Law Confirming the Fueros.

The rise to power of the Progressives after 1841 brought with it some changes imposed by force, such as the abolition of the internal customs posts and their transfer to the coast, the establishment of courts of first instance and others of lesser importance, such as the designation of the former Corregidor as Gefe Político or Governor. All of them were received with protests but, especially in the case of the transfer of the customs posts, it soon became clear that they were beneficial to the development of commercial and industrial business, above all in Bilbao and San Sebastián.

After the fall of Espartero in 1843 and the rise of the Moderates, the situation improved for the fueristas. All of them being conservatives, it was easy for them to reach a tacit agreement that allowed control of the situation in the Basque Country to fall to the same type of people who now enjoyed power in Madrid, against both the Progressives and the Carlists. This agreement not only allowed the Juntas Generales and the Foral Deputations (the true skeleton of the foral system) to be maintained, but also allowed the Town Councils themselves to continue to be elected in the traditional way, which put all the organs of local and provincial power in the hands of the aforementioned elite. Moreover, and this is an essential element, the maintenance of the foral institutions gave added legitimacy to the exercise of power by that social group in the face of a population that had mostly supported, above all in the countryside, the traditionalist side. When such arguments were not enough to convince their Moderate interlocutors in Madrid, the representatives of the Provinces did not hesitate to invoke a supposed threat of a new Carlist uprising to achieve their aims.

As far as Navarre is concerned, things were cleared up there earlier. Tired of the delaying tactics used by the other provinces, the representatives of the old Kingdom hastened to reach an agreement with the Central Government that took the form of the so-called Ley Paccionada of August 16, 1841. Although the same legal regime that prevailed in the rest of Spain was introduced (thereby losing legislative capacity), a certain financial self-government was maintained.

Throughout the years between 1845 and 1868, then, a strange situation was witnessed as regards the foral system of the three Basque Provinces. The never-realized threat of the modification of the Fueros by the Central Government coexisted with the highest degree of development ever reached by the foral system, especially as regards the Foral Deputations.

As for the economic and social situation, the years before the Third Carlist War saw the first steps on the road to modern industrialization. At the same time as the traditional activities of trade and crafts continued and developed in the cities, the first factories appeared: Santa Ana de Bolueta, on the outskirts of Bilbao, where the first blast furnace for smelting iron ore was installed, although it still ran on charcoal, and the Nuestra Señora del Carmen factory, set up by the Ybarras at the Desierto of Barakaldo, the initial nucleus of what would become Altos Hornos de Vizcaya. In these years, too, the systematic exploitation of the iron ore deposits began, although industrialization would not take off until the last quarter of the century.

After the Glorious Revolution and the fall of Isabella II, the Revolutionary Sexennium began, in which a new Constitution was approved and Amadeo of Savoy was named the new King. Opposed to the monarchy and practically outside the system were, first of all, the Carlists, whose strength had grown in parallel with the clashes between Church and State over the treatment of the religious question in the Constitution. They were divided into two tendencies, one favoring the parliamentary path (the Neo-Catholics led by Cándido Nocedal) and another more inclined to armed insurrection and the abandonment of legal paths. Finally, in the midst of a turbulent political period, it was the latter that prevailed, which would lead to the start of a new Civil War in 1872 that would last until 1876, the Third Carlist War.

The Basque Country after the abolition of the foral system

The Third Carlist War took place mainly in the Basque Country. In the territories occupied by the Carlists, even an embryonic State developed, with its administration, its taxes, its Official Bulletin, etc. As had happened in the First Carlist War, although the countryside was mostly Carlist, the most important population centers (among them the capitals of the territories) remained under the control of the liberals, supported by the bourgeois population and by a significant part of the artisans.

The war ended in 1876 when, with Alfonso XII now on the throne, the reorganized liberal army was able to put an end to the last pockets of Carlist resistance, especially after the bloody Battle of Somorrostro.

Despite the repeated protests of the Basque liberals, who tried to separate the future of the Foral Regime from the Carlist defeat, Cánovas secured the approval of the Law of July 21, 1876, abolishing the Foral Regime, which extended to the Basque Provinces the obligations to pay taxes and to report for the levies and drafts into the Army. The same law authorized the Government to introduce whatever reforms it considered appropriate into the foral system. The resistance to these measures, which went as far as civil disobedience by the Juntas and Foral Deputations, led the Government to dissolve these institutions the following year and to establish in Álava, Gipuzkoa and Biscay the Provincial Deputations, in principle with the same powers as those of any other province.

However, the suppression of the Fueros did not mean absolute equalization with the rest of Spain. Cánovas was perfectly aware that he could not confront definitively the bourgeois sectors of the Basque Provinces, which were an essential part of the support on which the new regime of the Restoration would have to count. Thus, although the relative self-government allowed by the foral system disappeared, the new Deputations were granted the power to negotiate with the State treasury the setting of a quota (cupo), or amount they would have to hand over to the State for the taxes agreed with it. In other words, since the exact value of the wealth of the Provinces was unknown, a global amount was calculated that the Provinces would have to pay in respect of the corresponding taxes. In addition, the State recognized the right of the Deputations to collect and manage their own taxes (mainly indirect taxes designed to benefit investment) in order to meet the payment of the quota. The taxes not covered by the agreement would be collected as in the other provinces.

The first Economic Agreement (Concierto Económico) was approved in 1878, and the quota was calculated on the low side, proceeding by comparison with other provinces whose wealth was assumed to be similar to that of the former foral territories. This, coinciding with the period of great economic growth (the last quarter of the 19th century is the moment when industrialization took off), allowed the Basque Deputations, above all the Biscayan one, to have a mass of resources that made possible their intervention in fields and powers beyond the reach of the Deputations of the common regime.

As if all this were not enough, the power to set taxes to obtain the quota allowed the Deputations of Álava, Gipuzkoa and Biscay to opt for a fiscal policy based on indirect taxes applied to basic necessities and the most consumed products (food, drink, fuel), which fell more heavily on the most disadvantaged social sectors, who saw the prices of basic goods rise considerably. With the revenue thus obtained, the Deputations were able to pursue a policy benefiting the social groups that controlled them, favoring the industrialization process along the way.

After the approval of the Concierto, complaints over the foral abolition were limited to the Carlists and to a minority sector of the bourgeoisie, which, in all the Provinces, continued to call for full foral reinstatement. This is the case of the Euscalerría Society of Bilbao, whose members ranged from a former Deputy General such as Fidel de Sagarmínaga to a businessman such as Ramón de la Sota, who would be so important some years later in the evolution of the Basque Nationalist Party.

The oligarchic sectors that benefited from the Concierto supported the dynastic parties, the Conservative and the Liberal, in the Basque Country. Their only point of disagreement concerned the need to establish a strongly protectionist system that would protect industrialists from foreign competition, an aim they would achieve in 1891. Using various means, ranging from vote-buying to threats of dismissal, they managed to contest the seats of deputies to the Cortes with the Carlists, above all in some districts of Biscay.

In the Basque cities, which were undergoing a significant process of growth fueled by industrialization (especially in Bilbao), the politicized sectors, a minority overall, divided their support among the groups outside the regime: republicans and socialists, who would later be joined by the Basque Nationalist Party.

The Basque countryside, and Navarre as a whole, continued to support the Carlists by a majority; despite having been defeated in the war, they maintained their political presence and won most of the deputies' seats in all the elections.

Industrialization in the Basque Country

The Industrial Revolution had a marked influence on the Basque Country. The richness of its mines and the purity of its ore attracted English investors who first exploited the iron mines to take the ore to England and then set up steelworks on the left bank of the Nervión estuary.

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a great entrepreneurial dynamism arose in Biscay, giving rise to large companies that spread throughout Spain. Names such as Horacio Echevarrieta, Pedro Pascual Gandarias and his son Juan Tomás Gandarias, Urquijo, Durañona, Ybarra, Aguirre, Ampuero... became involved in industries of every kind, investing in mines, steel, shipping companies, capital goods, explosives, urban development, energy production, railroads, the financial sector... these families settled in the Neguri district of Getxo coming to control, in the 1930s, three quarters of the steel and half of the iron produced in Spain.

As an example of the entrepreneurial dynamism of the Biscayan plutocracy, it may be noted that in 1921 four members of the Ybarra family held 46 seats on various boards of directors of the most important Spanish companies, among them Altos Hornos de Vizcaya, Sociedad Española de Construcción Naval, Compañía Marítima del Nervión, Sociedad Española de Minas del Rif, Compañía de los Caminos de Hierro del Norte de España, Hidroeléctrica Española, Babcock & Wilcox and Banco de Vizcaya.

Economic power led to political power, and the families of the Biscayan plutocracy held important and prominent posts in every political sphere, from local to state administration.

The Neguri families

Among the families that made up the core of the Biscayan plutocracy settled in Neguri, the following stand out:

Aguirre

Linked to the development of steel and to finance and insurance. Present in companies such as BBVA and Privanza (Axa Aurora seguros).

Ampuero

A family linked to the Banco Bilbao and to shipping, cement and winery companies, as well as electricity production (Ibardrola).

Aresti

A family linked to paper companies (Papelera Española, Cellophane Española, Unión Resinera and later Scott) and to companies such as Papelera del Cadagua, Compañía del Ferrocarril de Santander a Bilbao, the Sociedad de Plomos y Estaños Laminados and Terrenos de Neguri. They have also had broad representation on the board of BBVA.

Basterra

Indirectly linked to the bank BBVA, and directly to companies such as Viscofan. José María de Basterra was one of the most important architects of Bilbao; his work as diocesan architect in Bilbao and the province of Biscay stands out especially.

Chalbaud

Linked to steel and newspaper publishing. Businessmen stand out such as Pedro Chalbaud Errazquin, co-founder together with Nobel of the Sociedad Española de la Pólvora Dinamítica-Privilegios Nobel. The family lived in the Santa Clara palace, located in Neguri.

Delclaux

Related to the glass sector (Vidrala). Isidoro Delclaux Aróstegui was one of the main promoters of the Biscayan economy.

Echevarrieta

The Echevarrietas have Horacio Echevarrieta Marauri as their main exponent, together with his father Cosme Echevarrieta Lascurain. Very involved in mining and shipbuilding, though with stakes in all kinds of companies, from real estate to air transport (he was one of the founders of Ibaria). In the Echevarrieta y Larrinaga shipyards in Cádiz the submarine E-1, the first modern submarine in history, and the ship Juan Sebastián Elcano were built.

Gandarias

The Gandarias were connected with the mining and metallurgical sector; they founded Altos Hornos de Vizcaya, although they took part in every kind of industry. They managed to control the whole iron chain, from its extraction in the mines to its manufacture, and took part in all the companies and sectors related to it.

Lezama-Leguizamón

A family historically linked to mining, and a surname that gives its name to one of the palaces of Neguri and to an industrial estate.

Lipperheide

Linked mainly to the chemical sector, with companies such as Sefanitro, Petronor, Compañía Española de Plásticos, Española de Zinc and Andaluza de Piritas, among many others. José Lipperheide Henke was born in Germany in 1906 and at 17 moved to Biscay with his family; he was a tireless creator of companies.

Muguruza

A family of merchants that entered the arms industry. It took part in BBVA and in Metrovacesa.

Rotaeche

The Rotaeches took part in the construction of many engineering works in Bilbao and in industries of numerous sectors. They are also linked to the Zubiate Palace and other residential estates.

Sota

Linked to trade, mining and shipping. The shipping company Sota y Aznar and the Compañía Euskalduna de Construcción y Reparación de Buques were theirs. They also took part in founding the Banco del Comercio, the insurance company La Polar and the Compañía Siderúrgica del Mediterráneo. They took part in many other companies.

Ybarra

They took part in numerous industries in every sector: finance, mining, steel, energy, the media... A branch of the family moved to Andalusia, where it also started many businesses and companies.

Zubiría

Tomás de Zubiría e Ybarra was called "the steel count" by Miguel de Unamuno, in reference to his having been made a count for his activity in that sector. The Zubirías took part in the steel, metallurgy and shipbuilding sectors.

The social side

The incipient industry required a great deal of labor. At the end of the 19th century immigration from other parts of Spain was very high, which created a strong cultural contrast.

Until then, people of means who could study had to go to the Castilian universities and usually spoke good Spanish, while those who did not study could not speak it. This meant that speaking Spanish denoted a higher social class and, conversely, not knowing it was synonymous with belonging to the rural world. The immigrants, who came to these lands seeking a living and spoke Spanish, showed the natives that social position was not a matter of language, and they also brought the left-wing ideas that accompanied the birth of the industrial revolution, marking the class struggle and calling for the unity of the proletarians.

The Basque social structure, conservative in character and very attached to tradition and religion, was altered by the incipient ideas brought by the labor movement. In certain places such as Eibar, where a rich industrial activity based on iron had developed since time immemorial, the new ideas that confronted the traditional ones quickly took hold. In others there were strikes and struggles in which the population gradually opened up to the new thinking and became aware of the new society that was emerging; an example is the strike carried out by the Eibar workers of "Esperanza y Unceta" in the autumn of 1913 in Guernica.

Basque nationalism

Main article: Basque nationalism

Basque nationalism was born in Bilbao at the end of the 19th century with Sabino Arana, whose work arose at a moment of crisis in traditional Basque society due, on the one hand, to the abolition of the foral system after the Third Carlist War and, on the other, to the profound socioeconomic transformations brought by industrialization.

These aspects are clear in the very biography of Sabino Arana. His father, the owner of a small shipyard that built wooden ships, had to go into exile at the end of the Third Carlist War for his participation in it on the side of the pretender, and his company was unable to cope with the new situation created by the proliferation of steel-hulled ships. The founder of Basque nationalism was therefore brought up in an environment in which the traumas produced by the reality enveloping the Basque Country in the last quarter of the 19th century were very present.

Numerous authors have pointed out the importance of these facts in the work of Sabino Arana, whose political theory seems to reflect the agonizing sensation of witnessing the disappearance of a world one would wish to preserve.

Alongside these factors, another feature stands out in the work and life of Sabino Arana: religious integrism, the ultimate driving force of his thought, to the point of leading him to positions that would at first make it difficult for his ideas to spread in a society such as that of Bilbao, relatively modern and liberal.

The emphasis Sabino Arana placed on independence, first of Biscay and then of Euzkadi, arose both from the historical fuerismo which, since the 16th century, had justified Basque peculiarities by the idea of original independence in the face of the various invasions of the Peninsula (Roman, Visigothic, Arab), and from the need to separate from a country, Spain, corrupted by being liberal and irreligious:

Biscay dependent on Spain cannot turn to God, cannot be Catholic in practice.

The motto adopted by Sabino Arana (Jaungoikua eta Lagi-zarra, God and the Old Law) served him to articulate his thought. God is the central element of Sabinian thought. Independence becomes necessary to achieve the salvation of Euskeria, and Spain is hated because it corrupts the Basques. The Basque race must not mix with the Spanish in order to safeguard its characteristics as a Christian race, so the Basque language must be used to prevent contagion:

Where the use of Euskera is lost, immorality is gained; blasphemy and the irreligious character and the immoral and criminal customs of the maketo invader take hold in the field of Bizkaya in direct proportion to the conquests made by the Castilian language.

Lagi-zarra means regaining the political independence of territories that are not Spain either by race or by language. For Sabino Arana, race, expressed in surnames, is the element that defines the nation, and language is the barrier against the foreign, the maketo, so that in the Basque Country only the Basque language should be used by the natives of the country:

If we were given the choice between a Bizkaya populated by maketos who spoke only Euzkera and a Bizkaya populated by Bizkaians who spoke only Castilian, we would choose the latter without hesitation, because Bizkaian substance with exotic accidents, which can be eliminated and replaced by natural ones, is preferable to an exotic substance with Bizkaian properties that can never change it.

The religious integrism latent in Arana's political proposals is evident in the Sabinian motto itself, in which the copulative conjunction eta links tradition with God. We find the same symbolism in the design of the ikurriña, devised by Sabino Arana and his brother Luis Arana: the white cross alluding to God is placed above tradition, represented by the green cross of Saint Andrew, and both are superimposed on the red background symbolizing the people.

The founding of the Basque Nationalist Party

After presenting his ideas in public in the so-called Larrazabal Speech in 1893, Sabino Arana began a work of proselytizing and expounding his ideas in several newspapers founded and directed by himself, leading to the creation in 1894 of the Euzkeldun Batzokija, the embryo of the future Basque Nationalist Party, which was constituted as a political and recreational society.

The Basque Nationalist Party was founded in 1895, although at first it had a closed and clandestine character, with radically pro-independence positions that placed it practically outside the legal system. This radicalism would prevent elements other than those of integrist and Carlist origin who had already taken part in the Batzoki from joining the new party. Some years would pass before they were joined by another group of people, from the Euskalerria Society. This society, founded in 1876 to protest against the foral abolition, was led by the shipowner Ramón de la Sota, of liberal and pragmatic thought. The confluence of both sectors from 1898 onward would produce the first electoral successes of nationalism, among which the election of Sabino Arana himself as provincial deputy for Biscay stands out.

The premature death of Sabino Arana in 1903 prevented the autonomist approaches he had outlined in prison the year before from taking hold, and his successors at the head of the Basque Nationalist Party maintained the radical pro-independence tone while the mythification of Sabinian thought began, which would be a significant brake on the party's evolution.

Attempts to build a more modern party, one that would integrate in some way into the system of the Restoration and advocate obtaining more autonomy within the law, ran up against the frontal opposition of the most integrist sectors, led by Sabino's brother, Luis Arana. This would give rise to a series of splits from which the party would not recover until 1930, the year in which the Basque Nationalist Party reached its definitive form, although on its left a secular nationalist party closer to socialist postulates, Basque Nationalist Action, had appeared.

The 20th century

The Republic

Basque political forces during the Republic

1 The anti-republican parties of the right

The most important party was the Traditionalist Communion, the name of the organization that grouped the former Carlists. It was the leading party in Navarre and in Álava and very important in some rural areas of Gipuzkoa and Biscay; it presented itself as a bulwark of counterrevolution and a determined supporter of insurrection against the new regime, for which it had important paramilitary forces, notably the requetés.

Much less important were the monarchists, organized around Renovación Española, led by José Calvo Sotelo, or José María Gil-Robles's Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups. At the beginning of the Republic they tried to occupy the political space of the moderate right, but their efforts were not very successful. Close to them were the independent Catholics, whose main strength was their control of important newspapers, such as José María de Urquijo's La Gaceta del Norte in Bilbao, El Pueblo Vasco in San Sebastián and El Diario de Navarra in Pamplona.

All of them formed an electoral coalition with the PNV for the 1931 elections to the Cortes, and together they promoted the Statute of Estella to achieve religious autonomy. Failure in this undertaking made them turn toward increasingly authoritarian positions opposed to the political autonomy of the Basque Country, from whose project they managed to separate Navarre and almost Álava.

José Antonio Aguirre, leader of the PNV, in 1933.

2 The Nationalist parties

The PNV, Catholic and conservative, was the party with the greatest weight in republican Euskadi. Its strength came not only from its significant electoral backing but from its presence in every sector of society through organizations it created and controlled, such as the women's organization Emakume Abertzale Batza, the Mendigoizale, a youth mountaineering organization that at times functioned as a paramilitary force, the ikastolas, cultural associations, etc., in addition to the close relations it maintained with the nationalist trade union Solidaridad de los Trabajadores Vascos, ELA-STV.

Basque Nationalist Action was a small party, arising from a split on the left of the PNV, nationalist but non-denominational and progressive, a clear supporter of the Republic, which allied itself with the republican-socialist coalition in 1931. It never had much strength.

3 The Republican parties

These were small cadre parties, deeply divided among themselves and with scant presence except in the large cities. Their control of the Management Committees of the Deputations gave them great importance in the statute process. They clashed with the PNV over the religious question, above all during the first republican biennium. Later, some evolved toward positions strongly opposed to autonomy, especially in Navarre, while others did so in the opposite direction.

Indalecio Prieto, leader of the PSOE, in 1931.

4 The Workers' parties

In the workers' sphere, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party was the leading party and the Unión General de Trabajadores the most important trade union, and both organizations were strongly established in Bilbao, the mining and industrial areas, and some Gipuzkoan towns such as San Sebastián, Eibar and Irun. Their most important leader was Indalecio Prieto, and their evolution paralleled that of Spanish socialism as a whole: moderate in the first republican biennium and more radical after the right came to power at the end of 1933. The Revolution of 1934 had some impact in Biscay and Gipuzkoa, and served to bring socialists and communists closer, as a result of which Workers' Alliances were created in Biscay in 1935.

The Communist Party of Spain had its strongest presence in all of Spain in the industrial and mining area of Biscay, where it had been born. Its opposition to the PSOE was radical until 1935, when some Workers' Alliances were created between the two organizations. That same year the Communist Party of Euskadi appeared as an autonomous organization that supported the Statute and proposed the organization of an antifascist front that would also include the nationalists. The following year, in the elections that would give victory to the Popular Front, it ran allied with republicans and socialists and won one deputy for Biscay.

The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo never had much of a foothold in the Basque Country, and its calls for insurrection against the Republic met with no success.

The statute process

When the Republic was established, the autonomy expectations of Catalonia and Euskadi were very different. The Catalan parties had agreed in the Pact of San Sebastián on the start of the statute process, while the refusal of the PNV to take part in it did not allow a similar agreement, owing to a more conservative attitude, dependent on the Church.

The triumph of a right-wing coalition of the PNV, traditionalists and independent Catholics in the elections to the constituent Cortes did not help improve relations with the republican governments, dominated at that time by the left, which explains the governmental reluctance to start the process of Basque autonomy, its leaders (among whom Indalecio Prieto stood out) fearing that the Basque Country would become a "Vaticanist Gibraltar."

As early as 1931 the Society of Basque Studies drafted what would become known as the Statute of Estella, which was presented in the Cortes and rejected on several grounds of unconstitutionality: it had not been submitted to a referendum of the electors and, moreover, it reserved to the Basque Country exclusive relations with the Holy See, with which it intended to have its own Concordat.

After this first failure, a system for drafting the future statute was established: the first draft would be the task of the Management Committees arising from the Deputations, who would then submit it for approval to the Assembly of Basque Municipalities. Once approved by it, it would have to be approved in a referendum by two thirds of the electors (not voters; that is, it had to be approved by more than 67% of the electoral roll), after which the Spanish Cortes would approve it.

The preliminary draft prepared by the Management Committees was put to the vote in the Assembly of Basque Municipalities held in Pamplona on June 19, 1932. 60% of the Navarrese town councils voted against the draft. This meant the definitive break between the PNV and the Traditionalist Communion, which came out against the project.

Referendum on the Statute of Autonomy of November 5, 1933, in Eibar.

With Navarre now out of the project, the referendum on the Statute was held on November 5, 1933, after the fall of Manuel Azaña's government. The results were as follows: in Biscay 88.3% of the electoral roll voted in favor of the Statute, in Gipuzkoa 89.5%, and in Álava only 46.4% (where the Carlists and other right-wing groups had come out against it), which raised the problem of deciding whether, as the law required, two thirds of the Basque electorate could be considered to have voted for the text. Although for the country as a whole there was no doubt, the problem of Álava, together with the scant autonomist will of the Radical and CEDA governments during the biennium they were in power, contributed to freezing the statute process.

Only after the victory of the Popular Front, and after Prieto made some adjustments to the text of the Statute, was it approved by the republican Cortes in October 1936, after the war had begun. The outbreak of the war was precisely what finally decided the Popular Front government, which, to obtain the support of the Basque nationalists, had the Statute rapidly approved and offered a member of the PNV a place in the government, so that Manuel de Irujo became Minister of Justice.

The text of the Basque Statute of 1936 was quite different from the one put to the plebiscite three years earlier: as a result of the agreement between José Antonio Aguirre for the PNV and Indalecio Prieto for the Popular Front, its autonomous powers were smaller than those foreseen in the earlier projects. In any case, despite the provisions of the text, the course of the war and the isolation of the whole Northern Front from the rest of the republican zone forced the Basque Government, constituted under Aguirre's presidency, to take many measures exceeding what was legally foreseen, while the war itself prevented elections to the Basque parliament from being held.

The Basque Government was made up of representatives of all the parties loyal to the Republic: the PNV, PSOE, ANV, Izquierda Republicana, Unión Republicana and the Communist Party of Euskadi, and it remained unchanged until the fall of Biscay to the Francoist troops in 1937.

The government of Euskadi

Main article: Basque Government

When the Basque Government was constituted in October 1936, several months of war had already passed in which the defense of republican legality in the Basque Country had been in the hands of the Defense Juntas controlled by the left-wing parties. From that moment it would be the Government that took charge of organizing the war and life in the territory it controlled: the province of Biscay, Eibar and northern Álava, with a total population of less than 700,000 inhabitants. It was in charge of the police (the Ertzaña) and the army, but also of currency, the mail and even relations with other countries. Regardless of what the letter of the Statute said, the very circumstances of the war forced it to go far beyond the powers foreseen in it.

Given the control exercised by the PNV, there was no attempt at social revolution, unlike what happened in other republican zones, nor were there collectivizations or nationalizations. The expropriations carried out were made with prior compensation, except when those affected had gone over to the side of the "Nationals," such as José Luis Oriol, José María de Urquijo, Manuel Aznar or José María de Areilza. Nor was the Church attacked, and the Clergy continued to carry out their functions normally, even as chaplains of the Basque Army.

Relations between the Basque Government and the Republican government went through some tensions, owing to the misgivings aroused among the Republic's military chiefs by the almost independent action of the Basque Army, which was never integrated into the operations of the Northern Front. The Basque military chiefs, in turn, protested at the lack of air support from the republican command. To all this must be added the communication difficulties caused by the very circumstances of the war and the distrust and disagreements between José Antonio Aguirre and Manuel Azaña.

The Basque Army (which arose from the militarization of the voluntary popular militias and the mobilization of recruits, and which numbered some 40,000 men) was not organized into divisions and brigades, like the republican one, but into battalions directed by the political parties, which led to the absence of a single, coordinated chain of command.

On a not strictly military level, public order was ensured through the creation of the Ertzaña, an autonomous police force under the orders of the Basque Government. As regards control of the economy, although there were no nationalizations, the Boards of Directors of the banks were replaced by others appointed by the Councilor of Finance, banknotes were issued to prevent the hoarding of currency, and gold, jewels and foreign currency were seized with prior compensation. CAMPSA was also taken under control to ensure the supply of fuel.

With the creation of the Territorial Court of Euzkadi and a People's Court for crimes of rebellion and war, situations of covert revenge or massacres disguised as repression of the rebellion, such as occurred in other republican zones, were largely avoided, although it was not always possible to prevent acts of reprisal. The Basque University and a Higher Council of Culture in Euzkadi were also created, whose main objective was the teaching and dissemination of Basque. The advance of the Civil War meant that these institutions had an ephemeral life.

The Civil War

Main article: Spanish Civil War in the Basque Country

See also: Spanish Civil War

After the 1936 uprising of part of the army, supported by the parties of the right and center of the political spectrum, the civil war began, and the Basque and Navarrese territories were divided between the two sides; Álava and Navarre remained attached to the insurgents and Gipuzkoa and Biscay loyal to republican legality, although many of their inhabitants, ideologically attached to Carlist traditionalism and to the monarchy, joined the rebel side, so that there were Basques and Navarrese on both sides of the Civil War, although the majority of the population (Biscay) remained loyal to the Republic.

The rebels expected the PNV, given its conservative and Christian character, to join them, which did not happen, even though this possibility was weighed within the party until the last moment. In Biscay and Gipuzkoa the PNV declared itself in favor of the Republic, while in Navarre and Álava there were conflicting positions, from declarations of neutrality in the conflict to more or less forced adhesions to the uprising, such as the one attributed to Arturo Campión (who at that time did not even hold the leadership of the PNV in Navarre) in the Diario de Navarra after the taking of San Sebastián by the Navarrese columns, or those demanded of Javier de Landaburu in Álava, and there were also positions opposed to the uprising. According to Stanley G. Payne, it was not until August 18, a month after the uprising, that Mola ordered the dissolution of all Basque nationalist bodies.

The main Navarrese leaders of the PNV were shot (Fortunato Aguirre, mayor of Estella) or imprisoned (José Aguerre, president of the NBB) and the PNV's premises were closed; in Estella, on September 25, 1936, the Military Commander Ricardo Sanz de Iturria issued the following proclamation against the Basque culture existing in the town and, in particular, against the PNV and its founder [7]:

"I hereby make known: save for most honorable exceptions in which nationalist elements have enlisted voluntarily, in general the Nationalist Party has looked on with indifference at the very grave moments Spain is going through; (...) Estella is undermined by separatism, fostered and imported by certain of its sons whom everyone knows, so there is no need to name them. Because of them much Spanish blood has been shed in Gipuzkoa and elsewhere, not a little of it the blood of Estella. I therefore make known the following: within forty-eight hours of the publication of this Proclamation, all nationalist elements shall hand over to the Military Command all objects or articles (including clothing) of a separatist character, the books, newspapers, maps and portraits of the man who was called Sabino Arana, as well as busts or figures of him and of other separatist ringleaders. Likewise, whoever possesses them shall hand over the books and objects of every kind of the late Basque school; the documents, objects, insignia and funds of the nationalist societies and, in a word, everything belonging to those societies or related to them. In certain regions of the Basque provinces and in our beloved Navarre the chistu and the corresponding instruments are used for their dances. In the Basque provinces, very well, let them keep their patriarchal customs; in Estella that is an exotic plant, unknown and imported by those we all know of. The "gora euzkadi" is over; we are in times of LONG LIVE SPAIN, and consequently whoever possesses them shall hand over all those instruments within the same period. Likewise, the word "Agur" is prohibited, imported by the separatists in place of the genuinely Spanish "Adiós." (...) LONG LIVE NAVARRE! LONG LIVE SPAIN!"

By the autumn of 1936, 15 Basque priests had been executed by the Nationals for inciting rebellion, and during the first three months of the war, on the republican side, several churches had been looted and destroyed in Biscay and Gipuzkoa, and approximately 50 priests murdered. The PNV, having no organized forces, was unable to stop these atrocities.

The Basque provinces

In Biscay the results of the elections of February 16, 1936 were not accepted by the sectors of the right, which began to carry out various actions aimed at disrupting civil coexistence. It is estimated that there were around 3,200 organized requetés in Biscay, and training in guerrilla tactics was given at Urquiola, with evidence of the stockpiling of weapons days before the military coup of July 18.

July and August 1936

In Biscay there was no uprising, and in Gipuzkoa, after a timid attempt at an uprising, it was put down by the forces of the Popular Front with the significant participation of militiamen from Eibar. In Álava there was no opposition to the rebels. The only notable military action was the Villarreal offensive.

The PNV, which held a doubtful position toward the July uprising, did not make its loyalty to the Republic clear until August. Once the self-government of the 1936 statute had been achieved, the PNV obtained the presidency, the lehendakaritza, of the Basque cabinet, which created the Basque army "Eusko Gudarostea," which depended directly on Aguirre and collaborated with the republican army without integrating into it. Battalions of socialist and anarchist militias, with which it sometimes clashed, also collaborated in the defense of the Basque homeland.

The military forces remained loyal to the Republic. Defense Juntas or Committees were organized by the left-wing parties and trade unions, and on July 26 the PNV decided to join these bodies. On July 23 groups of PNV volunteer guards began to be formed. On July 29 the PNV issued a call for volunteer guards, and on August 5 the Bizcai Buru Batzar organized a parade of PNV militias in Bilbao. Meanwhile, the left-wing parties and organizations coordinated to organize the defense.

From Eibar, cradle of the republic, a battalion of militiamen marched to the defense of San Sebastián, managing to keep the city under republican legality while the soldiers of the city's barracks rose in revolt. The forces sympathetic to the rebels took steps to move to territories under their authority, and those elements that tried to move were arrested and imprisoned.

In Gipuzkoa the garrison troops of San Sebastián rose in revolt, but the uprising was crushed by socialist and anarchist militias, supported by the Civil Guard. The PNV leaders acted as mediators, persuading the rebel chiefs to surrender rather than fight to the death. The streets of San Sebastián and Irun were dominated by socialist and anarchist militias, which arrested and shot non-nationalist Catholics and conservatives. There were massacres in the prisons of Ondarreta (San Sebastián), Guadalupe (Fuenterrabía) and Tolosa. The nationalist militias were unable to prevent these outrages.

In the first week of the rebellion, 8 columns were organized in Navarre, mostly Requeté, with units of Falangists and of the regular army, which advanced toward Gipuzkoa. On August 5, three of them set out to cut off the border with France, with the aim of taking the border posts and thus isolating the Republic from one of its points of communication and entry of supplies. On August 26 they reached the castle of San Marcial.

On July 20 a defensive line was organized at Otxandio, anticipating an attack from Álava, which had been in the hands of the rebels against the Republic from the first moment; they took Legutio, which they then abandoned to dig in at Otxandio. On July 22 Otxandio was bombed, with 58 dead, most of them women and children.

September 1936

On September 2 the Navarre columns took the castle of San Marcial, after receiving reinforcements from the Legion and air support. On the 5th they took Irun, cutting off the border with France. In their retreat, the anarchist militias left Irun almost in ruins.

The other five Navarrese columns occupied San Sebastián on the 13th without meeting resistance. San Sebastián had been evacuated the day before. The Navarrese troops regrouped and advanced toward Biscay, reaching the Deva River on September 22. Up to that point the fighting in Gipuzkoa had been carried out by the revolutionary militias, with very little involvement by those of the PNV.

The insurgent troops advanced, taking Gipuzkoa, and on September 21 entered and established themselves in Elgoibar, on the 22nd entered Vergara and on the 26th Mondragón. Meanwhile, from Azkoitia, along the Irukurutzeta-Karakate ridge, they took this important vantage point over the town of Eibar, Placencia de las Armas falling into rebel hands. From Vergara they climbed via Anguiozar toward Elgueta, the front coming to a halt at the foot of the Intxortas, on the so-called camino de los Toldos, by September 23, 1936. On the Deva side, they advanced along the foothills of Kalamua and took the summits of Akondia and Arrate by September 26.

On September 25 Durango was bombed, leaving 12 dead, and in reprisal 22 prisoners sympathetic to the rebels were shot. That same day and the next, Bilbao was also bombed, with a high number of victims. In reprisal for that action came the assault on the prison ships Altuna-Mendi and Cabo Quilates and the murder of many of the inmates held there. There were also assaults on Bilbao prisons on October 2 and January 4.

On the 29th Mola's troops attacked on the western front of Gipuzkoa, but the militias loyal to the Republic held out.

At the end of September 1936, the Biscayan PNV had increasing doubts about its support for the Republic. The mass murders of September 25 on the prison ships Altuna-Mendi and Cabo Quilates had a negative effect on nationalist morale. The PNV leaders tried, unsuccessfully, to contact British diplomats so that England would support an independent autonomous regime. Aware of the situation, the Republic approved the Basque Statute of Autonomy in Valencia on October 1. Moreover, on September 24 it decided to send the squadron that was blockading the Strait of Gibraltar to the Cantabrian Sea; the squadron entered Bilbao, where it remained for 20 days. In those days a Russian ship with weapons was received in Bilbao, so the Biscayan spirit of resistance was strengthened. On the coast, the Biscayan town of Ondárroa was in rebel hands, the front line running through the Astarrica district and leaving Berriatúa on the republican side.

October 1936

On October 12 Mola ordered the advance to stop, and the front stabilized, with almost all of Gipuzkoa in rebel hands. At the beginning of October the advance was halted. Eibar remained in the republican zone and held its position until its fall in the spring of 1937. In the attack, alongside the rebel troops, the battalions of Navarrese requetés were especially prominent, notably the Tercio de Lacar and the Tercio de Lesaca, which had been joined by Carlist and monarchist supporters from the Gipuzkoan towns. On the side of those loyal to republican legality, the Amuategui Battalion was formed, made up of militiamen of the Popular Front, mostly socialists from Eibar.

From the coast, through the Deva valley, the front line, halted in the autumn of 1936, followed the line of the summits of the Intxortas and Udalaitz, passing through Besaide and Saibi, which became the front line.

The insurgent troops tried several times to break the front at Elgueta, attacking the Intxortas on the so-called camino de los toldos, and were repulsed. Several attacks took place during the winter period along the whole front line and were repulsed by the republican defenders. Notable were those on Mount Saibi, where their ferocity caused many casualties on both sides: while by day, with the help of aviation, the rebels conquered the position, at night it was recovered by the republican defenders.

The defense of the front was entrusted to the different groups of troops loyal to the Republic: the Intxortas were defended by the PNV's gudaris, the Calamua front by the socialist militiamen of the Eibar PSOE, the Udalaitz heights by the trade unionists of the CNT, the Campazar pass by the Proletarian Brothers... and so the defense of the front line was distributed. This organization, very deficient in effectiveness, faced a regular, professionalized army, well trained and with a rigid hierarchy. The loyal side lacked every imaginable supply, in food and quartermaster stores as well as in ammunition and spare parts.

The Tree of Guernica is the symbol of Basque liberties.

The new statute approved in Valencia would become known as the Statute of Elgueta, because it was approved when the rebel troops reached that town. Aguirre was elected lehendakari and took his oath of office on October 7 at the Tree of Guernica. The young gudaris taking part in the ceremony shouted No to the Statute, yes to autonomy. Luis Arana Goiri left the PNV that day as a sign of disagreement, but asked the other members not to do so.

One of the measures taken by the new Basque government was to dissolve all the existing security forces and replace them with the Ertzaina. It managed to improve public order and, with some exceptions, put an end to political executions.

The republican navy, very meager, was reinforced with armed trawlers of the Marina de Guerra Auxiliar de Euzkadi of the Euzko Gudarostea. These were large cod trawlers or smaller fishing boats, fitted out and armed, dependent on the Basque Government. These small ships were the protagonists of the Battle of Cape Machichaco, where they confronted, in conditions of great inferiority, the cruiser Canarias, one of the most important ships of the rebel navy. It should be said that the sister ship of the Canarias, the Baleares, which sank during the conflict, had a crew that was mostly Basque, specifically from Ondárroa.

On October 5 work began on the Iron Ring of Bilbao. Only a month later, the deputy director of the project was arrested and shot for having tried to contact the Nationals. On October 16 the Basque government called up four classes of recruits. In mid-October a ship arrived in Bilbao with airplanes and pilots, cannons, machine guns and other weaponry. And on October 26 Aguirre declared that all Basque forces were under the superior authority of the Defense Council of Euskadi, which he chaired, pointing out that they were independent of the republican Army.

November 1936

On November 7 the General Staff of the Basque Army was created. On November 20 it had 27 infantry battalions (some 25,000 men) without training, forming an army of maneuver, in addition to the 10,000 or 12,000 militia volunteers who were holding the front, which remained very inactive.

The republican government decided that, on November 24, all the troops in the north should be integrated into the Army of the North, under the command of Francisco Llano de la Encomienda, who established his headquarters in Bilbao. This unification was made only on paper, since Aguirre did not accept it. He rejected the system of political commissars and complained that the General Staff of the Army of the North was made up of people with little military training and with communist tendencies. As the rebels were concentrating their effort on Madrid, the republican Government asked the Basques to break the front, so the Villarreal offensive was organized. 29 battalions took part in it, supported by 5 engineer companies, 25 cannons and 8 armored cars. The objective was the taking of Vitoria, cutting the line of communication between Seville and the French border at Irun. The attack was planned along three axes: the first would start from Amurrio and was to occupy Murguía; the second would start from Otxandio with the objective of taking Villarreal de Álava; and the third was to take Arlaban and Izusquiza. With these objectives achieved, the Alavese plain would be at the mercy of the republicans, and with it Vitoria. Meanwhile, the Army of Santander intended to attack Espinosa de los Monteros and Miranda de Ebro. This plan led the Basque Government to cancel the attack on Murguía.

The attack began on November 30 with artillery bombardments preparing the ground for the infantry. The attacking troops managed to surround Villarreal, barely 3 kilometers from the town center. The stronghold was defended by a company of requetés and two mountain battalions, a machine-gun section and a mountain artillery battery of the regular army, with a total of 600 men.

December 1936

On December 1 and 2 the encirclement of Villarreal was maintained, but since the attack on Murguía had been canceled, the defenders were able to keep in contact with their rear, which sent reinforcements. The situation remained the same for several days. On December 10 an attack was made and repulsed, and on the 18th the last attack was launched, which also failed, and the attacking forces withdrew, having suffered some 1,000 dead.

January 1937

In January 1937 Aguirre wrote to Llano that until the Basque Government approves the new organization of all its forces... located in Basque territory, they shall remain under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Basque Government. Llano left Bilbao in February 1937 and settled in Santander.

The Basque nationalist troops were unable to prevent the mass murder of 224 political prisoners in the Larrinaga Prison on January 4, 1937, carried out by a battalion of mutinous socialist militiamen. The massacre was stopped by the troops of the Basque government, saving the lives of more than 100 prisoners. Those responsible were tried, with the result of 6 executions. As a result of this assault, 8 battalions of gudaris were withdrawn from the front to ensure public order in Bilbao.

February 1937

In February 1937, 7 Basque battalions went to support the Asturias front in the attack on Oviedo. On the 27th of that same month, Alejandro Goicoechea, a native of Elorrio and the captain in charge of the defense of Biscay, went over to the rebel troops.

Spring 1937

With the arrival of spring, Mola decided to begin the assault on Biscay with four Navarrese brigades (some 28,000 men), among which were 10 battalions of Basques from Álava and Gipuzkoa, many Navarrese Carlists and troops from the rest of Spain. He began the offensive on March 31 with air support (140 airplanes, of which 65 belonged to the Condor Legion) and artillery support (including 7 Italian batteries).

Plaque "in memory of all those who died in the bombings of Durango 25-9-1936 31-3-1937".

That same day at 8:30 in the morning Durango and Elorrio were bombed, a bombing repeated again at 5:45 in the afternoon. Soon the Nationals entered Eibar, a symbol of socialism and labor, considered the capital and seat of Spanish Marxism, which fell on April 26 after being bombed and set on fire, a fire which, as in the cases of Durango and Guernica, would be blamed on the republicans (although on this occasion there had been some eagerness to prevent the important Eibar arms industry from falling into rebel hands).

On April 26 Guernica suffered a bombing even more brutal than Durango's, a bombing that became famous through the reports of an English journalist and the famous painting that Pablo Picasso made on commission from the republican Government for the International Exposition in Paris, inspired by that barbarity. The bombing of Guernica, carried out by the German air force that was helping Franco, destroyed almost the whole town. Guernica had, initially, a symbolic rather than military importance, since that town is home to the tree that is the symbol of foral liberty, which survived the bombs and in whose shade the Navarrese requetés fighting with the insurgents stood guard, although after the collapse of the front it was the regrouping point for the republican troops.

The soldiers of the rebel side broke through the republican lines at the Zabalandi heights and Tellamendi, defended by the Octubre battalion, which did not withstand the attack of the traditionalists of the 1st Brigade, coming from Otxandio and Aramaio. They spread out over the heights of the Arrazola valley, but the terrain prevented a rapid advance. On April 7, owing to bad weather preventing air support, the offensive was temporarily suspended. On April 13 the Basque army counterattacked and recovered some positions. Soon the formidable Udalaitz would fall; it was defended by the CNT battalions Isaac Puente and Malatesta, which were surprised from the rear and abandoned the position. By the 23rd the whole area had been lost and the Intxortas would have to be abandoned; Elgueta fell on the 24th.

The Tercios of requetés Lacar and Lesaca advanced, taking Eibar, Ermua, Barriz and Zaldivar on April 26. On the other side, between April 5 and 15 there had been fighting on Mount Saibi, which was lost on the 15th, leaving the way open for the Francoists into the Mañaria valley. The Tercio Navarra took Mañaria and Durango on the 27th. Defensive lines were established as they retreated toward Bilbao, but without being effective. The offensive would end by taking Bilbao and its industry, after its defenses were easily overcome, since the rebels had the information about them that Alejandro Goicoechea had passed to the other side.

On May 5 Aguirre took command of all Basque military operations. He ordered the mobilization of all men capable of bearing arms or doing fortification work, coming to have 70,000 soldiers, but only on paper, since he did not have weapons for all of them. Several battalions from Santander and Asturias joined, who were not well regarded by the natives owing to their violence and extremism. On May 8, 45 of the 50 fighter planes sent by the Republic arrived in Bilbao. But the lack of well-defended airfields and the inexperience of the crews meant that almost all the airplanes were destroyed.

At the end of May the Navarrese troops were at the edge of the Iron Ring, which was only 40% complete, and about whose weak points they had precise information, given at first hand by Alejandro Goicoechea, who had gone over to their ranks.

At the beginning of June the Republic sent to Bilbao Mariano Gamir Ulibarri, a professional soldier, a Basque, not identified with any political party, recommending that Aguirre hand over military command to him. Aguirre agreed, and Gamir had some 40,000 men to continue the war. On June 11 the Nationals began the assault on the Iron Ring, which was overrun within 36 hours and with 500 casualties. With Bilbao about to fall, Aguirre received information that Gamir had orders to destroy Bilbao's industry if he could not defend Bilbao. Knowing the precedents of Irun and the clashes between the PNV militias and the socialist and anarchist ones in San Sebastián to prevent its destruction, he declared his intention of preventing it, so he deployed the gudaris to block attempts at sabotage and freed 2,000 political prisoners, who were escorted by trusted party gudaris to the Francoist lines. There were armed clashes between PNV battalions and Asturian battalions that wanted to set fire to Deusto.

On June 19 Bilbao fell, leaving almost all of Biscay in Franco's hands. Some 20,000 gudaris withdrew toward Cantabria. By mid-August only 6,000 remained. It is not clear whether the rest deserted or joined the Francoist troops.

The end of the war in Euskadi

On receiving orders from the republican Army to withdraw toward Asturias, the Basque battalions of Santoña and Laredo, sympathetic to the PNV, rose up, took Santoña and freed 2,500 political prisoners from its jail. The local Basque commander proclaimed the Republic of Euzkadi. Two Basque officers crossed the front line and met with the Italians to negotiate the surrender, resulting in what is known as the Pact of Santoña, which had already been agreed earlier by jeltzale (PNV) leaders. In the end the agreement came to nothing, as Franco refused to recognize it, which led to the execution of more than 300 of its members, while the battalions made up of militiamen sympathetic to other political formations continued fighting on the Asturian front. In a short time, in less than a year from the insurrection against republican legality, the whole of the present Basque Country was in the hands of the insurgents. In the summer of 1937 work was already beginning on rebuilding the bridges of Bilbao, which had been blown up by the town's defenders in an effort to delay the taking of the city and of the important industrial and mining area to which it was the key.

A few days after the taking of Bilbao, Franco abolished the fueros of Biscay and Gipuzkoa, considering them «traitor provinces» for not having joined the uprising, while Álava and Navarre kept their privileges and continued to have their small autonomous police forces and a certain fiscal autonomy.

During the war, the rebel side extrajudicially murdered or executed 199 people in Álava, some 500 in Gipuzkoa and fewer than 900 in Biscay. Proportionally, the number of victims of the Francoist repression in the Basque Country (1.6 per thousand inhabitants) was the second lowest in all of Spain, higher only than that of Catalonia. The repression carried out by the republican side caused a similar number of deaths.

Navarre

In Navarre the Carlists took the side of the insurgent troops of General Mola, who promised to maintain the fueros, and Navarre was occupied militarily by the rebel forces, supported by 8,400 Carlists, after the murder of the head of the Civil Guard command in Navarre, José Rodríguez-Medel Briones, an enemy of Mola, for having rejected an offer from him and remaining loyal to the Republic.

Compulsory recruitment was begun under penalty of execution, and repression took place, beginning immediately and causing some 3,300 deaths, in addition to other reprisals (see Victims of the Civil War in Navarre), mainly in the Ribera of Navarre and Pamplona. There was also the Escape from Fort San Cristóbal, with bloody consequences.

Exile and the Second World War

Exile of the Basque-Spanish republicans

The first stage, as for the rest of the Spanish republicans fleeing the Francoist repression, was France. But the welcome there would not be what was expected. The French government organized the "centres d'accueil," that is, improvised concentration camps, such as the one at Argelès-sur-Mer, set up on the beach itself, under the watch of Senegalese soldiers. There was a group of almost 5,000 Basques there, who found themselves organized in a "village" known by the name of "Gernika-berri."

Meanwhile, from March 1939, construction began on a new concentration camp in a remote place in the district of Orthez, in Béarn, known by the name of Gurs. By April it was already finished. It was located right on the border with the province of Soule and some 17 km from Oloron. Soon the Basques, coming from Argelès and other camps, were concentrated there. In all, on May 10, 1939 there were 18,985 prisoners in Gurs, of whom 6,555 were Basques.

The situation was distressing for the Basque prisoners in the face of the unstoppable German advance, since the alternative was to fall prisoner to the Nazis or to be handed over to the Francoists. Finally, on June 21, 1940, the first Basques were freed and left for Venezuela. Within a week the "C" block, where all the Basques were concentrated, was empty.

Second World War (1939-1945)

Once again the Spanish government remained neutral in the second of the World Wars despite its political sympathy toward Germany and Italy. This political affinity with the Axis powers, which did not command the sea, and the state in which the merchant navy had been left after the Spanish Civil War meant that the conditions of the First World War were not repeated. During the conflict, ships of Basque registry again fell victim to the submarines and mines of both sides.

The first ship sunk was the Basque merchant ship Banderas, of the Naviera Vascongada, sunk near Cape Villano by the German submarine U-53 (2-18-1940), and it was another Basque merchant ship, the Monte Gorbea, of the Naviera Aznar, that suffered the largest number of casualties in an attack, when it was torpedoed and sunk in the Caribbean by the German submarine U-512, with 52 of the 79 people on board perishing (9-19-1942).

The Franco regime

Main article: Francoist Spain

The end of the Civil War in the Basque Country, as everywhere, left a society deeply divided between victors and vanquished. Among the former, besides Falangists and soldiers, were the old dynastic parties, the traditionalists (very well established in rural areas) and the representatives of the world of business and industry. The latter were the nationalists, the socialists and the communists. After an initial stage in which intense political repression served as the framework for the resumption of activity in the factories, the long years of Francoism began, in which significant economic growth was combined with clandestine activities of resistance to the dictatorship, both by trade unions and political parties born before the Civil War and, from the end of the 1950s, by organizations such as ETA and others born in its orbit.

The postwar period

Repression and resistance

Franco giving a speech in Eibar during a visit in 1949.

With the occupation of the whole Basque Country by the Francoist troops from June 1937 began a period in which, besides the dismantling of the institutions created in the brief period during which the Statute of Autonomy approved in 1936 was in force, direct forms of repression predominated, against both the members of political parties and trade unions that had opposed the military uprising and everything related to the Basque cultural world. In addition to the soldiers taken prisoner after the Pact of Santoña, the nationalists, socialists and communists who had not managed to go into exile were imprisoned and many were sentenced to death. To this was added the express and categorical prohibition of any Basque cultural expression, such as speaking Basque in public. Biscay and Gipuzkoa, where resistance to the rebellion had been greatest, were declared Traitor Provinces, their Economic Agreements abolished as punishment (not so those of Álava and Navarre, where the authorities and most of the population had supported the uprising), and subjected to an army of occupation while the new regime appointed the new civil authorities.

Under these conditions any political activity had to be carried out clandestinely, and the risks run were great. Despite everything, some clandestine networks managed to rebuild themselves and tried, with little success, to keep alive the idea of resistance, trusting that the defeat of Germany and Italy in the Second World War would also mean the fall of Franco's dictatorship. When it was confirmed that it was a mistaken forecast to expect foreign intervention to put an end to the Francoist regime, the political and trade union forces had to change their analysis and rely exclusively on their own forces, which were not many.

The 1940s were years of low wages, extremely long working days and, in general, poor living conditions, owing to the regime's desire to rebuild the national economy as soon as possible. Police repression of any hint of dissidence or workers' organization, and the political control of the population, prevented from expressing its opinions, contributed to this. All this caused growing discontent in the large companies of the Bilbao estuary and in the Gipuzkoan industrial areas, which generated some conflicts in the factories as early as 1946.

In the spring of 1947 the political parties and trade unions opposed to Francoism (grouped in a Basque Resistance Council, dependent on the Basque Government in exile) issued a call to commemorate the proclamation of the Republic, just as, semi-clandestinely, some groups had celebrated the Aberri Eguna a few days earlier. Thousands of workers gathered on April 14 in various towns without the police intervening, which apparently demonstrated the possibility of carrying out mass actions. This success led to the calling of a stoppage on May 1, a protest against the dictatorship. That day, between 20,000 and 50,000 workers from the large Biscayan companies (la Naval, Altos Hornos, Euskalduna, Babcock, etc.) and Gipuzkoan ones went on strike. The Civil Governor of Biscay, Genaro Riestra, threatened to dismiss all the strikers and called in the military, who deployed throughout Bilbao. The strike continued in the following days and spread to other companies. Some employers refused to obey the governor's orders to provide the names of the strikers, for which they were penalized, and in view of the spread of the conflict, which had already led to more than 6,000 arrests, on May 8 a group of employers, worried about the turn the conflict was taking, negotiated in Madrid with the Government the cancellation of the penalties in exchange for the end of the strike.

Paradoxically, despite the success of this joint initiative, the 1947 strike marked the end of the political forces opposed to the dictatorship, incapable from then on of reaching agreement. Moreover, the subsequent police repression meant the definitive dismantling of the structures of the UGT and the CNT, whose effort was exploited by the Basque Government in exile and the nationalist trade union ELA-STV, which were the ones who capitalized on the success of the strike before Basque public opinion.

Economic recovery

Despite what Francoist propaganda said, the destruction suffered by the Biscayan and Gipuzkoan industrial installations during the war was not very great. Much more serious was the lack of fuel, raw materials or skilled labor (in part because of the repression that followed the entry of the Francoist troops, which largely affected the workers' cadres of the trade unions and parties), or problems of transport, prices, etc. In any case, a few weeks after the end of the Civil War in the Basque Country, most of the factories had restarted their activity, and a period of economic recovery began that lies at the origin of the growth after the 1950s.

The reasons for this rapid growth are to be found in the great demand for industrial products, first to meet the military needs of the war and then for the reconstruction of the country's economy after the end of hostilities. This demand, above all public, was directed at iron and steel and metallurgical products as well as at mining or chemical ones, all of them sectors very well developed in the Basque Country.

To the difficulties already mentioned must be added strong intervention by the new State in the economy, ranging from the militarization of factories producing articles of military interest (almost all those making metal products) in the first months, to the fixing of prices, allocation of resources, etc. All this hindered the normal course of economic activity, but had the advantage of assuring industrialists of the purchase of their products, whatever their quality, at a time when the country was practically closed to the outside world and demand by the State was very important.

Otherwise, each sector had its own problems. Thus, the steel industry had to face the impossibility of continuing to use English coal (progressively replaced by Asturian coal, which already accounted for 99.4% of the total in 1942), the exhaustion of the Biscayan iron mines and serious problems in the national supply of the scrap needed for the production of iron and steel.

The metallurgical companies did not suffer much either while state orders for the army and for the reconstruction of the country continued. The end of the Second World War, by contrast, meant the beginning of problems, as difficulties in the supply of raw materials and fuel began after the isolation imposed on the Francoist regime. This led to the underuse of installed productive capacity and the impossibility of renewing installations. Thus, production levels prior to the Civil War were not surpassed until 1955.

In short, Basque industry recovered quickly from the circumstances lived through in the war, and if its growth was not faster this was due to the shortages of fuel, raw materials and means of transport owing to the isolation in which Francoist Spain was left after the victory of the Allies in the Second World War, as well as to the autarkic economic policy pursued by the regime.

The Gurs camp

Main article: Gurs internment camp

After the fall of Bilbao, the exiles and the members of the Basque Army who, after fleeing or escaping the encirclement of the Battle of Santander, had been transported by sea to the republican zone, crossed the border after the fall of Catalonia and were confined by the French government in concentration camps on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War and classified as undesirables under the Decree-Law of November 12, 1938 of the government headed by Daladier.

On February 5, 1939, Daladier allowed the mass of refugees to cross the border, which until then had officially remained closed, the men (identified as combatants) being separated from the women. It is estimated that 440,000 republicans went into exile in France, costing the French treasury 750,000 francs a day.

Very soon afterward these "temporary stays" became "administrative confinement," and within a few months various internment camps had been created.

On February 25, 1939, in order to obtain Spanish neutrality, the Bérard-Jordana Agreement was signed, by which France recognized the legitimacy of Francoist Spain.[8][9] One of the points of that agreement detailed the return of the republican capital remaining in France, so the French government handed over to Franco 9,000 boxes deposited by the republican Basque Government at "La Rochelle," containing the funds of the Banks and Savings Banks of Bilbao and San Sebastián to the amount of two billion francs.[10]

The French government, because of its proximity, had initially conceived the "Gurs camp" to concentrate Basque refugees, which is why it was called the "Camp of the Basques." The largest group, some five thousand, came from the provisional camp of Argelès-sur-Mer; on May 10, 1939 there were 18,985 prisoners in Gurs, of whom 6,555 were Basques.

The prisoners in Gurs were divided by the French into four "blocks" (A, B, C, D), cut off from one another, according to their origin and occupation (Basques, Spaniards, Brigaders and Pilots). The Basques were assigned "Block C." Through the chaplain Iñaki Azpiazu they managed to contact the Basque Government in exile, with the support of Telesforo Monzón, Councilor of the Interior and Public Security of José Antonio Aguirre's Basque Government. The Basque Government entrusted the leadership of the Basque contingent to the communist Celestino Uriarte.

According to contemporary testimonies, the "block of the Basques" was the one that received the best treatment:

Conditions were critical, hundreds of people died, although they kept us Basques apart and we were better off; in fact we were the only ones who ate hot food.

Despite everything, conditions were inhuman: up to 60 prisoners were housed in barracks of 25 square meters. Food was scarce and dreadful. One of its inmates recounted:

We lived so badly that we were on hunger strike for eight days, and anyone who ate something ended up in the hospital in Pau from the beating they gave him. And seventy ended up there. When they promised us improvements we abandoned the strike, and an hour later they took us in handcuffs to Bordeaux to another, worse barracks.

We slept on sacks of straw or on the ground, we ate roots and the fear was permanent ... They came to take the Jews to Auschwitz. We were always afraid they were coming for one of us.

Later, half of the Basques were transferred to factories near Paris, to work on the Maginot Line or to the front, under the threat of repatriation to Francoist Spain. Most managed to find guarantors that allowed them to leave the camp and find work and refuge in France. In June 1940 only some 800 Basque prisoners remained, and in the face of the German advance they left "Block C," where they were concentrated, and mostly emigrated to South America, establishing colonies of Basque exiles in those countries.

Nevertheless, Gurs was distinguished by having constituted a "cultural redoubt" in the midst of barbarity owing to a series of factors, since from 1939 to the autumn of 1940 the languages that dominated in the camp were Spanish and Basque, owing to the large presence of republican exiles, which favored their unity in holding events even though each "block" was cut off from the rest.

The Basque inmates created an orchestra and built a sports ground. On July 14, 1939, the French national holiday, the 17,000 internees formed up in military fashion on the sports ground and sang La Marseillaise, then offering sports demonstrations and choral and instrumental concerts. Later, from March 1941, a "cultural center" was created in one hut in each "block," where musical and theatrical performances were held, and even classes were taught and talks given on "sex education." In Gurs, for example, in the week of August 10 to 17, 1939, 9 Culture Huts operated, in which 110 classes were given to 3,883 students.

After the summer of 1942, as deportations increased, "artistic activity" declined, and with the arrival of the Nazis and after the departure of most of the Basques, the camp was renamed the "Camp of the undesirables" and held prisoners on grounds of their race, sexuality or belief, conditions worsening even further, with as many as eight people dying each day. The Gurs camp remained in operation until 1945, the longest-running in all of France.

In May 2006 the Basque Government paid tribute to the Basques confined in the Gurs camp, at which a sapling of the Tree of Guernica was planted "as a symbol of peace" and a commemorative plaque, made by Néstor Basterretxea, was placed. This tribute is set within the context of the process of recovering historical memory that has arisen in Spain in recent years.

The 1950s

With all attempts to develop joint opposition to the regime having failed, parties and trade unions entered a period in which they recorded almost no activity at all, hampered also by repression.

The nationalists, throughout these years, confined themselves to trying to spread the Basque language and culture through the creation of mountaineering groups, choirs and dance groups or the like, for which they counted on the collaboration of numerous priests of like-minded ideology. The work of these priests, in their homilies and in their contacts with citizens, especially in small towns, was of great importance in the transmission of nationalist culture and ideology, which thanks to it were able to evade the official prohibitions and stay alive during these years.

On the other hand, the Church also contributed to the creation of the Juventud Obrera Cristiana (JOC) and of the Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica (HOAC), organizations which, besides taking part in the opposition to the regime from factories and workshops (and also from universities in the case of the JOC), served as a seedbed for future political and trade union leaders.

The 1960s

The Basque Country and Navarre were at the forefront of the intense process of change that Spain experienced in the 1960s, the most decisive economic and social transformation of the 20th century. The 1960s were indeed years of enormous development, of accelerated industrialization, of great rural exodus, of uncontrolled urban growth and of tourist avalanches. By 1970 Spain had ceased to be an underdeveloped, agrarian country and, even with serious social costs, had been transformed into a comparatively dynamic, modern and relatively prosperous society. As a substantial part of this process, the Basque-Navarrese region lived through a period of extraordinary development and growth during this decade.

The changes of the 1960s meant a true historical rupture. It was then that the transformation of the region, Álava and Navarre included, into a highly technified, urban, professional mass society culminated and became general.

All social and cultural spheres underwent decisive changes between 1960 and 1970. Few decades can have been more decisive than the 1960s in the modern history of the Basque Country and Navarre.

The development years

The essential factor in the economic takeoff and modernization of Spain was the liberalization of the economy, which began after almost 20 years of autarky, as a result of the so-called Stabilization Plan of 1959. Basque-Navarrese desarrollismo, however, owed nothing to direct action by the State. The region was left out of the policy of development poles begun in Spain in 1964, although in Navarre and Álava the action of the respective Deputations was decisive for industrial development. The participation of the National Institute of Industry, INI, the holding company of industrial firms that the State had created in 1941, was meager; it was limited to some shipbuilding companies of the Bilbao estuary such as Euskalduna and La Naval, integrated into Astilleros Españoles in 1969, and a few, rather few, new factories established in Álava and others located in Navarre. In general, that development, proclaimed and praised by the Francoist Regime as exemplary, was in the Basque Country and Navarre the result of private investment and the export capacity of their industries; that is, it was the result of their entrepreneurial dynamism.

The results were impressive: the value of the Gross Domestic Product of the Basque Country and Navarre almost tripled between 1960 and 1973, with a higher percentage growth in Álava and Navarre and a more moderate one in Biscay and Gipuzkoa. As all the indicators revealed, the growth was due above all to industrial development. In 1975, the final year of that great expansive cycle, industry generated more than 53% of Basque-Navarrese GDP and, while services made up somewhat more than 40%, agriculture by contrast accounted for only 5% in the Basque Country and a little over 14% in Navarre. The industrial labor force increased in the same proportion while that employed in agriculture and fishing fell appreciably.

Biscayan shipbuilding continued at a good pace until 1974-1975. The output of the shipyards, which in 1959 had been somewhat over 227,000 gross registered tons with 96 ships, rose in 1973 to more than 341,000 tons with 56 vessels, which represented 28.4% of Spanish output.

Petronor chimney in Musques.

The activity recorded by the Port of Bilbao during the decade was extraordinary; cargo traffic increased from 3.9 million tons in 1960 to somewhat over 20 million tons in 1973. The port also fostered two of the great investments of the decade, both decisive for the future of Biscay. In 1968 the province was granted, for location at Somorrostro (very close to the port entrance), the installation of a large oil refinery, with capacity to process some 10 million tons of crude a year, which would be named Petróleos del Norte S.A. or Petronor. It was later, in 1972, that in view of the inadequacy of the river port, above all to accommodate the large ships then dominating oil traffic, the construction of a superport in the bay, between Ciérvana and Punta Galea, was decided. The first of the docks came into service in 1973. One of Petronor's first actions toward its surroundings, parallel to the construction of the Musques refinery, was financing a large part of the Bilbao Superport in the 1970s, although this project was practically paralyzed until the 1990s, with only one breakwater under construction.

In Gipuzkoa development had different characteristics. Although the paper and chemical industries were undoubtedly important, the expansion was above all the result of the great dynamism of the metallurgical sector. The sector was highly diversified, with factories and plants scattered throughout the province: factories of tools, hardware, locks, screws, arms, metal furniture, bearings, household appliances, machine tools, electrical equipment, bicycles, rolled products and special steels; and, curiously, made up mostly of modest companies and businessmen. The archetypal Gipuzkoan businessman, unlike the Biscayan (more linked to banking and the joint-stock company), had a much more personal and close view of the company, perhaps even a patriarchal one.

At the same time, cooperatives would have a most remarkable development and often formidable success. The Mondragón cooperative acquired an international image in these years; these were the years of Mondragón's great business growth, when Eroski began operating as a consumer cooperative and the Fagor cooperative became a reference brand throughout Spain.

In Álava a total of 1,363 companies were created in the 1960s, 80% of them on industrial estates around Vitoria, which, thanks to the planning and promotion initiatives of its town council and of the Alavese Deputation, had become the natural outlet for the expansion of the Biscayan and, above all, Gipuzkoan economies. It was a development pole in an ideal location, modern and well conceived. The metallurgical and chemical sectors and construction were the fundamental pieces of the Alavese industrial takeoff. Among the most vigorous companies were Forjas Alavesas, devoted to special steels; Mevosa, Mercedes and Volkswagen, devoted to industrial vehicles; and Michelin, devoted to tires.

The case of Navarre was very similar. The Industrial Promotion Plan promoted by the Foral Deputation of Navarre on the initiative of its vice-president, the industrialist Félix Huarte, allowed the creation between 1964 and 1974 of a total of 337 companies, with an investment of some 20 billion pesetas and some 30,000 industrial jobs. At least half of these companies, mostly metallurgical, were established in the Pamplona area.

Basque-Navarrese economic growth in the 1960s was enormous but had many imbalances and contradictions. In the first place, the growth took place without any environmental control and therefore brought with it extremely intense pollution of rivers such as the Oria or of industrial enclaves such as Barakaldo, Sestao or Bilbao. In the second place, development was enormously concentrated in a few sectors; specifically, the metallurgical and chemical sectors took up to 60-70% of all investment. In the third place, owing to tariff protectionism, the companies that emerged were, in general, small and uncompetitive, as well as highly dependent on foreign technology via patents or licenses for industrial products.

The economic development of the 1960s, which lasted until 1974, radically transformed the Basque-Navarrese region. The population rose from 1,773,696 inhabitants in 1960 to somewhat over 2.5 million in the mid-1970s. The migratory balance was decisive: a significant mass of immigrants had arrived from Andalusia, Galicia, Old Castile, the Leonese Region, Aragon, Asturias, Extremadura and Murcia.

In 1971 Biscay occupied first place among the Spanish provinces in per capita income, Gipuzkoa second, Álava third and Navarre eighth. The Gross Domestic Product of the Basque Country and Navarre grew by 210.1% between 1955 and 1975.

Urban transformation

The spectacular growth of the economy of the Basque Country and Navarre, which did not exclude cyclical crises, brought serious imbalances and shortcomings that would become evident during the very long crisis the region would suffer from 1974-1975 onward. Territorial imbalances, for example, were glaring. Activity and population were concentrated, above all, in the provincial capitals and the districts and towns immediately around them. At the provincial level, only Gipuzkoa grew harmoniously, although the San Sebastián district, the San Sebastián-Irun corridor and Eibar grew more, and worse. Important districts of Álava such as Campezo, the Montaña Alavesa and the western valleys; middle Navarre, the Navarrese mountains and the eastern Pyrenean valleys; as well as Las Encartaciones and Arratia in Biscay were areas that were left either stagnant or on the margins of development, and some of them even lost population.

The double process of urbanization and of industrial and demographic concentration was excessively intense and took place in an uncontrolled and chaotic way. In 1975 what had shortly before begun to be called Greater Bilbao absorbed 79% of the population of its province, Vitoria 73.1% of its own, San Sebastián 57.6% of the Gipuzkoan population and Pamplona 46.8% of that of Navarre. The capitals and Greater Bilbao grew spectacularly. The urban-planning disasters that followed from this were considerable.

Population trend of Vitoria, showing a large increase in the 1960s.

The growth of Vitoria and Pamplona, which figured as the fastest-growing cities in Spain between 1960 and 1975, might seem exemplary in more than one sense; it took place in ensanches (extensions) that were generally spacious, comfortable and functional, and that grew reasonably well developed and equipped. But the local and provincial authorities attended to the preparation of industrial spaces before preparing areas and neighborhoods where working families would live. Thus there arose, in the belts around both cities, in nearby villages and hamlets and in areas close to the industrial estates, marginal and segregated working-class neighborhoods, poorly developed and with inadequate facilities and services.

San Sebastián also held up and in 1970, although it was no longer only the summer and tourist center it had been since the 19th century but the service capital of its province, it retained its beautiful layout and its balanced and elegant architecture despite some assaults, such as the demolition in 1973 of the Gran Casino Kursaal building. It had numerous green and landscaped areas and a good level of hospital, sports and educational services (except as regards university education). On the periphery of San Sebastián, towns such as Hernani, Pasajes, Rentería, Oyarzun, Usúrbil, Urnieta or Lasarte, which had industrialized intensively, presented problems of considerable magnitude: crowded neighborhoods, disorderly and anarchic layout, urban ugliness, structural shortcomings, poor housing and lack of services.

Barakaldo was one of the municipalities of Greater Bilbao that grew chaotically

Greater Bilbao was, above all, an urban-planning failure. Its growth exceeded all expectations and forecasts. In a few years the Biscayan capital was transformed into a congested urban agglomeration, with 6,953 inhabitants per square kilometer in 1970: a city literally hemmed in by working-class neighborhoods of poor architecture, insufficient and low-quality housing, and with serious shortcomings in facilities and infrastructure. In 1970 Bilbao had practically no buildable land left, recorded extremely high levels of pollution, lacked green areas, and its cultural and health facilities were, in view of its dynamism and wealth, unsatisfactory and mediocre. Bilbao had become a great problem whose solution required a radical review of all urban management, as town planners, architects and sociologists demanded. Serious planning of the urban territory and its development, plans for the provision of green areas to reduce air pollution, municipal housing programs, collective sanitation and hygiene projects, the layout of new road and rail networks, and new educational, sports and welfare facilities were necessary and urgent. The reaction, however, came very late. Only in 1968 did the Ministry of Public Works, the Town Council and the Deputation decide to tackle the by no means easy question of road access to the town, agreeing on the layout of several solutions for the urban center and its surroundings, and the construction of motorways toward the French border (Bilbao-Behobia) and toward Madrid and the Vitoria-Barcelona axis (Bilbao-Miranda). However, since these were works that were by definition costly and slow and laborious to carry out, all the more so given Bilbao's complicated geography, they only began to be completed from the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s.

Economic growth had radically transformed Basque-Navarrese social life. The fascinating panorama of factories, shipyards, chimneys, tracks, cranes, trains, smoke, flames, docks, ships, pipes, blast furnaces and cables offered around 1970 by Bilbao and its estuary revealed an incomparable wealth. Gipuzkoa was transformed, practically, into a workshop province. Both the Basque Country and Navarre made up a dense urban region; in 1975, 76.23% of the Basque-Navarrese population lived in municipalities of more than 10,000 inhabitants.

Cultural transformation

The cultural change taking place was just as significant: an unstoppable movement that had begun with the construction, between 1950 and 1955, of the Sanctuary of Aránzazu. Jorge de Oteiza, after his beginnings as an expressionist sculptor, pioneered a profound study of the space next to form. Eduardo Chillida, through iron, alabaster and concrete, produced poetic emotions in the space radiated by his works, creating a sculptural world of austere forms full of strength and vigor, the fruit of metaphysical concerns that Oteiza sought to theorize in his book Quousque Tandem...!.

Eduardo Chillida's Comb of the Wind

With Oteiza (grand prize for sculpture at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1957), Chillida (the same prize at the Venice Biennale of 1958), Néstor Basterretxea, Vicente Larrea, Remigio Mendiburu and Ricardo Ugarte, Basque sculpture took shape as one of the most innovative artistic ventures of international art in the 1960s. This resurgence of sculpture in the 1960s (which also occurred in Madrid with the El Paso group and in Barcelona with the Dau al Set group) drew on the introduction of the expressionist movements that had evolved in Europe and began fundamentally in the plastic arts. Oteiza (and his book) was the great cultural driving force of the moment; it was he who, with important vision for the future, created the Barandiarán Gallery, where the most important exhibitions would be held. In 1966 Basque and Navarrese sculptors and painters formed the Basque school groups Gaur (in Gipuzkoa), Orain (in Álava), Emen (in Biscay) and Danok (in Navarre), definitively stirring up the Basque cultural milieu promoted by Oteiza and projecting a group of creative personalities who would go on asserting and consolidating themselves in later decades.

In literature, too, the 1960s were a rich and effervescent period, with approaches of freedom in every cultural and social sense. The writer Ramiro Pinilla won the Nadal Prize for literature, the most prestigious Spanish literary prize, in 1961 with Las ciegas hormigas. In 1962 another Basque writer, José María Mendiola, won it again with Muerte por fusilamiento. These novels, by their structures and language, belonged to the new narrative currents stirring Spanish literature. Luis Martín-Santos wrote in 1962 the best Spanish novel of the decade, Tiempo de silencio, which tells the story of the existential failure of a doctor in the miserable Madrid of the postwar period; a singular book, of surprising language and construction, the starting point of the stylistic renewal the Spanish novel would later experience. In 1966 Raúl Guerra Garrido, born in Madrid but settled in San Sebastián, published Cacereño, a harsh social novel about the discrimination suffered by immigrant workers in the Basque Country. It was in this context that the San Sebastián literary magazines Kurpil and, later, Kantil would appear.

In 1968 Néstor Basterretxea and Fernando Larruquert filmed Ama Lur/Tierra madre, a feature-length documentary on the Basque Country with images of great power and beauty that sought to reflect what the Basque Country was in those years. The case of Ama Lur/Tierra madre is singular because it was not born of a conventional production system (from conventional production companies) but from a popular subscription through small financial contributions. The San Sebastián producer Elías Querejeta promoted from 1965, in step with the timid and contradictory cultural liberalization of Francoism, the new Spanish cinema, which combined aesthetic quality and social criticism, and produced a handful of films of considerable interest.

The musical group Ez Dok Amairu.

Literature in Basque experienced at the same time its first real resurgence since the Civil War. As in art, a new generation of writers renewed themes and narrative techniques and, in short, made a new literature. For its quality and its linguistic, aesthetic, social and political interest, Harri eta Herri, Gabriel Aresti's long poem of 2,401 lines, which appeared in 1964, became the symbol of the renewal.

The liberalization of Francoism allowed the opening of ikastolas from 1960. In 1970 approximately 120 ikastolas were operating with some 12,000 pupils. The linguist Koldo Mitxelena gave considerable impetus to studies on the Basque language, above all with a view to the unification of its spelling and declension, a basic element in the recovery of Basque as a modern language of communication. The appearance in the middle of this decade of the so-called new Basque song, whose greatest exponent would be the musical group Ez Dok Amairu, also contributed decisively to the recovery of Basque.

Basque-Navarrese society in the 1960s was also a mass consumer society. Uses and customs that the social life of each town had organized since long ago survived, and had even been reinforced: daily rounds of bars, peñas, cuadrillas, gastronomic societies... But the prosperity of the decade had intensified the population's leisure possibilities and had multiplied, as was to be expected, the range of entertainment typical precisely of industrial and urban life. Sports occupied the leading place, even though in the 1960s the performances of Basque and Navarrese athletes were not exceptional. Athletic de Bilbao won the football Cup in 1969, but Real Sociedad remained in the Second Division between 1962 and 1967. Osasuna, for its part, inaugurated the El Sadar stadium in 1967. Some cyclists, such as Otaño, Gabica, Perurena, the Lasa brothers and, above all, the Vitoria team Kas, won significant victories. Azkarate and Atano X dominated hand pelota. The Navarrese Astibia popularized, thanks to television, the aizkolari (wood-chopping) contests. Fuenterrabía won the San Sebastián trainera regattas between 1965 and 1968. In 1968 the boxer Urtain emerged, as an obvious commercial operation based on reviving the myth of the Herculean strength of the Basques.

Building of the University of Deusto.

Finally, economic change brought about two substantial developments destined to have a decisive medium- and long-term influence on the collective consciousness, on the ideas, beliefs, values and moral sensibility of Basques and Navarrese: on the one hand, the emergence of university life and, on the other, the secularization of society. The need for technical and professional cadres and also the greater demand for culture of a developing society made it necessary to expand university provision in the region, until then dependent for these purposes on Zaragoza and Valladolid. At the beginning of the 1960s there were a couple of university centers with 2,700-2,800 university students, which would rise to some twenty with 14,000-15,000 students, who would number 20,000-25,000 around 1974-1975. The fundamental developments were, first, the conversion into a university of the institutes and faculties that the Jesuits had had in Deusto since the end of the 19th century, which would give rise to the University of Deusto; second, the creation of the University of Navarra in Pamplona; third, the creation in 1968 of the Public University of Bilbao, embryo of the future University of the Basque Country; and, finally, the establishment in 1970 of a university college in Vitoria dependent on the University of Valladolid. Precisely, the existence of the universities of Deusto and Navarra made the weight of the Church in university education in the Basque Country and Navarre very high. In 1974-1975 almost 50% of all the university students in the region belonged to those two universities.

The rates of Mass attendance in the four provinces and other indicators, such as the number of priests per thousand inhabitants, were around these years far above the Spanish averages. All this suggested that the Catholicism of Basques and Navarrese was still high. However, the observance of religious practices was very high among the population over 60 and among women, but very low among those under 30 and among the immigrant population. Priestly vocations were declining markedly, and the teaching of the Church's universities was, in essence, technical and professional teaching. The religious world was in crisis in Basque-Navarrese society.

ETA appears

The appearance of ETA was the consequence of the reaction of members of youth organizations more or less linked to the Basque Nationalist Party. Men such as José Luis Álvarez Emparanza, Julen Madariaga, José Manuel Agirre or José María Benito del Valle aspired to found a new nationalism, capable of responding to the new Basque reality brought about by Francoism and industrial development.

Born clandestinely in 1959 after several years of incubation, Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) was, certainly, the result of the lack of freedoms of the Franco Regime. But it was also a generational reaction against the apparent crisis that Basque nationalist feeling seemed to be undergoing in the 1950s, the fruit of repression, economic growth and the mass immigration of workers, and in the face of the passivity of historical nationalism in clandestinity and in exile. The old members of the PNV had opted for a less confrontational strategy with the Regime in the 1960s. With the generational turnover, some elements of the youth taking over rebelled against that acquiescence and stillness, and so embarked on a revolutionary path, defining themselves as Marxists, breaking with the heritage of traditional nationalism and basing Basque identity on elements different from the Sabinian ones (no longer would they be race and religion, but rather the will to feel Basque and Basque as the central element of that Basque identity).

ETA's IV Assembly defined it as socialist and nationalist. The synthesis of these ideologies gave rise to revolutionary nationalism, taking as its model the liberation movements of the Third World. With this new definition the concept of the Basque Working People was created: a Basque was the worker who had national class consciousness; put another way, a Basque was the Basque nationalist. Thus the importance that Sabinian nationalism had given to race was set aside, and Basque was taken as the reference element of Basque identity. This concept was much more attractive to the immigrant population, who could be considered Basque (by ETA) merely by declaring themselves nationalist. During ETA's V Assembly, held in two phases (December 1966 and March 1967), the divisions between the workerist and nationalist sectors were clearly displayed, the latter influenced by the liberation struggles of the Third World in Algeria and other countries. At the end of this assembly, ETA came to define itself as a Basque socialist revolutionary movement of national liberation. After the success of the nationalist sector over the workerist one, ETA representatives attended the meeting of the Intercontinental in Havana, where doors were opened for the organization to relate to other revolutionary movements of the Third World.

ETA was the result of the voluntarism of a small core of militants. Initially, its actions were mere propaganda agitation: painting the slogan "Gora Euskadi", painting the initials E.T.A., placing Basque flags in visible and frequented places, and similar acts. In 1968, after the V Assembly, the period of mimetic violence began in the Basque Country, with the adoption of the action-repression-action strategy. In June 1968, while the events of May 68 were taking place in Paris, the first deadly attacks by ETA began in the Basque Country. It was then that it was decided to put into action something that until then had been kept only in theory: ETA's Biltzar Ttipia (equivalent to the Central Committee of a Communist Party) decided to murder the chiefs of the political-social brigades of San Sebastián (Melitón Manzanas) and Bilbao.

Seal of ETA.

The first serious and resounding events took place in 1968: Txabi Etxebarrieta, together with his companion Iñaki Sarasketa, was driving a stolen car and came upon the traffic Civil Guard José Pardines on the road, who decided to stop them at a routine checkpoint. When Pardines realized the car was stolen, Txabi Etxebarrieta shot the guard in the back and finished him off on the ground with several shots to the chest. The Civil Guard killed Txabi Etxebarrieta in a later shootout, and he became ETA's first "martyr." On August 2 an ETA commando killed the police commissioner Melitón Manzanas in Irun.

Those events were decisive. The Franco Regime was unable to offer any policy other than indiscriminate repression in the face of ETA's escalation, and declared a State of Emergency in Gipuzkoa in response to the attack on Melitón Manzanas. It thereby distanced itself from a good part of Basque public opinion, even that which had at first been indifferent, if not hostile, to ETA. ETA's conflict would become, together with that of the workers, the students and some sectors of the Church, one of the four characteristic conflicts of the last years of Francoism, eroding public order and the stability of society significantly, though without managing to bring down the Regime. The Franco Regime declared several States of Emergency in Biscay and Gipuzkoa from 1968 in connection with ETA actions and operations against ETA.

The radicalization of the local Church, which revealed its own religious crisis, likewise favored that strategy. Significantly, the first part of ETA's V Assembly had been held in the parish house of Gaztelu, in Gipuzkoa. After the death of Etxebarrieta, quite a few priests celebrated Masses and funerals for his soul, defying the authorities. This helped make the young ETA leader the organization's first national hero. In August 1968, 40 priests occupied the offices of the Bishopric of Bilbao to demand that Bishop Gúrpide speak out on the situation of repression and on the recently approved Law on the Repression of Banditry and Terrorism, as the Bishop of San Sebastián, Lorenzo Bereciartua, had done in a pastoral letter. In June 1970 the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Bilbao, Monsignor Cirarda, condemned the repression against the opposition of the Regime; and, what was even more unacceptable for Francoism, refused to celebrate the Solemn Mass held every year in the main church of the Biscayan capital to commemorate the entry of Franco's Troops into Bilbao in 1937.

The break with Francoism

One of the most substantial questions raised at that time was whether a modern, developed society, such as the Basque-Navarrese society of the 1960s, could fit within an authoritarian dictatorship of personal power such as the Franco Regime, which would still govern until 1975. Certainly, around 1960 Francoism had a by no means negligible degree of social acceptance in the Basque Country and Navarre. This was an evident situation, even though an institution representing republican legality continued to exist in exile, namely the Basque Government (maintained by the PNV, the PSOE, ANV and Izquierda Republicana) under the leadership of Lehendakari Jesús María Leizaola.

The Palace of Ayete was Franco's summer residence

Franco's Governments included Basque and Navarrese Ministers; it came to be said that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was a "Basque Ministry." Some of the most important of these figures were Fernando Castiella (Foreign Minister from 1962 to 1969), José Félix de Lequerica (ambassador of Spain to the UN from Spain's entry into that body in 1955 until 1963), José María de Areilza, Juan Pablo de Lojendio (both holding important embassies), Esteban de Bilbao (President of the Cortes Españolas), Antonio Iturmendi (Minister of Justice, until in 1965 he replaced Esteban de Bilbao), Antonio María de Oriol y Urquijo (Minister of Justice), Jesús Romeo Gorría (Minister of Labor) or José Daniel Lacalle Larraga (Minister of the Air). Although its social function had changed, San Sebastián remained the summer capital, Franco's preferred city for his summer rest, which he enjoyed at the Palace of Ayete and on the Yacht Azor. The Provincial Deputations and Town Councils were run by men trusted by the Regime; even Guernica granted the Caudillo its Medal with Diamonds in 1966.

The premature death of Lehendakari Aguirre in Paris in 1960 and, two years later, that of the socialist leader Indalecio Prieto in Mexico left the Basque and Spanish exile without its two most important and active leaders. The new Lehendakari Leizaola, also a member of the PNV, gave the office a lower profile, and the Basque Government entered a period of passivity without as prominent a role as in previous decades. The work of the Basque Government was devoted more to preparing the end of Francoism, concentrating more on political-diplomatic pacts. In this sense come the visits of Julio de Jáuregui to Juan de Borbón in Estoril, preparing post-Francoism together with the other political forces. The Basque Government's greatest achievement was to maintain the unity of the two major parties of the Basque Country, the PNV and the PSOE, throughout Francoism, while the rest of the opposition remained divided.

There was, of course, a clandestine opposition; but this opposition of nationalists, socialists or communists had above all, during these years, an exceptional moral value, yet barely translated into real and effective actions against Francoism. The clandestine opposition was an extreme minority.

The Communist Party, despite the harsh repression to which it was subjected, had influence in working-class circles in Biscay (much less in the other provinces) through the work of men such as Ramón Ormazábal, its main leader, the painter Agustín Ibarrola, Julián Viejo, David Morín and Tomás Tueros, among others. What the PCE proposed in those years was a national reconciliation, starting from the fact that the War had not been won by some and lost by others, but that the true losers had been the workers. It therefore proposed a national reconciliation without victors or vanquished. The possibility for workers' leaders to hold meetings in churches, lent by the priests, allowed both the leftist and the Catholic traditions (organized in the Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica) to come together in the labor movement.

Socialist militants such as Antonio Amat, Ramón Rubial, the writer Luis Martín-Santos, Nicolás Redondo, Eduardo López Albizu and the Múgica Herzog brothers (Enrique and Fernando) also managed, despite police persecution, to keep alive the old socialist memory that went back to the end of the 19th century. It was they who linked the socialist tradition with the society of late Francoism, attracting the leaders who would play leading roles in the transition, such as Txiki Benegas or Ramón Jáuregui.

Juan de Ajuriaguerra, Luis María Retolaza and a handful of collaborators had been rebuilding the Basque Nationalist Party since the 1950s, in permanent contact with Jesús María Leizaola and the membership in exile, especially the nationalists in South America. The death of José Antonio Aguirre, who had an international reputation, the appearance of ETA and the repression made it difficult to reorganize the party in clandestine conditions, in a process in which the external structure gradually lost importance in favor of the internal one.

The local Church likewise appeared to be under the control of immobilist or conservative prelates and, in any case, aligned with Francoism. In this atmosphere, in May 1970, to general astonishment, 339 Basque priests had signed a letter calling for the restoration of certain freedoms. The priests took it upon themselves to bear witness to every repression of human rights that occurred, such as the lack of freedom of expression and opinion. But besides denouncing the Regime, they denounced the oppression of the Basque People, in clear harmony with Basque nationalism, and denounced the Catholic Hierarchy, which was supporting the Regime:

[...] Silence could be misinterpreted and perhaps attributed to an absence of conscience in the face of facts and events that imperiously demand a frank and open attitude on the part of those of us who feel the duty to proclaim the postulates of truth, justice, freedom and the dignity of man. We do not want our silence to be the reason for our being accused of complicity

The conflict in the Basque Country and Navarre in this decade was twofold: on the one hand, strikes and labor conflicts of growing breadth and intensity, and, on the other, acts of violence carried out by ETA as part of its armed-struggle strategy. With an additional and equally decisive factor: the confrontation between the Francoist Regime and the Church, the result of the support that a significant and growing number of Basque priests gave both to the workers' conflicts and, above all, to the terrorist band.

The Franco Regime faced a broad challenge in the Basque Country. Biscay and Gipuzkoa figured, by number of strikes, among the most conflict-ridden provinces in Spain. The "Basque Problem" that Francoism believed it had liquidated in the War resurfaced. Euskaldun culture had not disappeared under industrial and urban development; it had survived thanks to the work of philologists, local scholars, anthropologists and bertsolaris, and through expressions of rural sport. From 1965 it could be seen, besides ETA's actions, how the mobilizations taking place in the region, despite police deployments, grew ever larger on the occasion of the Aberri Eguna called from clandestinity and exile by the nationalist organizations. The first after the War was called in Guernica; thousands of people attended despite forceful police action with checkpoints and arrests. On September 18, 1970, a veteran nationalist, Joseba Elósegui, threw himself, wrapped in flames, before Franco himself as a sign of protest during a pelota match the latter was watching in San Sebastián.

The legitimacy of Francoism was increasingly weak. Abstention, for example, in the referendum the Regime held in December 1966 to ratify the Organic Law of the State, one of its fundamental texts, was the highest in Spain in Gipuzkoa and Biscay (24.2% and 21.3% respectively, when the national average was 10.8%). Participation in the elections for procuradores for the Family Third, held in November 1967, did not reach 40%.

In Navarre, the traditional bastion of Carlism, the economic and social changes of the 1960s were clearly transforming the provincial political culture. Strikes increased appreciably from 1966. Pamplona and the various industrial enclaves of the province lived through a long and very hard General Strike (the first in the history of Navarre) between June 12 and 22, 1973. At the University of Navarra a democratic student movement had also arisen at the end of the 1960s. Part of Carlism broke with Francoism; from 1965, the pretender Carlos Hugo de Borbón sought to steer the movement toward progressive positions, redefining Carlism as a form of Self-Managing Socialism while emphasizing the Basque dimension of the party, which after all had been especially linked since its origins to Navarre and the Basque Provinces.

The definitive acid test came in December 1970 around the Burgos Trial: a trial (the largest brought against ETA up to then) in which a military court tried 16 members of the organization (among them three women: Itziar Aizpurua, Juana Dorronsoro and Arantxa Arruti) and two priests (Juan Echave and Julián Calzada). If the awakening of Basque consciousness was a minority phenomenon before 1968-1970, after the Burgos Trial it was overwhelmingly a majority one. This trial represented a moment of legitimizing symbolic accumulation by radical nationalism that would be perpetuated in the following years. The Burgos Trial was devised by the heads of Carrero Blanco's intelligence service as a way of achieving a political milestone so that Franco's historical allies would continue to accept the need for a dictatorship after the Dictator's death. To this end they had to create a staging showing the world the existence of a threat constituted by ETA. The Regime managed to arrest ETA's leadership (Mario Onaindia, Teo Uriarte, Jokin Gorostidi, Xabier Izko, among others), practically dismantling the organization, and organized a show trial to make an example of them. The main charge was the murder of the policeman Melitón Manzanas, in addition to crimes of illegal association, theft, robberies, etc. These events shocked society owing to the great amount of information available (more than there had ever been), since the Regime was unable to conceal information about a trial in which 9 death sentences and 517 years of prison were sought.

The trial with which the Francoist authorities sought to cut off ETA's escalation at the root and with exemplary forcefulness turned out to be a true political and propaganda disaster for Francoism. The Burgos Trial created a wave of international solidarity, though especially in the Basque Country and Spain; the whole anti-Francoist opposition supported the defendants. What the Franco Regime had conceived as an exemplary trial before Basque and Spanish society, to counter any plan of determined action against Franco, ended up turning the accused into heroes. The defendants turned the situation around, converting the show trial into a trial denouncing Francoism itself. The defendants divided up roles so as to speak each day on a particular subject: the oppression of the workers, industrialization, the pressure against Basque... Many of the lawyers of the Burgos Trial would later play leading roles in the Transition, such as Gregorio Peces-Barba, Juan María Bandrés or José Antonio Etxebarrieta. The lawyers managed to slip recorders under their gowns, recording the whole trial. Mario Onaindia, the great ideologue of the defendants' strategy, made a very elaborate and intellectual speech, defining himself as a Marxist-Leninist and an internationalist, as well as refusing to recognize the court trying him. During the trial, at a moment of great tension, he stood up and confronted the soldiers trying him. The defendants followed him and began to sing the Eusko Gudariak, although they sang only the first verse, since they considered the rest of the song excessively patriotic and chauvinist:

[...] of the right to give no more than first name and surnames, because I want to take advantage of this opportunity they have given me to exalt the struggle of the Basque People and denounce the oppression it suffers; GORA EUSKADI ASKATUTA! EUSKO GUDARIAK GARA EUSKADI ASKATZEKO, GERTURIK DAUKAGU ODOLA BERE ALDEZ EMATEKO! [...]

ETA surprised everyone and got ahead of the Trial by kidnapping a German consul, Eugen Beihl, in San Sebastián, and threatening that the consul's life would depend on the course the trial took. The kidnapping helped project the cause of the ETA militants in international public opinion. The Burgos Trial kept the country in suspense for a good while. Popular mobilization resulted in more than 1,000 arrests, more than 200 of them in Madrid. In Eibar, in one of the clashes between police and workers showing solidarity with the defendants, the young worker Roberto Pérez Jauregi died. Catalan intellectuals of the stature of Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies, Joan Manuel Serrat or Raimon staged a sit-in at the Sanctuary of Montserrat to show their solidarity with the accused and to demand recognition of the rights of minorities throughout Spain.

The labor movement

CAF was the scene of the first great strike of the 1960s

Society's accommodation to Francoism and the expectations of order and stability broke down at the end of that decade of Development. The resurgence of the Labor movement during the 1960s, led by the new Working class born of immigration and Francoist Development, was the consequence of the new system of labor relations approved in 1959-1962. Strikes remained prohibited, but the principle of negotiating collective agreements was introduced, which strengthened company juries and union delegates. Moreover, it determined that, from then on, wages and working conditions would be regulated in direct agreements between the representatives of employers and workers, and not, as until then, by the Ministry of Labor. The first great strike in many years, which took place at the CAF company in Beasain in December 1961, was motivated precisely by the negotiation of the Collective Agreement. The following year another equally bitter and tense conflict for the same reason occurred at the Vasconia Factory in Bilbao. In the spring of that same year, 1962, some 50,000 workers went on strike in Biscay and Gipuzkoa in solidarity with the miners of Asturias (also on strike over the negotiation of their own agreement); the Francoist Government declared a State of Emergency, certain legal guarantees of the population were suspended, and the repressive work of the police was facilitated.

From 1963 conflicts and stoppages were, despite repression, habitual in Biscayan and Gipuzkoan companies, generally for wage reasons, but also to force the readmission of dismissed workers and even for political reasons, for example on the occasion of May Day, the workers' holiday banned by Francoism. This conflict was to a large extent led by Comisiones Obreras, a new type of clandestine trade unionism that arose in Biscay in 1962, in which communist influence was considerable, though not exclusive. The Comisiones Obreras organized workers outside the union to fight clandestinely against the Regime and, at the same time, infiltrated the Vertical Syndicate with the aim of destroying it from within.

Gipuzkoa was the most conflict-ridden province in Spain in 1964; it recorded 16% of all strikes, estimated at 484. Between 1967 and 1972, 525 labor conflicts were recorded in Gipuzkoa, 502 in Biscay and 121 in Navarre. Encouraged by the successes they achieved with their actions, the workers steadily increased their protest activity, holding broad strikes among the workforces of the large factories. The Strike at Bandas was the longest strike of the whole of Francoism and one of the best known and most moving. It was a large factory, with more than 500 workers, which remained on strike for almost a year in 1966-1967. Most of its workers came from farmsteads, so they had enough sustenance to carry out a long strike of this kind. Moreover, the Church lent its premises for holding the assemblies, which the workers' wives also attended. This strike aroused, for the first time in a long while, a great deal of solidarity in the Basque Country and in the rest of Spain: 107 priests published a letter in solidarity with the workers, the workers' children were sent to other families to be looked after, and there was very tenacious resistance. The Regime responded by declaring a State of Emergency and by imprisoning and prosecuting the leaders of that strike and part of the leadership of the clandestine workers' opposition in Biscay.

Late Francoism

The XXV Years of Peace celebrated in 1964 seemed, at the start of the 1970s, a memory of a distant and stiff past in the face of the effervescence of the protests that marked the beginning of that decade. Not even the commutation of the death sentences in the Burgos trial, which took place on December 30, 1970, achieved the desired effect. The gesture, far from seeming a magnanimous act, became one more proof of the weakness of the Regime. The latest events highlighted the profound social and political change that Basque and Spanish society had undergone in a few years.

The Burgos trial marked the beginning of the terminal phase of Francoism, because of the whole wave of protests and solidarity it produced both in the Basque Country and in the rest of Spain. This brought about clashes among the various forces of the Regime. Franco, by then of very advanced age, proved unable to control in a balanced way the various families that had taken part in his Governments.

Labor unrest

Although the strikes during the Dictatorship had evident political connotations, most of them arose for strictly labor reasons, generally based on wage increases, as happened in the 1960s in the strike of 1962 or in the Bandas strike in 1966-1967. The increase in labor unrest brought with it repression against the leaders and militants of the labor movement such as David Morín. The repression consisted of acts of police brutality and also of banishing workers' leaders; for example, Tomás Tueros was banished to Cuéllar. The banishment of leaders only spread the labor movement to places traditionally untouched by these phenomena, to the misfortune of the Regime.

Throughout December 1970, the workers' mobilizations and stoppages resulting from the Burgos trial followed one another across much of the Basque territory, giving rise to the broadest strike movement known since the Civil War. The class organizations led by Comisiones Obreras, with the support of the PCE, found fertile ground for solidarity mobilizations. Regardless of the differences that many of the militants and sympathizers who took part in the protests might have with the methods, and even with the objectives, of the defendants, the truth is that they experienced the summary trial as one more display of the force and intolerance of the Regime against any kind of dissent. The arrest and imprisonment of those who showed solidarity with the defendants became a new reason for protest. The picture was further complicated by strictly labor demands and by the calling of the union elections of 1971 after the approval of a new union law.

The battle fought over this issue largely shaped the future of the labor movement during the following years. This battle was played out among three parties: the Vertical Syndicate, the Comisiones Obreras and the rest of the class union organizations. The most active organization was the Comisiones Obreras, which were organized more as a socio-political movement than as a trade union. They promoted an active infiltration of the Vertical Syndicate by standing in the union elections in which union delegates and company jury members were appointed. On the other hand, the historic class organizations (ELA-STV, CNT and, above all, UGT) boycotted participation in the union elections because they understood that any participation of this kind could be considered a legitimization of the Francoist Regime.

However, the circumstances created by the repression over the Burgos trial, chiefly the arrests, delayed and harmed the reorganization of the labor movement, at least until 1973. By then some problems began to be felt that would mark labor unrest over the following years. In 1971 the Ministry of Labor published a text in which it declared that any labor conflict was a conflict of public order, and therefore political. Consequently, any demonstration or strike occurring in that sphere would be answered as a public-order conflict. Above all as a result of the great repression that took place over the solidarity with the defendants in Burgos, the union movement would be seriously hit; many leaders and rank-and-file trade unionists ended up before the Public Order Court and were removed from their posts of union representation. In addition, internal dissent began to arise within the labor movement as ever younger people joined, with other kinds of attitudes and perspectives on the anti-Francoist struggle. The labor movement would not recover until 1973.

The demands of the workers' representatives found a significant echo among the workforces, which became increasingly radicalized owing to the intransigence of the employers and the politicization of the period itself. In this context it was increasingly difficult to distinguish conflicts of labor origin from those arising from political motives, since strikes were beginning to spread without many distinctions. The bloody response of the public order forces undoubtedly helped to spread and radicalize the conflicts even further. Events such as those of March 10, 1974 in Ferrol, where two workers (Amador Rey Rodríguez and Daniel Niebla García) died of gunshot wounds and dozens of demonstrators were injured, were answered with a major stoppage in the industrial area of Biscay and Gipuzkoa. Similar events took place in April 1973 in Sant Adrià de Besòs, where Manuel Fernández Márquez was killed.

In any case, the intensification and radicalization of protests in the world of labor in the Basque Country over the last three years of Francoism never reached the revolutionary profile that some organizations believed they saw at the time. Not even the call for a General strike on December 11, 1974 (promoted by the sectors to the left of the PCE and by other organizations such as the PSOE, the UGT and the sector of Comisiones Obreras not controlled by the PCE) responded to strictly political issues. It was precisely the high cost of living that led workers to mobilize. The mobilizations began on December 2 and 3 and culminated on the 11th with a General Strike whose following surprised even its organizers. This day of protest was marked by a whole series of street protests with road blockades, the throwing of Molotov cocktails and even false bomb warnings. All this gave rise to real chaos that paralyzed the provinces of Biscay and Gipuzkoa, with more than 1,000 companies affected and 110,000 workers on strike. The Regime's official reports reflected the social and political tension experienced during those last months of the Dictatorship. The State of Emergency decreed in April 1975 and the announcement of the Court-martial against the ETA militants José Antonio Garmendia Artola and Ángel Otaegui Etxebarria raised the temperature even further, giving rise to a new General Strike at the end of August that ended with a large number of workers sanctioned and dismissed in several companies. The executions by firing squad of Juan Paredes Manot (Txiki) and Ángel Otaegui together with militants of the FRAP caused a real shock in Basque public opinion, giving rise to an unprecedented mobilization. The stoppage in the Biscayan industrial area was very large, and practically total in Gipuzkoa, with numerous incidents and clashes with the public order forces.

One of the fundamental factors that facilitated the increase in labor conflicts throughout this final period of the Dictatorship was the spread of workers' assemblies in companies. The aim of the assemblies was to confront the decisions that the union leaders had taken. During the hot autumn of 1974, these bodies elected representative committees in order to negotiate directly with management, as happened in some companies on both banks of the Estuary of Bilbao. Over the following years they became an indispensable element in shaping the collective action of workers. Strikes such as that at CAF in Beasain in 1973, that at Firestone in Basauri in 1975 or that at Michelin in Lasarte would never have reached the proportions or the social echo they obtained without the permanent convening of assemblies. Before the formation of the so-called "Coordinating Committee of Factory Delegates of Biscay", various unitary experiences took place among workers of two or more companies, as happened on the Left Bank of the Nervión Estuary. The most significant case occurred during the serious conflicts of October 1974, when joint assemblies were called by the dismissed workers of Babcock & Wilcox and General Eléctrica Española. This experience took shape in a permanent "Coordinating Committee of Factories in Struggle", which managed to bring together the workers of these two companies plus those of Astilleros del Cadagua. These first movements were confined to very specific areas of Trápaga, the Left Bank and Basauri. But the later prominence of the assemblies was, if anything, even more evident in areas of late industrialization, where the class union organizations were weaker; as happened in Vitoria, where in a few months things led to a labor conflict of enormous proportions that ended with the terrible Events of March 3, 1976.

At first practically all the opposition union organizations were in favor of the assemblies, but as the assemblies grew they became ungovernable in many cases. Faced with this situation, during the first years of the Transition the most powerful union forces withdrew their support for this form of organization, alarmed by a process in which they ran the risk of losing control of the assemblies.

Union reconstruction

Labor unrest in the Basque Country was closely linked to the reorganization of the labor movement. The Comisiones Obreras were the most powerful, active and organized socio-political movement during the 1960s and remained so during the 1970s. The old unions from before the War, such as the UGT, the CNT or ELA-STV, reached the end of the Dictatorship exhausted.

The arrival of a new generation, the activism of Catholic organizations such as the HOAC and the economic boom brought with them an effervescence in society. The Catholic organizations fought to build a more just society in which authentic Christian fraternity could exist, that is, a society in which there would be no exploitation of man by man. They promoted the meeting of different sensibilities, with attitudes increasingly and openly opposed to Francoism. In the 1960s the Unión Sindical Obrera, USO would also appear, drawing on Catholic militants of leftist inspiration.

In this context the first factory or company commissions were formed in each workplace. They were open organizations, completely clandestine and outside the law, where anyone with concerns was invited to come. The first to attend were mainly Catholics who had broken away from the HOAC, groups of the PCE and groups of ELA-STV. Later this movement would be consolidated into provincial commissions; in the case of Biscay it was constituted in 1963. From then on one can begin to speak of the Comisiones Obreras as an increasingly important organization in the Basque union and political sphere. The Catholic element was very important in this movement. In the Bandas strike of 1966-1967, ELA-STV as well as Catholics, priests, intellectuals and others took an active part. From 1967 the repression was so great that the dismantling of the unions nearly finished off the Comisiones Obreras. The movement would not recover until 1970. In 1972 the leaders of the General Coordinating Committee of the Comisiones Obreras were arrested in Madrid, where Marcelino Camacho and Nicolás Sartorius, among others, fell. The importance of the 1001 Trial was more notable in the rest of Spain than in the Basque Country itself. Among those arrested was Pedro Santiesteban, as representative of the Workers' Commissions of Euskadi at that meeting.

In addition, during this period the historic class organizations were also recomposed; that is, the UGT, the CNT and ELA-STV. Coming from the republican tradition, they too had to adapt to the new situation created at the beginning of the 1970s in the Basque Country.

The renewal of the UGT was promoted, among others, by the Basque (and more specifically Biscayan) leaders Nicolás Redondo and Eduardo López Albizu (Lalo), although the paternity of the change cannot be attributed to one specific sector. The UGT, like the PSOE, gradually established itself throughout the State during these years, largely driven by the organization in the Basque Country, where it was most consolidated. At the XI Congress in exile in 1971, Nicolás Redondo was elected political secretary of the organization and in this way the leadership of the organization, which until then had been in exile in Toulouse, was brought inside the country. At this congress a call was made to all anti-Francoist forces to create a common bloc against the system, with which numerous union mobilizations were called, mainly together with the CCOO.

In the nationalist sphere, ELA-STV, as a historic organization, went through problems very similar to those of the UGT. Exile had ended up distancing the leadership abroad from the daily reality lived in the Basque Country, to the point that from 1964 one could in practice speak of two different organizations with their respective strategies and confrontations. This circumstance also conditioned the organization's evolution. At the end of 1970, coinciding with the end of the Burgos trial, the unions were practically dismantled. The PCE would then end up controlling the Comisiones Obreras, and ELA-STV (which was inside the Comisiones Obreras) left these bodies. From then on ELA-STV would fight on its own, amid an internal struggle between the so-called "Eladios" and the "Baroja-Bengoas". The "Eladios" advocated hibernating in the face of a Francoism they saw as far from disappearing. The "Baroja-Bengoas", for their part, would carry on quite significant activism in the sector of the social schools. In 1974 ELA-STV held the debate on whether the party should be built first and then the union or vice versa. After an arduous internal struggle, the idea of a strong union over the party, defended by the "Baroja-Bengoas", was the majority choice.

During the last years of the Dictatorship new union forms appeared, always born in the heat of assembly-based practice. One of them represented the union and political sensibility of radical abertzalism: the union Langile Abertzaleen Batzordeak (LAB). In its early years LAB took as its model, when developing its idea of labor organization, the Comisiones Obreras of the 1960s, in the sense that they were an open and unitary socio-political body. The Executive Committee of ETA (pm) was in favor of what was called a "splitting" of political action, always directed by Pertur. Pertur had the model of the far left of the PCE (he declared himself a comunista abertzalea) and with that idea he tried to create a new ETA; he created a youth wing, a student movement and, more importantly still, the Comisiones Obreras Abertzales (COA), which would evolve into LAB, the union arm of ETA (pm). In those years in the Basque Country, the CCOO had great strength in calling strikes, while those called by ETA (pm) had not been as successful. In that context, LAB would be a body separate from ETA (although at first all its militants belonged to that organization), broad and initially not pro-independence, since Pertur considered that this issue could divide the workers. Thus LAB was constituted as an organization to compete with the Comisiones Obreras, which were the great model and what worked at that time.

The Basque union landscape would still take time to become clear, but the most significant union organizations were beginning to take up positions at the end of the Dictatorship.

The recomposition of political organizations

As happened with the class unions, most of the political organizations of the opposition to Francoism had placed their leadership abroad. The changes taking place both in the Basque Country and in the rest of Spain required, however, a rethinking that would bring the leadership closer to the real pulse of society. This required moving the leaderships inside the country, which inevitably had to be accompanied by a process of renewal, both generational and purely strategic. The process was not at all easy, above all for the formations attached to a situation that began as transitory and that, over the years, had become practically permanent and without prospects of change.

Juan de Ajuriaguerra, leader and reference figure of the PNV inside the country, at a rally.

The PNV had led the Basque Government in exile and, until that moment, represented the hegemonic force of the nationalist world. The question became more complicated for this party because of the irruption of ETA and the prominence it had achieved after the attack on Melitón Manzanas and, above all, as a result of the Burgos trial and the assassination of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. These events gave the organization a popularity that worried the PNV. For a significant part of Basque society, especially the young, ETA had a special attraction and represented the most forceful response against Francoism. For this reason, when the jeltzale party received a new offer to form a national front made up of the PNV itself, ETA, ELA-STV, EGI-Batasuna and a series of other abertzale groups (a proposal largely encouraged by the climate created by the Burgos trial), it not only distrusted it but reaffirmed its pact with the rest of the political forces that made up the Basque Government in exile. In reality, the chances of an entente between the PNV and ETA were truly minimal, given the incompatibility of their respective strategies and political projects. The PNV always defended the union of the Basque political forces within the Basque Government, so its relationship with these parties was always closer than with organizations outside it. The PNV's activism in these years was shown in continuous acts of resistance against Francoism, such as the clandestine celebrations of Aberri Eguna, displays of Ikurriñas or graffiti. Juan de Ajuriaguerra was the party's top leader and reference figure inside the country and was in favor of a generational change at the beginning of the 1970s. In this way, although the influence of men such as Jesús María Leizaola, Manuel de Irujo or Ajuriaguerra himself remained important, other young leaders such as Luis María Retolaza, Xabier Arzalluz, Joseba Leizaola, Sabin Zubiri, Gerardo Bujanda, Mikel Isasi, Jokin Intxausti or Joseba Azkarraga joined the leadership.

At that time the jeltzale leaders focused their objectives on obtaining a statute of autonomy. For this reason, despite the differences, relations were much easier with the two anti-Francoist coordinating bodies that emerged at the end of the Dictatorship. In July 1974 the Democratic Junta, made up mainly of the PCE and some republican and monarchist personalities, proposed to the PNV that it officially join this body, whose meetings the veteran jelkide José María Lasarte attended in a personal capacity. A year later, in June 1975, the Platform of Democratic Convergence was formed, promoted by the PSOE, which the PNV finally officially joined. The PNV had gone through major problems, but it reached the end of the Dictatorship with a fairly well-defined political plan, with a short-term objective (the recovery of Autonomy) and with the explicit support of the rest of the political forces of the Basque Government in exile.

The socialists tried to redefine their political project and their space within the anti-Francoist opposition. Until the 1960s the role of historic figures of Basque and Spanish socialism such as Antonio Amat or Ramón Rubial was fundamental. Antonio Amat was the man inside the country who in 1953 received the task of reorganizing the Socialist Party throughout Spain, a task he carried out until his arrest in 1958. Antonio Amat had been raising the need for a generational renewal in Spanish socialism, which meant the incorporation of new resisters who no longer came from the War but from the social upheaval that was taking place. However, this renewal was postponed until later. In 1958 he was succeeded by Ramón Rubial, who had left prison two years earlier after a 16-year stay. He would be the one who would organize the party's structure inside Spain, a post he held until the beginning of the Transition. These two men were the great figures in the PSOE during Francoism; not only of Basque socialism, but also of Spanish socialism as a whole.

In May 1970 the Basque socialists vindicated the party's revolutionary socialist tradition, in an attempt to attract the vanguards of the workers' and intellectual worlds. This process, undoubtedly complicated and traumatic, accelerated among the Basque socialists; the Renovators, headed by Nicolás Redondo, Enrique Múgica and Eduardo López Albizu, joined the Standing Commission, that is, the Executive Commission inside the country, in November 1970. Nicolás Redondo was a very important figure, who symbolized the union of the union tradition with the political world. In 1974, at the Suresnes Congress, the generational change took place and control of the party passed from abroad to inside the country at the hands of Isidoro (the alias of the socialist leader Felipe González). Like Amat and Rubial, these socialists had an importance that transcended the Basque scene and had a general dimension at the Spanish level. The work of the Gipuzkoan labor lawyers Txiki Benegas and Fernando Múgica (brother of Enrique Múgica) should also be highlighted.

File:ORT Logo.jpg

In the last years of the Dictatorship new far-left parties appeared, such as the PTE, the ORT (logo in the image) and the MCE-EMK, always influenced by the protests of May 1968.

For their part, the Basque communists undertook their own reconstruction process in the final stretch of Francoism, which was favored by the return of Ramón Ormazábal, the historic leader of the PCE in the Basque Country, after his release from prison. During this period the communists maintained contacts with ETA that were formalized in a joint document denouncing repression signed in November 1970. There was an attempt by the PCE to delve into the nationalist world, which it found attractive but unfamiliar. This effort should be understood within the PCE's search to join forces with the aim of reaching more people. From that internal debate came the meeting between these distinct political cultures. Between 1973 and early 1974 there was an influx of militants, most of them highly qualified, coming from ETA into the Communist Party of Euskadi, such as the historian José María Garmendia. The II National Assembly of Euskadi in 1970 and the II Congress of the PCE-EPK in 1974 would reflect this internal process of the party. This process largely explains the tensions that would arise in the future in the PCE-EPK, owing to the difficult fusion of political cultures that came from very different worlds.

In any case, neither the PSOE nor the PCE monopolized left-wing political sensibility in the Basque Country during those years. Other far-left parties, born in one way or another from the embers left by the French May of 1968, had a certain prominence at the end of the Dictatorship, above all in the union and student spheres. In this respect the presence of the Party of Labour of Spain or the Revolutionary Workers' Organization, both linked to Marxism-Leninism of Maoist orientation, should be highlighted; but above all that of the Communist Movement of Euskadi. The first elections of the Democracy would highlight the scant social support for all these small parties, but the evidence cannot be denied that in the last years of Francoism their prominence, in the labor movement as well as in the neighborhood and student movements, was very notable, above all among the youngest sectors of anti-Francoism.

ETA in late Francoism

The leadership of ETA (Mario Onaindia, Teo Uriarte, Jokin Gorostidi, Xabier Izko...) was arrested in 1970, leaving the organization practically dismantled. The fall of the leadership caused an unprecedented crisis in the organization in which ETA's internal contradictions came to light; the revolutionary nationalism decided upon at the V Assembly had not been assimilated, that is, the union between socialism and nationalism had failed. Despite everything, and even despite the growing social support that ETA achieved on the occasion of the Burgos trial, the protest movement did not contribute to the organization's internal cohesion, and new tensions arose within it. The tendencies of ETA that had tried to go deeper into Leninism ended up moving to the left, leaving nationalism; and the more nationalist tendencies of ETA abandoned socialism, taking refuge in nationalism. In 1970 ETA was divided into four sectors: the leadership (directed by Patxo Unzueta) was the most powerful sector; the "Red Cells" (directed by José María Escubi), of Marxist ideology; the "Anti-Colonialist" sectors (directed by Julen Madariaga); and the "Militarists", a nationalist current without an ideology as elaborate as that of the other currents.

ETA committed its most important assassination on December 20, 1973, in which the President of the Government Luis Carrero Blanco was killed. The attack, like the one that had ended the life of Melitón Manzanas, was generally viewed with sympathy by the population. In the image, the plaque in memory of Carrero Blanco at the place where he was attacked.

Meanwhile, the VI Assembly of ETA was breaking with nationalism, shifting its political orientation toward the labor movement and the Trotskyism represented by the Revolutionary Communist League. However, its more militaristic line was gradually imposed by way of faits accomplis, as would become clear within a few months. By then ETA had already murdered the municipal policeman of Galdakao Eloy García Cambra in August 1972 and, presumably (because there was never a claim of responsibility and the bodies never appeared), three young Galicians living in Irun: José Humberto Fouz, Jorge Juan García Carneiro and Fernando Quiroga Veiga, whom ETA apparently mistook for policemen in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. But without any doubt the zenith of ETA's activity was the assassination of the President of the Government Luis Carrero Blanco on December 20, 1973 at the hands of the Txikia commando. The assassination caused great social upheaval and a major crisis within the Regime. The scenes of enormous tension during the funeral of the President of the Government were one of the clearest proofs of the tensions the attack created and of the delicate situation experienced at that time; Cardinal Vicente Enrique y Tarancón, symbol of openness within the Church, was insulted and threatened by far-right elements and, moreover, snubbed by several Ministers. The situation created after the assassination of the President of the Government was one of great uncertainty within the Government itself, above all because it created an unforeseen scenario. The explicit support that the President of the Government had given to Prince Juan Carlos caused his position within the Regime to wobble, while giving wings to the most immobilist sectors. In any case, the attack was received very differently among broad sectors of Basque society, for whom the action lent prestige to terrorism, since those responsible were able to maintain, and in a way display as a trophy, the decisive role they had played in the end of Francoism. The truth is that the attack on Carrero Blanco, as happened in the case of police commissioner Melitón Manzanas in 1968, had the support or acquiescence of a significant social and political sector, as became clear throughout the Transition in the atmosphere of political effervescence experienced at the fiestas of the towns and cities of the Basque Country, where the attack was cheered by thousands of people. Undoubtedly the consequences of all this, including the significant legitimization that ETA terrorism enjoyed, persisted for decades.

However, attacking the President of the Government, an Admiral who had fought the war with Franco and who had stood out for his violence against the anti-Francoist opposition, was not the same as doing so indiscriminately, as happened shortly afterward. It was not the same for those who had watched the irruption of this movement with sympathy, nor was it for many militants within the ranks of the organization itself. On September 13, 1974 ETA planted a bomb in the Cafetería Rolando in Madrid, frequented by members of the security forces, and murdered 13 people, most of them civilians. The only member of the Security Forces injured in the attack, Félix Ayuso Pinel (an inspector of the General Police Corps), died in January 1977 as a result of the very serious wounds from which he could not recover. In the terrible attack 80 people were injured. The bloody attack accelerated the internal tensions already existing in the organization. The debate over whether or not to claim responsibility (which in fact never happened) accelerated the internal crisis. The organization was divided into two branches: ETA Military, ETA(m) and ETA Political-Military, ETA(pm). Nevertheless, the differences between the two groups were not limited solely to the question of authorship of the attack but to a much more decisive debate on the role of the so-called "armed struggle" and its articulation with popular struggle. ETA(pm), led by Eduardo Moreno Bergareche (Pertur) and Javier Garayalde (Erreka), maintained the insurrectional strategy based on a Leninist-style formation along the lines of other South American groups such as the Uruguayan Tupamaros or the Chilean MIR. ETA(m), headed by José Miguel Beñarán (Argala), rejected, as an armed group, participation in mass actions.

Within the structure of ETA(m), generally composed of members with less cultural education than those of ETA(pm), Argala was the leader and brain of the organization and the one who would write the propaganda. The combined armed struggle, political struggle and workers' struggle had unleashed repression on all fronts against ETA, so Argala decided to separate them. ETA(m) would simply fight by means of terrorist techniques, separated from politics, becoming a professional army. Argala would be the architect of defining ETA(m) as a revolutionary vanguard. According to this revolutionary vanguard, those who risked their life, freedom or well-being would have to occupy a more prominent position in the movement's hierarchy and would direct its course above the political arm. The armed organization would be the guarantor of orthodoxy, the one that would guarantee the purity of the movement. Through this division it was ensured that the political formations would not be contaminated and have problems with the police, while ensuring that ETA(m) itself would not suffer strategic deviations because of negotiations by the political parties. The split into a revolutionary vanguard and a political party would have consequences beyond the Transition. In 1977, after the first democratic elections, the importance that the political parties achieved forced a revision of the splitting strategy. The creation of the Herri Batasuna coalition in 1978 meant the beginning of a strategy by Argala and ETA(m) to control the political arm. The party would be subordinated to the hierarchy defined by Argala in the revolutionary vanguard.

Pertur would be the most prominent figure of ETA(pm). The strategy designed by Pertur also included a splitting of political activity and military activity; the political arm, which would be Euskal Iraultzarako Alderdia (EIA), would take advantage of the openings presented by the incipient democratic political system (participating institutionally) from a pro-independence and Marxist approach, complemented by the military strategy that ETA(pm) would apply. Precisely this combination of political and military paths is what differentiated ETA(pm) from the pure splitting of ETA(m). However, its terrorist activity was no less important for that; in May 1974 ETA(pm) murdered the Guardia Civil Manuel Pérez Vázquez after a robbery at CAF in Beasain, and in September 1974 it killed another Guardia Civil (Martín Durán Grande). On October 29, 1974 the Guardia Civil stopped the ETA(pm) member Ignacio Iparraguirre in the Gipuzkoan town of Pasajes; in the ensuing shootout Iparraguirre himself and the Guardia Civil Jerónimo Vera García were killed. Convinced of the success of their strategy, the polimilis launched a campaign of attacks that cost the lives of the policemen José Díaz Linares in San Sebastián and José Ramón Morán González in Algorta in the first months of 1975. Throughout the rest of the year and until Franco's death, ETA(pm) murdered Guardia Civiles, policemen and civilians. When Pertur tried to adapt ETA(pm) to the new circumstances that arose after the death of Franco and to change its strategy, he met strong resistance within the organization, mainly from the so-called berezi commandos. The berezis were the elite special commandos of ETA(pm) and were directed by Miguel Ángel Apalategi, Apala, and Francisco Mujika Garmendia, Pakito. They considered Pertur's proposal a "workerist" and "Spanishist" deviation, as had happened with ETA Berri at the V Assembly and ETA-VI at the VI Assembly. For this reason many attributed Pertur's disappearance in the summer of 1976 to the berezi commandos.

Folder with political stickers from the period of the Transition. The photos of the two ETA members shot in the last executions of Francoism stand out: Otaegi on the left and Txiki on the right.

Only 4 days after the death of Franco, ETA murdered the Mayor of Oyarzun, Antonio Echevarría Albisu. The following day it issued a communiqué in which it threatened all mayors if they did not resign within two months. The murder of the mayor of Oyarzun and the subsequent statement marked the beginning of a campaign of attacks against municipal and provincial officeholders that lasted several years, extending over time to militants and leaders of formations such as the UCD, AP, PSOE, PP and UPN. The trail of victims was as dramatic as the political consequences that derived from this campaign. The increase in ETA's actions and the growing labor unrest of the time caused the Dictatorship to focus a large part of its repressive action on the Basque Country. Of the 11 States of Emergency decreed by the Francoist Government in its last 20 years of existence, 10 had a direct impact on the Basque provinces, chiefly Biscay and Gipuzkoa. The application of the States of Emergency further contributed to spreading impunity in the exercise of repression.

All this gave rise to numerous abuses and indiscriminate actions against the population, which gradually created a strong climate of animosity toward the State Security Forces and Corps among broad sectors of Basque society. A large number of these abuses occurred as a result of confusion at road checkpoints, altercations, demonstrations and protests of all kinds, or while detainees were in police custody. But in addition, during the last years of the Dictatorship, repression took very diverse forms. Some were carried out by supposedly uncontrolled elements and far-right groups with clear connections to the State Security Forces and Corps, which acted especially against members of the opposition to Francoism, basically represented by militants or sympathizers of left-wing and nationalist formations and dissident priests. Despite the impunity with which they acted during those years, their appearance was the most palpable evidence of the weakness of the Regime and of the most immobilist sectors, overwhelmed by a situation in which the State was unable to control an increasingly active opposition. As most investigations confirm, these far-right gangs were woven within a mercenary network deliberately established by the Central Documentation Service of the Presidency, which had been conceived and created by Carrero Blanco shortly before he was assassinated. Based on the Francoist intelligence services, various commandos were formed, made up of foreign mercenaries of far-right ideology, common criminals, police informers and members of Spanish far-right groups.

In July 1975, thanks to the work of an infiltrator in the ETA organization (Mikel Lejarza, El Lobo), the police managed to arrest a large group of militants of the political-military branch; among them were Wilson, Ezkerra, José Antonio Garmendia, Ángel Otaegui, Juan Paredes (Txiki) and more than 150 members. This whole wave of repression culminated in the summary trials that took place in the summer of 1975. The Court-martial tribunal sentenced the accused to the Death Penalty; the Regime was inflexible. On this occasion the pressure exerted by demonstrations and foreign governments made no impression on the top of the Government nor on Franco himself, as had happened 5 years earlier with those sentenced in the Burgos trial. On the morning of September 27 the ETA(pm) members Juan Paredes (Txiki) and Ángel Otaegui were shot, together with the militants of the Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front (FRAP) José Luis Sánchez Bravo, Ramón García Sanz and José Humberto Baena. In memory of the last executions of Francoism, Luis Eduardo Aute composed the song "Al Alba".

The Basque Church

The Church, which had been one of the most solid pillars of the Francoist Regime in the early period, began to show some changes of attitude. During the 1960s the involvement of the Catholic groups of the JOC and the HOAC in labor protests and the publication of the famous letter of the 339 Basque priests clearly showed the importance of internal dissent.

The repression of the ETA phenomenon, indiscriminate and brutal on many occasions, met with a response of solidarity among a significant sector of the heterogeneous Basque clergy, above all among those clearly identified with nationalism. The most radical expression of this process was the formation of the Gogor group, born in 1968, very close to ETA's theses. The case of the priest Alberto Gabikagogeaskoa, imprisoned for the denunciations he had made in a homily in 1964 against torture and the lack of freedoms, opened a cycle of protests that spread among the Basque clergy until the end of the Dictatorship. The reports of the Civil Government of Biscay on the political activities of priests and their involvement in labor protests multiplied during those years. In 1968 several priests were tried by the Public Order Court and some major protests took place, such as the occupation of the Diocesan Curia by a group of priests and the lock-in at the Seminary of Derio. But the most serious events were yet to come.

The change of attitude in the Church brought about by the Second Vatican Council favored the rise to the Catholic Hierarchy of clerics critical of the Regime. An example was the appointment of José María Setién (in the image) as Auxiliary bishop of San Sebastián.

The death of the Bishop of Biscay, Pablo Gúrpide, accelerated the crisis of the Basque Church. The Holy See wanted to appoint as his replacement José María Cirarda, a euskaldun native of Baquio, who was in tune with the reforming spirit of the Second Vatican Council and accepted Basque nationalism. The division in the clergy was evident, above all on the question of Human Rights. The Concordat, signed in 1953, required Franco to present a shortlist of three beforehand in which, evidently in this case, Cirarda (then Bishop of Santander) did not appear. For this reason, the Holy See ended up appointing him Apostolic Administrator of Bilbao in July 1968. In reality it was a canonical formula for appointing him interim Bishop. His appointment ended the protests that had marked the last years of Gúrpide's pontificate. The new pastoral style exuded a renewing spirit that created considerable suspicion in Franco's Government, although it never satisfied the demands of the most radical clergy. Cirarda's attitude, who in 1970 refused to celebrate Mass in the Basilica of Begoña to commemorate the capture of Bilbao by the Francoist troops in the Civil War, or who signed together with the Bishop of San Sebastián a pastoral letter on the Burgos trial, accelerated his transfer to Córdoba in 1971.

In Gipuzkoa the tension had not gone so far, but there were also major problems with the Hierarchy. Bishop Lorenzo Bereciartua, appointed in 1963, had to face some serious protests, such as the walkout of the seminary students in 1964 and 1965. The problems were repeated the following year on the occasion of Aberri Eguna, when several seminarians were expelled for showing solidarity with the persecuted demonstrators who took part in that celebration. His successor, Jacinto Argaya, did not have it any easier, trying to keep a balance between a Regime that distrusted him and a radical clergy that rejected him for his moderation. The problems increased after the appointment of José María Setién in September 1972 as Auxiliary bishop; a Bishop increasingly distant from power because of his clear position in favor of the Second Vatican Council and Human Rights.

The tensions and confrontations reached such proportions that the Regime set up a special concordat prison in Zamora for clerics sentenced to prison terms. The measure contravened the terms of the Concordat and provoked a reaction from the Bishops, but Franco's Regime ignored the criticism. The divorce between the Regime and the Church was becoming evident. The first priest imprisoned in the Zamora prison was Alberto Gabikagogeaskoa in 1967, with the approval of Bishop Gúrpide. At the end of 1973 six priests mutinied and declared a Hunger Strike, and other groups locked themselves in in Bilbao and San Sebastián. The Bishops' mediation with the Regime resulted in a preliminary agreement by which the striking priests would be transferred to other centers, but the assassination of Carrero Blanco several days later halted the negotiations, and they served their sentence in Carabanchel Prison.

However, the most serious incident between the Church Hierarchy and the Francoist Regime was yet to come, and it had the Basque Country as the epicenter of the earthquake that followed. In February 1974 the Bishop of Bilbao, Antonio Añoveros, sent all the Biscayan parishes a text to be read as a homily. The text defended "the right of the Basque People to preserve its own identity", since he considered that it was encountering serious obstacles to enjoying that right. The homily unleashed the wrath of the Government, which decreed the house arrest of the prelate and asked the Holy See to call the Bishop to Rome. The possibility of expelling Añoveros from Spain together with the Vicar General of the Diocese, José Ángel Ubieta, was even considered. But the threat of excommunication of the Government by the Episcopal Conference prevented the measure against the Bishop. Carlos Arias Navarro, successor of Carrero Blanco, even thought of breaking off relations with the Holy See and denouncing the Concordat. The threats were not carried out, but the confrontation highlighted how far the disagreement between the Church Hierarchy and the Regime had gone at the end of the Dictatorship. The State of Emergency of April 1975 and the death sentences carried out on September 27 on the members of ETA and the FRAP only served to raise even further a tension that in those months seemed unsustainable.

A new urban society: the neighborhood movement

At the end of the 1960s and, above all, in the following decade, the ossified life of local politics underwent some changes. Although there was no general turnover either in the attitudes or in the color of the mayors and Presidents of the Provincial Councils in the Basque Country, access through the candidacies of the so-called "Family Third" facilitated the incorporation of certain elements and sensibilities more open to the new times. For example, some Procuradores elected in 1967 tried to liven up the dull life of the Cortes by proposing the introduction of vernacular languages in education. This initiative was proposed by the Navarrese Carlist Procurador José Ángel Zubiaur and supported by the 7 Basque-Navarrese representatives, although it failed in 1970 because of internal division and the opposition of the Government. Álava was probably the territory where the renewal of the elites and the incorporation of new elements was most evident, above all through participation via the "Family Third" in the Municipal Elections. From it and from other local cultural spheres, such as "Los Luises", even some of the future leaders of the most important democratic parties of the Transition emerged, with a political culture of social-Christian origin. Something similar happened in Pamplona and in the Council of Navarre, but this process was much less clear in Biscay, where until the end of the Dictatorship political control of the capital and the Province remained in hands linked to the economic interests of the traditional oligarchy. In any case, the hasty resignation of the last Francoist mayor of Bilbao, Pilar Careaga, largely forced by pressure from the town's neighborhood movement, heralded the major change taking place within Basque society. This process had protagonists unexpected by the Francoist Regime: the residents themselves.

The Neighborhood Movement took strong hold in the Bilbao neighborhoods of Uribarri (in the image, Calle Sendeja in that neighborhood) and Recaldeberri.

Bilbao was one of the places where the neighborhood movement took hold most strongly from the mid-1960s, largely because of the massive rural exodus from rural areas to industrial areas that took place in that decade. One of the main problems faced by immigrant workers was the lack of housing; a problem they tried to alleviate by building shacks in their self-managed neighborhoods on the outskirts of the cities, building what would come to be called the "tin belts". Over time they gained access to rented housing, but always in the working-class rings and peripheral industrial neighborhoods, which is where the neighborhood movement would later be born. The neighborhood movement germinated mainly in Bilbao neighborhoods such as Uribarri and Recaldeberri, and began around a series of demands for improved urban development of these suburban working-class neighborhoods on the outskirts of Bilbao. Among the most common demands were the installation of traffic lights at points where accidents had occurred, as well as the demand for drainage systems and cultural facilities. In this sphere the popular universities were created, the first significant example of which was created in the Recaldeberri neighborhood. This phenomenon of the neighborhood movement would also occur in the peripheral neighborhoods of San Sebastián, Vitoria, Eibar, Barakaldo and other towns. The first demands gave way, over time, to a movement that ended up demanding democratic town councils.

As happened in other spheres, the repression of the first protests caused major social upheaval that conditioned their evolution. One of the most serious events in this respect occurred as a result of the mobilizations in Erandio in 1969, in protest against the heavy pollution caused by nearby companies. The repression of one of the mobilizations ended with two dead and numerous injured. The refusal or inability of the municipal authorities to meet the demands of residents who were asking for schools, outpatient clinics and paved streets contributed to the radicalization of the protests, which little by little were infected by the general atmosphere of those times. The residents' associations resorted to all the legal channels available at the time: letters to Mayors and Civil Governors, technical reports, interviews with national authorities... but they also combined these initiatives with other more striking and forceful ones such as road blockades, sit-ins and demonstrations. Thus, in 1970, 14 residents' associations openly criticized the way councilors were elected, considering that it meant a step backward in democratization and a segregation of economically weak families from municipal management. That same year the neighborhood committees or neighborhood commissions were constituted, semi-clandestine organizations that brought together the most progressive sectors of each association and took an active part in the various mobilizations that occurred as a result of the Burgos trial.

In the 1970s environmental protests against industry increased. In the image, facilities of Dow Chemical in Lejona, against which residents mobilized.

The citizens' movement of Greater Bilbao was the most active of the Basque capitals, owing above all to the deterioration suffered by the neighborhoods and towns of its industrial area and to the enormous concentration of population gathered in an intricate space. In December 1970, the same month in which the protest movement against the Burgos trial took place, a girl died after being run over by a truck in Recaldeberri. Indignation spread through the neighborhood over an event that had been foretold on numerous occasions because of the enormous traffic the neighborhood bore, where there were hardly any traffic lights. In response, residents occupied the streets and there were serious clashes with the police. Between 1971 and 1975 the protest actions against environmental pollution in the area were the spearhead of the neighborhood protests against the installation of the Dow Chemical company in Lejona, the Artigas garbage dump, the emissions from the ore furnaces in Ortuella, etc. One of the most important mobilizations was carried out by the various residents' associations of Bilbao, which managed to gather more than 50,000 signatures against the policy pursued by the town's Mayor, Pilar Careaga, who ended up resigning in 1975. The Recaldeberri association was the most important and served as an example for other associations that would be formed in those years in the rest of Spain. As a result of this strength, this association even published books giving an account of its initiatives and was one of the most important promoters of the signature collection against the Mayor.

In the rest of the Basque Country the citizens' movement came later. In Navarre, although the first residents' association had been born in 1964 in Tudela, they did not have any real activity until 1970 and 1973, the years in which associations appeared in the Rochapea and Burlada. In Gipuzkoa the first associations arose between 1969 and 1970, such as that of Loyola in San Sebastián and that of Galtzaraborda in Rentería. In Álava, owing to its later industrialization and urbanization, the citizens' movement began to manifest itself in 1976, during the last months of the Dictatorship and the first of the Transition, in Zaramaga and Arambizcarra. The strength of the Neighborhood Movement was scattered even though the problems were common. Attempts to create unitary bodies (in Bilbao, for example) did not produce good results. In this context the first protests also arose against the nuclear power plant projects in Deva, Ea-Ispáster and Lemóniz, with the formation of the Commission for the Defense of a Non-Nuclear Basque Coast, which would arise in May 1976.

One of the important aspects of the residents' associations was the participation of women. While in other contemporary social movements (the Labor Movement, the Student Movement...) their participation was blurred, the role of women was notable in the Citizens' Movement. Within the residents' associations the first feminist associations would germinate in the mid-1970s.

In reality, many of those residents who, from the most deteriorated neighborhoods, demanded street lighting and schools for their children, or who protested over every death that occurred in their streets, were claiming to be full citizens of that same city that seemed to exclude them.

The transition to democracy

Franco died on November 20, 1975, giving way to a new time in which the institutions that would succeed the Dictatorship would be set in motion. A dark time in which the longing for change was crushed by the Francoist Regime was followed by a stage characterized by an explosion of freedom, joy and enthusiasm that, however, in the Basque Country soon turned into unease, disquiet and confrontation.

The stage lived between 1975 and 1980 was of special significance; barely five years that meant not only the arrival of Democracy but the birth of a new time during which different strategies were brought into play to determine the political future of the Basque Country. A stage in which events crowded together, passing rapidly from an authoritarian and centralized dictatorial system to a democratic system and an autonomous regime in which freedoms blossomed at every pole of society. It was an important period from an institutional point of view, because of the profound changes that occurred in a very short period of time. During these years the political parties would definitively emerge, as would the whole set of expectations that had arisen in late Francoism.

The death of Franco created numerous uncertainties in the Basque Country, in addition to those raised in general by the Transition. Practically all organizations of one sign or another (including the most extremist groups of Marxist, Maoist or Trotskyist bent) demanded Democracy, but it was included and almost diluted within a broad package of demands ranging from the rights of the Basque People to the seizure of power by the Working Class, without the demand for a democratic system appearing as a specific and priority objective. In reality, many of these organizations, influenced by the National Liberation processes that had taken place internationally during the previous decades and also by a political culture dating from before the republican era, conceived of Democracy from a purely instrumental point of view. For many of them the democratic system was no more than an intermediate step in a long-term process. The consequences of this situation would shape political behavior during the convulsive years of the Transition. The complicated process over the kind of fit of the Basque Country within the constitutional system, which would be one of the fundamental problems during the Transition, was not yet even sensed.

While in the rest of Spain, on the threshold of the Transition, there was a conjunction of political forces creating unitary bodies (such as the Assembly of Catalonia or the so-called "Platajunta"), in the case of the Basque Country this was not possible (although there was an exception in the 1977 Senate Elections with the so-called "Autonomy Commitment"). The Transition followed other courses in the Basque Country, characterized by a fierce struggle between different political projects and conditioned by the terrorism of ETA, which struck and murdered with unimaginable and unbearable brutality. The Basque Country would reveal itself as an invertebrate community where it was impossible to establish channels of communication with a sector of Basque citizens, since they rejected the democratic system root and branch. Another singular characteristic of the Transition in the Basque Country appeared in December 1976 in the face of the Law for Political Reform; the parties of the Opposition to Francoism abandoned the path of rupture and embraced agreed reform. In the Basque Country, however, the struggle between the path of rupture and agreed reform continued, maintaining an illusion of rupture throughout the Transition.

In the Basque society of those years radically different models of conceiving the political functioning of society were opposed, against a backdrop in which violence and terrorism were part of the everyday scene. Despite the profound mutations that took place, the legacy of Francoism could not be resolved; so that the so-called "Basque Problem", far from being solved, became entrenched and grew, becoming in fact the main problem the incipient Spanish Democracy had to face. With the arrival of Democracy, peace was not possible in the Basque Country, mainly because a minority (though numerous) sector did not accept the rules of the democratic game and the institutions with which the majority of Basque citizens provided themselves, making it impossible to reach consensus on basic values within the institutional framework that was being formed. In this way, what had been imagined as a time of encounter and reconciliation turned out, in the Basque Country, to be a period in which freedom was established with pain, with suffering and with many victims; and another kind of silence, thicker but of deep social significance, gradually took hold of the country.

The differences between the Basque Country and the rest of Spain were accentuated; in general, as opposed to the consensus that characterized the Transition in the rest of Spain, the Basque Country lived through a period of very intense tension. While in the rest of the State the forces of the Opposition to Francoism accommodated themselves to an agreed reform as the path to reach and consolidate Democracy, in the Basque Country the tension between reform and rupture continued, favoring the hegemony of nationalism because of the importance attained by the so-called "National Question". Throughout these years two main lines of force with different political and social projects clashed in the Basque Country: in the first were aligned parties such as the PSOE, the PNV, the UCD and the PCE-EPK; in the second were the formations of the far left, but above all and very principally ETA in its various expressions and with its corresponding civilian ramifications, whose most emblematic embodiment was the birth in April 1978 of Herri Batasuna (HB). There were other ideological confrontations, such as the one that opposed nationalists to those who did not feel themselves to be such, a dispute that marked (and marks) the political life of the Basque Country ever since. Nevertheless, this ideological division over nationalism was then overshadowed by the clash that opposed those who sought the establishment of a fragile democratic system to those who not only denied its legitimacy but rejected it outright.

But without any doubt, it was the climate of political violence that flooded the streets of the Basque Country at that time that was the fundamental problem that weighed down the transition toward Democracy. The end of Francoism, with its terrible repression, turned ETA into a symbolic reference for a whole series of groups linked in one way or another not only to political parties but to organizations of the social, union and cultural movements and those in favor of Basque-language revival in the orbit of radical Basque nationalism that revolved around it, getting them to adopt to a large extent certain symbols and ideological and political approaches. The so-called "National Question" or the Right of Self-Determination thus became a rallying banner for all the abertzale organizations and for a good part of the organizations of the Left, from the PSOE to the most extremist parties. The crucial element was, above all, the internalization by a significant sector of Basque society of the legitimacy of the use of violence, and more specifically of terrorism. The death of a large group of ETA militants in various clashes with the public order forces or as a result of the accidental explosion of the explosive devices they were carrying (16 between 1972 and November 20, 1975) helped reinforce the heroic and committed image of ETA militancy within that same social sector. Their figure was raised to the category of martyrs, as had already happened in 1968 with Txabi Etxebarrieta. All this gradually shaped a real Community of Violence, essential to understanding the intensification and persistence of terrorist activity during the Transition in the Basque Country and some of the social behaviors that occurred during that period. The social delegitimization the Government had suffered because of its origin in the Dictatorship produced in the Basque Country a de facto power vacuum, with multiple political and labor protests. This situation was exploited by ETA, which would reach its zenith at the end of this stage (going from 18 murders in 1976 to 93 murders in 1980). In this context negotiations took place between the Ministry of the Interior under Rodolfo Martín Villa and ETA, which failed because of the Minister's insistence on conducting the negotiations publicly. Alongside ETA's violence, the Security Forces continued with a structure inherited from Francoism and exceeded their duties in repressing political and labor protest actions. In addition there were very significant far-right groups that committed violent acts, at times with the complicity (if not collaboration) of certain officials of the Security Forces. The context was therefore extremely prone to destabilization at the very time the new framework was being drawn up.

But other apparently less political issues were beginning to affect Basque society and would condition the transition from the Dictatorship to Democracy as much as or more than the political problems. The Economic Crisis was beginning to be felt; the increase in the cost of living had been one of the first symptoms. Within a few months the Basque Country would feel the scourge of an unprecedented crisis that would end up dismantling the industrial fabric built over a century and sending unemployment rates soaring to unknown levels.

It was a time welcomed at first with great hope because of the possibility of establishing Democracy, and yet five years later the perception would become much more pessimistic owing to the harshness with which the process had unfolded. The paradoxical situation arose in which the attainment of the demands long yearned for by the Opposition to Francoism (such as freedom, amnesty or autonomy) went hand in hand with the intensification of violence and terrorism.

The birth of Euskadi

In the process of forming the new State of Autonomies laid out by the Constitution of 1978, the provinces of Álava, Gipuzkoa and Biscay would be included in the Basque Autonomous Community or Euskadi, taking over from the Basque Government in exile that derived from republican legality. The process of forming Euskadi was singular because of the foral characteristics of the provinces recognized in the Constitution and the extensive powers that would be recognized in its Statute of Autonomy.

When analyzing this 5-year period, it can be divided from the political-institutional point of view into four stages: the first runs from the death of Franco to the approval of the Law for Political Reform, with which the process of dismantling the Dictatorship would begin; the second runs until the first democratic elections in June 1977, in which the political landscape would become clear; the third reaches the constitutional referendum of December 1978, during which the pre-autonomy was set up with the Basque General Council as its most relevant institution, a stage politically marked by a relative predominance of the PSOE, or of the center-left if the UCD is included; the fourth runs until the Elections to the Basque Parliament in March 1980 and the formation of the first Basque Government, with the beginning of the hegemony of the PNV and the attainment of the Statute of Autonomy as the most relevant milestones.

The dismantling of the Dictatorship

The confirmation of Arias Navarro as President of the Government offered a picture clearly continuous with the previous period. However, on the initiative of the King and of the President of the Council of the Realm, ministers of a more reformist character joined the new Government, such as Manuel Fraga (Interior), José María de Areilza (Foreign Affairs) and Antonio Garrigues (Justice). On the King's initiative, the Government tried to carry out a reform of the Regime to adapt it to the democratic standards of European countries. The timid political reform promoted by this cabinet was limited to the laws "on Assembly and Demonstration" and "on Political Associations"; the "Law on Assembly and Demonstration" extended the freedom to meet without the need for authorization, while the "Law on Political Associations" allowed the creation of political groups, though without the legal character of political parties, which moreover had to accept the principles of the Movement and the Fundamental Laws. All these reforms met significant opposition within the Regime, some as important as the National Council of the Movement. But meanwhile, other serious events shook Euskadi, reflecting both the new political climate and the inability of the Arias Navarro Government to undertake a democratic alternative.

One of them took place in Vitoria in March 1976, when a disproportionate and brutal intervention by the armed police repressing a gathering of workers (including the use of firearms) caused the death of 5 of those gathered and numerous injuries in the well-known Vitoria events. It all began in December 1975 with a protest by workers against the decree on wage ceilings and in defense of better working conditions. Factory assemblies were called and, later, joint assemblies to unify the movement, at the end of January and the beginning of February. The strength the movement reached led to the calling of several general strikes; the third general strike was held on March 3. Several massive demonstrations were called that started in the outer neighborhoods of the city and converged in the center. Police interventions began in the morning, and the first use of firearms even took place. In the afternoon the general assembly was called for 4:00 p.m. in the church of San Francisco de Asís in Vitoria; half an hour earlier the police had begun to prevent both entry into the building and the exit of the workers who were already inside. The police began to gas the church to force out the workers gathered in it, so that the people outside began to throw objects at the police to help the others. The police were thus overwhelmed both in numbers and in means, so they began to use firearms, shooting not only into the air but also at the demonstrators themselves. The result was 5 dead, around 60 wounded by bullets and hundreds injured with bruises. The following day Lluís Llach wrote the song "Campanades a morts" in homage to the victims.

Equally serious were the Montejurra incidents of May 1976, on the occasion of the gathering-pilgrimage-political rally that the Carlists held there every year. Violent clashes occurred, as a result of which there were two dead and several wounded by shots from a group of far-right militants (who very probably acted in connivance with State security bodies). In the last years of Francoism, Montejurra had become one of the few authorized anti-Francoist demonstrations taking place in Spain. The National Confederation of Former Combatants, led by José Antonio Girón, and the Traditionalists, led by Sixto de Borbón, met in mid-April in Madrid and agreed to call a demonstration on the day of Montejurra on the spot, as part of a campaign called "Operation Reconquest"; all this in an atmosphere heated by the campaign launched weeks earlier by newspapers such as El Alcázar or El Pensamiento Navarro. On the day before Montejurra, graffiti appeared in Pamplona such as "Montejurra, Rojos NO" or "EKA No", and that same night Sixto de Borbón rented 20 rooms at the Hostal Iratxe. The following day the Carlists gathered, as they did every year, on the Iratxe esplanade to begin the Way of the Cross toward the mountain. Then around 200 people in two rows with trumpets and drums burst onto the esplanade and began to lay into those present. A man who was with the formation (who would become known as the "Man in the Raincoat") drew a pistol and wounded a Carlist Party militant who would die several days later. Once Carlos Hugo de Borbón, then leader of the PC, had joined, the Way of the Cross toward the summit began. Almost on reaching the summit, several submachine-gun shots rang out and wounded Carlist militants began to come down the mountain together with a lifeless body. Both Sixto and his followers quickly left, and only some men dressed as legionnaires remained on the summit. With the summit taken, the Carlists came down from the mountain and canceled the pilgrimage. The men who had stayed at the hostel, seeing that "Operation Reconquest" had failed because of the dramatic turn it had taken, withdrew. Three people were prosecuted (the "Man in the Raincoat" and two others) and spent seven months in prison, but they were released by the Public Order Court by virtue of their "irreproachable attitude". The Government, moreover, prevented an investigation of the events by expelling Sixto de Borbón and other companions from Spain before they testified before the Judge. Finally, the following year the Government would promote a General amnesty, so the events became time-barred. A judgment of the Audiencia Nacional of November 5, 2003 recognized the two murdered men, Aniano Jiménez Santos and Ricardo García Pellejero, as victims of terrorism.

The blocking of political opening caused the fall of Arias Navarro and the appointment of Adolfo Suárez as President of the Government in July 1976, thus beginning a new political time for Spain and for the Basque Country. Suárez was perfectly aware of the importance for Spanish Democracy as a whole of channeling the "Basque Question", facing its problems and being able to confront ETA terrorism (which was becoming the main burden of the Spanish Transition); but first he had to dismantle the apparatus of the Francoist State. Suárez began discreet contacts with the opposition to Francoism, while advocating and securing the approval in the Cortes of a Law for Political Reform that was the legislative embodiment of the process of dismantling Francoism from within the Regime itself.

The Opposition gradually emerged from clandestinity; the PSOE held its XXVII congress in Madrid, attended by important international social-democratic leaders such as Olof Palme or Willy Brandt. At the congress the PSOE made clear its will to negotiate the transition from Dictatorship to Democracy, without renouncing the implicit democratic objective. Santiago Carrillo, the communist leader, gave a clandestine press conference in Madrid demanding the right of the PCE to be legalized. Arrested on December 23, 1976, he was released 8 days later. Meanwhile, the PNV began to prepare its first National Assembly, which would be held in Pamplona in March 1977 and at which the historic leader Juan de Ajuriaguerra would be replaced by the lawyer Carlos Garaikoetxea.

The situation Suárez would find in the Basque Country would consist of various challenges of great complexity, in a context of higher social mobilization than in the rest of Spain. To the contacts with the Opposition was added, as the central representative of nationalism, the PNV; although formations of unknown political weight had appeared to its left, in addition to the very present activity of ETA. Moreover, the Crisis was evident in heavy industry and worsened citizens' living conditions day by day. Finally, the demands for amnesty and autonomy took to the streets in a massive and widespread way.

On December 15, 1976 the Referendum on the Law for Political Reform was held; it was approved with 94.45% of the votes cast in Spain as a whole, with an abstention rate of 22.28%. In the Basque Country it met with a different acceptance; abstention was very high in Gipuzkoa and Biscay, while it approached the national average in Álava and Navarre. The result of the referendum was an eloquent thermometer of how the four provinces breathed politically and of the added difficulties the transition was going to have in these territories; moreover, it allowed the illusion of rupture to be maintained.

Referendum on the Law for Political Reform Do you approve the Bill for Political Reform?
Data	Option	Votes	%
Electorate: 1,596,682 Voters: 922,990 (57.81%) Invalid votes: 2,855 (0.31%) Abstention: 673,692 (42.19%)
	Yes	845,378	91.47%
	No	29,722	3.35%
	Blank votes	45,035	5.19%
	Total valid votes	920,135	100 %

Results by province
Option	Álava	Gipuzkoa	Navarre	Biscay
Yes	103,816 (92.19%)	170,363 (91.92%)	217,879 (93.08%)	353,320 (91.04%)
No	3,066 (2.72%)	4,992 (2.69%)	6,766 (2.89%)	14,898 (3.84%)
Abstention	34,638 (23.47%)	225,228 (54.75%)	84,067 (26.37%)	329,699 (45.87%)
Total electorate	147,590	411,489	318,797	718,806

The Law for Political Reform and its debate led the Opposition to state clearly its desire for a clean break with Francoism, as opposed to Adolfo Suárez, who defended a reform of the Regime from within. After the approval of the law in the referendum, the Opposition accepted Suárez's approach in order to set to work and achieve the objectives being raised at that time, such as freedom or autonomy.

The search for political normalization

Adolfo Suárez lost no time in taking measures to seek the political normalization of the Basque Country and, from his taking office, a trickle of provisions to that end followed. He began in that same month of July with a partial Amnesty Law that did not include blood crimes, and continued with the legalization of the Ikurriña in January 1977, the legalization of political parties in February and the restoration of the General Assemblies in March. In that same month a new extension of the amnesty was promoted and, given its notable shortcomings (since it still did not cover blood crimes), the Amnesty Law was promulgated in October 1977, which this time did include blood crimes (mainly those committed by ETA). This question was criticized by some sectors both in the Government and in the Opposition and proved tragic later on, since many of those amnestied for blood crimes would later return to prison after committing new attacks. In addition, Suárez pursued a policy of constant willingness to dialogue with the other political interlocutors, which would be clearly shown in his decisive intervention when closing the agreement on the Statute of Autonomy (the first to be approved in Spain).

Nevertheless, Suárez did not have it easy, and even less so in the Basque Country, where the remnants of Francoism and sectors of the Army examined the opening measures undertaken with special scrupulousness, limiting his field of play. Thus, for example, the legalization of the Ikurriña led to the resignation of the Civil Governors of Biscay, José Antonio Zarzalejos, and of Gipuzkoa, José Manuel Menéndez, as well as a very harsh note from the Provincial Council of Biscay against the instruction authorizing its use, while it refused to raise it on public buildings. These resignations were followed by others, so that by February 1977 more than 100 local and provincial authorities in the Basque Country had resigned. Nor did the opposition, settled into a dynamic of distrust toward the new reformist project, make things easy for Adolfo Suárez. An example is the coldness or open rejection with which the new civil governors of Biscay and Gipuzkoa were received, despite the open and dialogue-minded attitude they showed.

As for the political scene, the traditional political triangle around which the Basque Country had revolved during the first 40 years of the century (based on nationalism, the PNV; the left, the PSOE and the PCE-EPK; and the right) now added the abertzale left as a fourth component. The exit from Francoism highlighted the accentuation of the political plurality that had defined Basque politics since the beginning of the 20th century, with the appearance of new parties and social movements. Thus, in these years the traditional parties gradually emerged alongside far-left parties: formations such as the MCE-EMK, the LKI or the ORT on the Spain-wide far left; parties such as HASI or LAIA in the case of the abertzale left, apart from what ETA meant, which at that time was acting through two different organizations, ETA(m) and ETA(pm); and finally there also appeared nationalist organizations of a social-democratic character such as ESB-PSV or ESEI. All this, together with the significant mobilization of groups in Basque society, fed the imaginary held by the most radical left of a revolutionary Euskadi, a stronghold in the Europe of that time; a Euskadi capable of setting up a non-bourgeois, participatory, socialist and popular democracy. It also allowed speculation with the idea that society would reward the formations that had most distinguished themselves in the struggle against Francoism, minimizing the support for historic parties such as the PNV or the PSOE. As late as January 1977, the secretary general of the PCE-EPK, Ramón Ormazabal, stated that he hoped to obtain between 10% and 20% of the votes of the Basque electorate; and a few days before the first elections, the PCE-EPK estimated that it would finish ahead of the PSOE.

Another revealing fact about the political atmosphere in the Basque Country was the absence, in the last years of Francoism and the first of the Transition, of a unitary political platform of the opposition in the style of the Assembly of Catalonia. There were some demands shared among the Basque formations and, in fact, there were attempts to reconstitute a unitary body, but the marked contrast between them and the opposing models they upheld made such an understanding impossible. Especially notable was the dividing line between nationalism and non-nationalism, a fracture that had been lived covertly in political circles since the 1960s and that now manifested itself openly with a forceful rejection by the most radical nationalist rank and file of the Spain-wide formations.

In those years it was not unusual for groups of the abertzale left to boycott events organized by the parties of the Spain-wide left or to show disapproval of their public activities. Thus, the first authorized rallies given for the PSOE by Felipe González in Bilbao, Eibar or San Sebastián in February 1976 met repeated attempts at boycott. Among the rank and file of radical Basque nationalism there was a closed conception of the Basque national fact; a seamless devotion to an exalted idea of the construction of the Basque Country that led them to repudiate anyone who did not share their understanding of the Basque nation. These Spain-wide formations were considered to be reproducing oligarchic national oppression and, therefore, had to be treated with hostility.

In any case, nationalism did not present a common image either, and no front in that sense was constituted, although such a possibility was considered at the so-called "Basque Summit" or Chiberta Summit held in the French Basque town of Anglet in April-May 1977. Practically all the nationalist forces attended at the request of Telesforo Monzón, who sought to formalize an agreement to deal jointly with the State on the future of Euskadi. The immediate objective was to take a position on the imminent elections of June 15, 1977, but behind this objective there was in reality a struggle for the hegemony of Basque nationalism; on the one hand the PNV represented traditional nationalism, while ETA represented the new nationalism that emerged under the dictatorship. According to Monzón's political thinking, in the Basque Country only two forces existed: ETA ("etismo") and the PNV ("jelkidismo"). Therefore, according to Monzón, "etismo" and "jelkidismo" had to reach a joint agreement on minimum points in order, once it had been put to the other nationalist forces, to talk with the Government as equals. It was a question, first, of building the country and, later, of considering what kind of society was to be formed, a question Monzón considered secondary at that time. The Spain-wide forces were of no interest to Monzón, since they were Spanish, they were not his own; at the bottom of this question lay the idea that had already appeared at the ETA V Assembly and that identified the Basque with the Basque nationalist, that is, for Monzón and "etismo" what made one Basque was being a nationalist. However, contrary to Monzón's idea, the PNV refused both to boycott the elections as Monzón proposed and to form an abertzale front; moreover, in the Senate it took part in the Autonomy Front with the PSOE.

Not even a political front within the abertzale left was possible. Initially, both ETA(pm) and ETA(m) created an electoral platform under the name Euskal Erakunde Herritarra (EEH) while waiting to see what happened with the amnesty for political prisoners. When the prisoners were released in March, ETA(pm) opted to stand in the elections and broke away from EEH. Thus was born the Euskadiko Ezkerra (EE) coalition, under which name both EIA (the political arm of ETA(pm)) and the MCE-EMK converged. Since the amnesty did not include blood crimes (for that it would be necessary to wait until October), ETA(m) and the rest of EEH decided to boycott the elections.

However, there was collaboration between the PNV and the PSOE on the basis of the minimum demands: freedom, amnesty and autonomy. More specifically, the two formations agreed on the demand for self-government; a demand that, in fact, was taken up by all the forces of the opposition. The exacerbated Spanish nationalism of the Franco regime, accompanied by rigorous centralism, meant that the demand for a new autonomous system of State organization was a substantive part of the program of the opposition parties. It thus happened that the rejection of Francoism produced a convergence between the idea of democracy and that of recognition of the nationalities, so that the demand for freedom was associated with the restoration of the Statutes of Autonomy. It was therefore not surprising that most of the Basque democratic parties (PNV, PSOE, ESEI, PCE-EPK, DCV and ANV) reached the agreement called the "Autonomy Commitment" in May 1977. On the basis of a minimum program, its central objective was to demand the "immediate recognition of the political and administrative personality of Euskadi". As an offshoot of this agreement, for the first democratic elections of June 1977 the Autonomy Front was constituted, with joint candidacies to the Senate in the three Basque provinces and in Navarre by the PNV, the PSOE, ESEI and independents.

The general elections held on June 15, 1977 meant a significant clarification of the Basque political landscape. The election results were a dose of realism, with the opinion of the citizens known for the first time. The strength of each group and ideology was measured, and the daydreams of a socially revolutionary Euskadi evaporated. From the elections two triumphant parties emerged in Euskadi with the highest percentage of votes: the PNV and the PSOE. The fact that they had not been in the front line of the struggle against Francoism did not take its toll on them; rather, a kind of historical memory allowed them to emerge again as dominant forces, just as they had been in the Second Spanish Republic.

1977 Spanish general election Results in the Basque Country
Data	Option	Votes	%	Seats
Electorate: 1,659,466 Voters: 1,297,550 (78.19%) Invalid votes: 4,058 (2.11%) Abstention: 361,916 (21.81%)
	PSE-PSOE	322,617	25.40%	9
	PNV+UAN	314,272	24.74%	8
	UCD	204,636	16.11%	7
	AP+GU+AFN	93,809	7.39%	1
	EE+UNAI	85,906	6.76%	1
	PCE-EPK	67,736	5.33%	0
	DCV+EDP	36,550	2.88%	0
	ESB	36,002	2.83%	0
	Others	121,000	9.53%	0
	Blank votes	3,166	0.25%	-
	Total valid votes	1,270,203	100 %	26

Results by province
Álava			Gipuzkoa			Navarre			Biscay
Option	Votes	Seats	Option	Votes	Seats	Option	Votes	Seats	Option	Votes	Seats
UCD	38,338 (30.86%)	2	PNV	102,494 (30.94%)	3	UCD	75,036 (29.03%)	3	PNV	171,991 (30.92%)	4
PSE-PSOE	34,244 (27.57%)	1	PSE-PSOE	93,010 (28.07%)	3	PSE-PSOE	54,720 (21.17%)	2	PSE-PSOE	140,643 (25.28%)	3
PNV	21,708 (17.48%)	1	EE	31,208 (9.42%)	1	UNAI	24,489 (9.47%)	0	UCD	91,262 (16.41%)	2
AP	7,927 (6.38%)	0	GU	27,048 (8.16%)	0	AFN	21,900 (8.47%)	0	AP	36,934 (6.64%)	1
PCE-EPK	3,906 (3.14%)	0	ESB	18,167 (5.48%)	0	UAN	18,079 (6.99%)	0	EE	30,209 (5.43%)	0
DCV	3,439 (2.77%)	0	DCV	16,627 (5.02%)	0	AET	13,195 (5.11%)	0	PCE-EPK	29,968 (5.39%)	0
Abstention	26,112 (17.06%)	-	Abstention	102,080 (23.33%)	-	Abstention	56,700 (17.76%)	-	Abstention	177,024 (23.62%)	-
Total electorate	153,080	4	Total electorate	437,592	7	Total electorate	319,222	5	Total electorate	749,572	10

The center (represented by the Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD)) and the right (represented by People's Alliance (AP)) obtained respectable results, very much below the national average in the case of the UCD; but they had to face very harsh conditions because of the terrorist pressure they suffered. It was very significant that the only province in which the UCD did not present candidates was Gipuzkoa, and AP stood under the name Guipúzcoa Unida (GU). The coercion exercised by the violent in this province was ever greater, constraining the freedom of these formations and their possibilities of expansion and taking root; and even so, the elections showed that the Spain-wide center-right still had a social space in the Basque Country.

The election results also meant the collapse of the groups to the left of the PSOE, with meager results for the PCE-EPK and the marginalization of the leftist groups. As for the abertzale left, it became evident that it had limited strength, far from what it expected: EE (the coalition supported by ETA(pm)) was left with one seat and a scant 6%, while abstention (the option supported by ETA(m) and all the forces of EEH) remained at percentages similar to the Spanish average, from which it can be deduced that it had a limited impact. In any case, the boycott proposed by these forces made it impossible to obtain an exact political picture of the society of the time.

The constitutional process and the Basque General Council

The holding of the elections of June 15, 1977 meant the entry into a new political stage in which public debate would revolve, basically, around autonomy and amnesty. In its course the two models of building the country openly collided: the democratic one and the one led by the violent. It was also a time in which rifts began to open between the PNV and the PSE-PSOE once the unitary demands had been obtained and channeled, opening the way to the dispute for political hegemony in the Basque Country.

The roadmap of the "Autonomy Commitment" established that, once the elections had been held, an Assembly of Basque Parliamentarians would be constituted to set the autonomy process in motion and draw up a draft statute. This assembly was held on June 19 in Guernica, and all the elected parliamentarians joined it except the Navarrese deputies and senators of the UCD, who rejected the possibility of Navarre's integration into the future Basque community. This absence heralded one of the main obstacles to speeding up the formation of a Basque pre-autonomy regime, since the PSE and, especially, the PNV were in favor of Navarre's integration into the body to be constituted for that purpose. These divergences delayed the constitution of the pre-autonomy body in Euskadi until finally, in December 1977, the deadlock was broken with an agreement whereby the UCD accepted the incorporation of Navarre provided that the competent Navarrese foral body requested it and that it was subsequently ratified by the Navarrese citizens in a referendum. With the obstacle overcome, the creation of a pre-autonomy body was approved, the Basque General Council, which was constituted in February 1978. Among the parliamentary forces there was agreement on the cross-party character this new body should have, which was to reflect the plurality that emerged from the elections.

The Council was formed from members of the parties that had obtained representation in the elections: 5 councilors from the PSE, 5 councilors from the PNV, 3 councilors from the UCD, 1 councilor from EE and 1 independent councilor. When deciding who should preside over the council, Ramón Rubial for the PSE and Juan de Ajuriaguerra for the PNV stood as candidates. After several tied votes, the socialist Ramón Rubial was elected President of the Basque General Council in the eighth round. The PSE's choice to keep its candidate proved very controversial and has continued to be debated since; although the argument put forward at the time, of yielding the presidency to the PNV in order to obtain a greater commitment from that party to the Spanish democratic process, does not seem convincing when evaluated with the passage of time. The fact is that Rubial's election marked a new stage in PSE-PNV relations, from then on more tense and bitter, and also reflected the socialists' decision to lead the autonomy process in Euskadi. For its part, the PNV's reaction was to distance itself from the Basque General Council and, although it took part with five councilorships, it made clear its coldness toward the new institution while standing firm in its decision to maintain the Basque Government in exile presided over by Leizaola. In this way they granted historical legitimacy to the latter, while giving the Basque General Council the status of a mere administrative body until autonomy and the Statute arrived. For this reason, the PNV refused to grant Ramón Rubial the title of Lendakari as President of the Basque General Council, although the term Lendakari was accepted in documents in Basque.

The Basque General Council had to face a very complicated situation. At the start of its mandate it set as priority tasks the restoration of the Economic Agreements, democratic strengthening and an autonomy no less than that achieved in the past; an ambitious task undertaken from a body born without powers, waiting for a statute-law to establish the competences of the Basque Country. The statutory path began when the Basque General Council, without waiting for the referendum on the Constitution, decided in November 1978 to entrust the Assembly of Basque Parliamentarians with drawing up the draft statute. Drafting the project took barely a month, since the aim was for the Basque draft statute to be the first presented to the Congress of Deputies, as this entailed the absence of similar cases that might mean the prior existence of ceilings on competences. Another political element that explains the brevity of the drafting of the statute was the consideration that the achievement of political self-government would be a factor that would calm the situation of tension and political violence. The draft was approved by the Assembly of Basque Parliamentarians on the night of December 23, 1978 and reached the Congress of Deputies shortly before it was dissolved, after the constitutional referendum. The dissolution of the Cortes on December 29, 1978 caused a momentary halt in the procedure.

While all this was happening, Basque society faced another debate raised around the key legal piece of the new Spanish democratic system: the Constitution. This debate brought to the fore the growing divorce between nationalists and non-nationalists. The Constitution enshrined the idea of a "social and democratic State governed by the rule of law", a concept that fused three ideas of different historical origin, which the constitutional text considered united and interdependent: the State under the Rule of Law, the Social State and the Democratic State. The other two basic principles on which the Constitution was founded were the Parliamentary Monarchy (whereby the King became Head of State, but without control of the Executive and subject to the control of parliament) and the State of Autonomies, with which it recognized and guaranteed access to self-government for the various nationalities and regions of Spain. In addition, the Constitution guaranteed the separation of powers through an autonomous governing body for the Judiciary, the General Council of the Judiciary, and the establishment of parliamentarism. Finally, the Constitution established individual as well as collective rights and freedoms (such as the right of association, the right to honor, to effective judicial protection, to the inviolability of the home, and to freedom of expression and information) together with basic social rights (such as the right to housing, to education or to health care, among others).

Until its final approval in the Congress of Deputies, the constitutional draft went through a dense debate in which the PNV took an active part, although it was absent from the committee charged with drawing up the preliminary draft owing to procedural questions (at that time it did not have enough deputies to form its own parliamentary group, which gave access to membership of the committee). The constituent legislators continually tried to get the PNV to commit to the Constitution because of its importance for bringing peace to the Basque Country, but the PNV repeatedly avoided these attempts. Two reasons have traditionally been associated with this attitude; the first is the possibility of being considered a traitor by the militancy of the abertzale left, and the second is associated with the ability to exert pressure later in the drafting of the Statute of Autonomy. The PNV tried to incorporate foral rights into the Constitution and raised it through an amendment to the draft. This amendment gave rise to a long debate throughout the parliamentary procedure and, after modification, was included in the First Additional Provision of the Constitution with the following wording:

La Constitución ampara y respeta los derechos históricos de los territorios forales. La actualización general de dicho régimen foral se llevará a cabo, en su caso, en el marco de la Constitución y de los Estatutos de Autonomía.
(The Constitution protects and respects the historic rights of the foral territories. The general updating of that foral regime shall be carried out, where appropriate, within the framework of the Constitution and of the Statutes of Autonomy.)

It was not the text the PNV had presented, but it contained the key concept of Historic Rights and, in fact, the jelkide deputy Xabier Arzalluz voted for it in the committee of the Congress of Deputies.

The Constitution, as finally drafted, meant an evident step forward for the country's self-government and implied an explicit recognition of the singularity of the Basque Country, generating contradictory opinions within the PNV on whether or not to support it. In the end the PNV did not support the Constitution because it did not share the text of the First Additional Provision, arguing that including the concept of foral rights in an additional provision could give rise to future breaches. However, that provision was later to have a notable legal effect when the Statute of Autonomy was set in motion. In any case, the PNV's choice, read in terms applicable to the Basque Country, meant a new clash with the PSE. The distancing between the two parties was conspicuous and, in turn, the rift between nationalists and those who were not widened.

The constitutional referendum of December 6, 1978 once again reflected the political singularity of the Basque Country, with results that differed from those in the rest of Spain. In the campaign, the Spain-wide parties (UCD, PSOE, PCE and AP) supported approval of the Constitution, the PNV and ESEI favored abstention, while the abertzale left (with its two main references: EE and the newly founded HB) called for a no vote. The results in the Basque Country meant a victory, with 72%, for the supporters of the Constitution, by a wide margin over the no vote, which nevertheless obtained 22% support. The most remarkable thing about these results was the high abstention, which exceeded 51%, well above the overall figure of 33%, with Biscay and Gipuzkoa standing out especially with around 57% abstention.

Constitutional referendum 1978 Do you approve the draft Constitution?
Data	Option	Votes	%
Electorate: 1,913,980 Voters: 934,005 (48.80%) Invalid votes: 13,367 (1.43%) Abstention: 979,975 (51.20%)
	Yes	661,412	71.84%
	No	203,995	22.16%
	Blank votes	55,231	6.00%
	Total valid votes	920,638	100 %

Results by province
Option	Álava	Gipuzkoa	Navarre	Biscay
Yes	73,409 (72.45%)	139,777 (64.56%)	182,207 (76.42%)	266,019 (73.01%)
No	19,726 (19.47%)	65,429 (30.22%)	40,804 (17.11%)	78,036 (21.42%)
Abstention	70,590 (40.71%)	285,357 (56.57%)	120,548 (33.37%)	503,480 (57.54%)
Total electorate	173,412	504,389	361,243	874,936

The attainment of autonomy

Once the Constitution had been approved, the Cortes were dissolved and general elections were called, held on March 1, 1979. In them the civilian brand of ETA(m), Herri Batasuna (HB), was going to stand for the first time, which was also a good barometer for measuring the support the gang had in society.

The results meant a triumph for the PNV, not so much considered in isolation, since it fell both in number of votes and of deputies (from 8 to 7) compared with the 1977 general elections, but because of the debacle of the PSE-PSOE, with a very sharp drop that meant losing some 77,000 votes and some 6 percentage points between those two elections. The UCD, on the other hand, obtained a good result, remaining in practice as the only representation of the Spain-wide center-right in the Basque Country. However, it did not manage to absorb the whole AP vote, which, standing as the Foral Union of the Basque Country, suffered a harsh setback. Possibly the most striking fact of the elections was the strong electoral irruption of the abertzale left, with an HB standing for the first time and obtaining 14% of the votes (some 170,000), which, added to those obtained by EE (in the midst of a process of evolution toward the rejection of terrorism), served to confirm the roots that the community of violence had put down in the Basque Country.

1979 Spanish general election Results in the Basque Country
Data	Option	Votes	%	Seats	Diff.
Electorate: 1,911,185 Voters: 1,277,555 (66.85%) Invalid votes: 25,908 (2.03%) Abstention: 633,630 (33.15%)
	PNV	298,597	23.86%	7	▼1
	UCD	251,909	20.13%	8	1
	PSE-PSOE	245,634	19.62%	6	▼3
	HB	172,110	13.75%	3	3
	EE+UNAI	91,068	7.28%	1	=
	PCE-EPK	51,472	4.11%	0	=
	UFV	34,108	2.72%	0	▼1
	UPN	28,248	2.32%	1	1
	Others	76,311	6.10%	0	=
	Blank votes	3,190	0.25%	-	-
	Total valid votes	1,251,647	100 %	26	=

Results by province
Álava				Gipuzkoa				Navarre				Biscay
Option	Votes	Seats	Diff.	Option	Votes	Seats	Diff.	Option	Votes	Seats	Diff.	Option	Votes	Seats	Diff.
UCD	29,625 (25.41%)	2	=	PNV	87,090 (26.50%)	2	▼1	UCD	83,302 (32.93%)	3	=	PNV	161,480 (29.18%)	4	=
PNV	26,722 (22.92%)	1	=	PSE-PSOE	59,863 (18.21%)	2	▼1	PSE-PSOE	55,399 (21.90%)	1	▼1	PSE-PSOE	105,481 (19.06%)	2	▼1
PSE-PSOE	24,891 (21.35%)	1	=	HB	57,811 (17.59%)	1	1	UPN	28,248 (11.17%)	1	1	UCD	88,431 (15.98%)	2	=
HB	11,594 (9.94%)	0	=	UCD	50,551 (15.38%)	1	1	HB	22,425 (8.86%)	0	=	HB	80,280 (14.51%)	2	2
UFV	7,205 (6.18%)	0	=	EE	42,293 (12.87%)	1	=	PNV	21,305 (8.42%)	0	=	EE	32,363 (5.85%)	0	=
EE	5,442 (4.67%)	0	=	PCE-EPK	10,034 (3.05%)	0	=	PC	19,522 (7.72%)	0	=	PCE-EPK	31,942 (5.77%)	0	=
Abstention	54,253 (31.15%)	-		Abstention	172,369 (33.99%)	-		Abstention	106,708 (29.34%)	-		Abstention	300,300 (34.67%)	-
Total electorate	174,145	4	=	Total electorate	507,142	7	=	Total electorate	363,713	5	=	Total electorate	866,185	10	=

The municipal and foral elections held a month later, on April 3, 1979, only accentuated the trend set by the general elections. The PNV appeared ever more consolidated as the majority force, while the Spain-wide parties continued their marked hemorrhage of votes and the abertzale left, and more specifically HB, was endorsed as a powerful electoral force. The most populous cities of Euskadi gave a comfortable majority to the PNV, which thus took the capitals of the three Basque provinces, while the collapse suffered by the PSE meant that HB overtook it in San Sebastián, Bilbao and Pamplona. The same happened in the elections to the General Assemblies, where the PNV's predominance became overwhelming, with HB emerging as the second political force in Euskadi while the Spain-wide political parties suffered a considerable loss of votes. For its part, the UCD was the most voted force in Pamplona, by a narrow margin over HB. Post-electoral pacts gave the mayoralty of the Navarrese capital to the PSE. The 1979 elections to the Parliament of Navarre were won by the UCD.

The significant backing achieved by HB showed that ETA was not only a problem to be tackled from the police angle but had a major social dimension deriving from the support it enjoyed among a significant segment of the population. The political pluralism of the Basque Country was maintained, but it was reinforced at one of its extremes, in what some authors have called polarized pluralism. Thus, after the elections, a nationalist political hegemony took shape that would be maintained in the following years.

The new composition of the parliamentary institutions was transferred to the Basque General Council, which was remodeled to adjust it to the election results. HB was not present since, in keeping with its anti-system criterion and the delegitimization of democratic institutions, it chose not to attend the parliamentary bodies (the exception being its presence in the municipalities). Thus the new Basque General Council was made up of 9 councilors from the PNV, 4 councilors from the PSE, 4 councilors from the UCD and 1 councilor from EE, with the jeltzale Carlos Garaikoetxea appointed president. The new Basque General Council set as its main objective the negotiation and approval of the draft Statute, steps that had already begun in the previous stage under the presidency of the socialist Ramón Rubial.

After the triumph of the PNV in the general elections, this party assumed exclusive leadership of Basque representation, leaving aside the rest of the political forces, without the protest of any of them having any effect. The importance attained by the PNV in the Basque General Council also led Suárez to focus his negotiating effort on this party when detailing the future Statute of Autonomy. So much so that the key pieces of this statute were agreed bilaterally between the UCD Government and the PNV, leaving to the constitutional committee the task of validating those agreements. Within the parliamentary negotiation, the significant friction that existed between the PSE and the PSOE over the Basque Economic Agreement is worth noting, since the federal leadership considered this instrument a privileged situation compared with other Autonomous Communities, although the PSE's arguments in its favor, about its necessity for establishing Democracy in the Basque Country, finally led it to support it. The Statute of Autonomy was definitively approved by the constitutional committee on July 17, 1979.

The Statute took up a good part of nationalist aspirations. Not for nothing, from the beginning the script on which the negotiations were articulated was that of the PNV, with major concessions by the non-nationalists on sensitive issues such as the internal organization of Euskadi, the flag, the symbols, the anthem, the name, etc., which had after all been those of the nationalist community. In the negotiation with the Government the PNV had to accept certain restrictions, such as the definition of Euskadi's competences within the State framework, but in exchange it obtained the incorporation of the confederal regulation of the Historical Territories, and saw the legal operability of concepts such as the Fueros and the Historic Rights embodied, which were the basis on which a Statute with a high ceiling of competences was achieved. The paradox arose that the Constitution, through its First Additional Provision, played in favor of the nationalists. The Statute of Autonomy thus meant that Euskadi acquired broad self-government, with matters as sensitive as education, health and other public services (media, transport) falling under its authority, allowing it to set up an autonomous police force, and providing itself with its own financial and fiscal system thanks to the restoration of the Economic Agreements.

The referendum campaign again divided Euskadi into two poles, with the struggle of nationalism vs. non-nationalism shifting toward the confrontation between a pro-statute bloc and another that rejected it. The latter was made up of HB and leftist parties, which advocated abstention, while the bloc in favor of the Statute was a motley group that included Spain-wide formations such as the PSE, the UCD and the PCE-EPK and nationalists such as the PNV and EE, in the latter case as one more step by its leaders to settle the organization and the world of ETA(pm) on political and democratic paths. Finally the right, AP, and the far right, FN, called for a no vote.

The results of the referendum meant a clear triumph for the supporters of the Statute, with a not insignificant abstention rate (41%). It was an abstention significantly lower than that in the Constitution referendum, or very similar to that registered, for example, by the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia, all of which would suggest that the abstentionist proposal had limited reach. In any case, one of the great objectives hoped for from the Statute, that it should serve as a meeting place for the Basques, was partially unsuccessful. The non-nationalist world overcame historical resistance and made it its own, but the same did not happen with the universe of the radical abertzale left, which found another front to oppose.

Statute of Autonomy referendum 1979 Do you approve the draft Statute of Autonomy for the Basque Country?
Data	Option	Votes	%
Electorate: 1,565,541 Voters: 921,436 (58.86%) Invalid votes: 10,649 (1.16%) Abstention: 644,105 (41.14%)
	Yes	831,839	91.33%
	No	47,529	5.22%
	Blank votes	31,419	3.45%
	Total valid votes	910,787	100 %

Results by province
Option	Álava	Gipuzkoa	Biscay
Yes	92,535 (84.95%)	278,399 (92.89%)	460,905 (91.78%)
No	10,023 (9.20%)	12,290 (4.10%)	10,023 (5.02%)
Abstention	64,321 (36.77%)	204,155 (40.27%)	37,562 (42.51%)
Total electorate	174,930	507,002	883,609

Thus began a stage characterized by the hegemony of nationalism represented by the PNV, which took over the Basque political and social institutions and became strong in every organization with social roots in Euskadi. The new elections held in March 1980 to elect the first Basque Parliament were a boost for the autonomist path and for the self-government of Euskadi, expressing that the majority of the population opted for that alternative. They also implied that the political trends pointed to in the previous elections were confirmed, with a predominance of nationalism that came to total 65% of the electorate, with the clear hegemony of the PNV, which consolidated itself as the winning party with a wide lead over the other formations. HB, for its part, again established itself as the country's second force, ahead of a dispirited PSE, which nevertheless two years later, in the 1982 general elections and with low abstention, would again show itself to be a party with powerful social roots.

In the face of the hegemony of nationalism in general and of the PNV in particular, the organizational fragility of parties such as the PSE or the UCD was striking, above all in the latter case, with hardly any membership. Thus the paradox arose during the years 1977-1979 that while the PSE was directing the autonomy process through the Basque General Council, it was a party lacking cadres and presence in society, producing a clear mismatch between its electoral strength and its weakness as an organization. The contrast with the PNV in this field was very marked, since if this party was characterized by anything it was by its visibility in society, making perceptible its discourse that it was the party from here, the one that had the means to solve the serious problems Euskadi was going through.

ETA deployed during this stage an intense murderous activity that struck with special viciousness at everything that could physically or symbolically be related to Spain. They practiced a kind of cultural cleansing that coerced any expression contrary to Basque nationalism and that undoubtedly limited the freedom of the Spain-wide parties, their capacity to take root socially and to exercise public action. The Spain-wide parties, as well as the public opinion in tune with them, lived in conditions of disadvantage and democratic precariousness, which logically weighed down their possibilities of taking root in society.

Political reaction to ETA violence

The beginning of the Transition meant an escalation in the action of ETA, so that the number of people murdered increased as the democratic regime became established. From 16 murders in 1975 it rose to 98 in 1980, the highest figure of the whole democracy, one murder every three or four days. There were 246 innocent victims in the years 1978-1980, almost 30% of the murders ETA has committed throughout its history, apart from the injured and those otherwise harmed. With reason that three-year period in Euskadi is known as the years of lead.

Murders by ETA

Year	No. of dead
1975	16
1976	18
1977	11
1978	68
1979	80
1980	98

These murder figures reveal the challenge that ETA launched against democracy and also reflect the serious error of diagnosis of a good part of the democratic parties, with the PSE and the PNV at their head. An error because both considered that ETA was a phenomenon derived from Francoism, which would be solved with democracy and after attaining a high degree of self-government. Confidence was placed in the possibilities of integrating both ETA and the radical abertzale left into democratic life through the application of political measures such as the establishment and deepening of freedom, amnesty, autonomy, the creation of a police force of its own, etc.; it was thought, in short, that this world would be sensitive to democracy and would feel comfortable in it.

In the case of the PSE, this meant that during its period at the head of the Basque General Council it maintained an attitude of willingness to dialogue with ETA, expressed through the then councilor for the Interior Txiki Benegas as a will to negotiate with the gang, which did not bear fruit despite the steps taken. People were still under the syndrome of Francoism, under the culture of shared opposition to the regime, of feeling ETA as an organization with which they had coexisted in the common struggle against Franco. This explains, for example, statements such as those of Alfonso Guerra, who in March 1977 showed his solidarity with two ETA militants who had been shot down, while Benegas, at that same event, expressed his condemnation of the death of two ETA activists. It is true that these were still the first moments of the Transition, but as late as February 1978 party documents equated the Government's institutional violence with that of ETA. Gradually the PSE changed its position toward classifying ETA as a terrorist movement with which there were no possibilities of negotiation, the murder of a socialist militant, Germán González López, in October 1979 by one of the groups emanating from ETA being decisive in setting this criterion.

The PNV, for its part, maintained an ambivalent position: condemnation of ETA for the methods it used, but at the same time evoking its legitimate component as an organization fighting for just national demands. At the beginning of the Transition there persisted among the party's rank and file a thread of understanding toward the gang forged in common nationalist sentiment, a paternal sympathy toward the ETA militants with whom they disagreed on the means (violence) but agreed on the end (the struggle against Spain). The PNV was reluctant to condemn ETA, which did not happen until April 1976, when ETA murdered a nationalist businessman, Ángel Berazadi Uribe. From that moment the PNV gradually adopted a clearer position of rejection, not without signs of disagreement among its membership. During this time it did not abandon its core argument of understanding ETA violence as a consequence of the State's refusal to accept the right of self-determination. This led it to that ambiguity in which, on the one hand, ETA's murders were condemned, and at the same time police actions against it; or they tended to put the Union of the Democratic Centre government and ETA on the same level, since there was the conviction expressed by the jelkide Irujo that ETA "is something more and essentially different from simple terrorism like the German or the Italian".

It is true that ETA found unsuspected allies in its task of delegitimizing democracy in the violent far right and in the "uncontrolled" groups, which during many phases of this stage roamed freely through the streets of Euskadi, provoking incidents, without the authorities being able to control them because it was their own agents who carried them out. ETA's murders were sometimes followed by small nighttime raids by plainclothes policemen through the cities of Euskadi, intimidating the population, more frequent when the victims were members of the armed institutions. This behavior reached its paroxysm in July 1978, when two companies of the armed police, in uniform and in broad daylight, stormed the town of Rentería (noted for its support of the radical world), causing various damage to commercial establishments, from which they stole goods. The public order forces insisted on appearing before the Basque population as Francoist remnants, intervening in many cases in a disproportionate and brutal way, as an authority distant from the Basque citizen, who was systematically distrusted. In this way a climate of suspicion toward the State security forces was perpetuated in the Basque Country, however much effort the civil governors of these provinces put into giving them another image more in keeping with democratic times.

More damage to coexistence in Euskadi than the "uncontrolled" groups was done by the appearance of far-right terrorism. Although the data vary from one source to another, they reflect a low-intensity far-right terrorism compared with ETA, but whose mere existence was one more factor in the degradation of democratic life and reinforced in the radical abertzale world the imaginary that the dictatorship was still in place. It allowed the nationalist world bordering on ETA to justify its existence, neutralizing possible criticism of the ETA organization in the face of the existence of another violence, this one denounceable, since it went against the aspirations of the people.

Far-right terrorism

Year	No. of dead
1975	1
1976	0
1977	7
1978	2
1979	8
1980	19
1981	1

One of the great difficulties the Transition had to face in Euskadi was the delegitimization of the State bequeathed by Francoism, which had been a support for violent responses to the Regime being applauded by part of the population. What has been said about the conduct of the public order forces, or the suspicion that far-right terrorism found connivance in sectors of the security forces, made the task of establishing democracy in Euskadi and of depriving abertzale radicalism of social support all the harder, as it was reinforced every time the State apparatus overstepped its functions.

Nevertheless, these actions of the far right cannot disguise the fact that the drama lived by Basque society was determined by the terrorist action of ETA and the undoubted social support it enjoyed. In this respect it is worth asking how society reacted to that flood of ETA attacks and murders. Reading the press of the time is disheartening, since the contrast between the support ETA found and that received by its victims is brutal. The funerals of the latter gathered a small number of people, even fewer if they were members of the armed forces or of the public order forces. The photographic documents are chilling and speak to us of the solitude of the murdered, who were bid farewell in almost clandestine ceremonies, surrounded by their comrades in arms or in the corps, with the absence of the political parties, which were still held hostage by the Francoist syndrome of considering them groups linked to the dictatorship. By contrast, the ETA members killed in clashes with the security services were received with grief and expressions of solidarity, with the official version of events questioned almost on principle, with strikes and demonstrations of support, and with a generally ambiguous position on the part of a good many of the democratic political parties. In contrast with what was said above, the funerals of dead ETA members were massive, with interventions by the officiating clergy in which they tended to present ETA members as freedom fighters, or else ETA's guilt was diluted in a "we are all responsible in some way for the drama that is happening here, we all share in a collective drama", as Monsignor Añoveros said in 1977.

As has been observed, the political parties reacted late and timidly to the penetration of violence into the social fabric and did not promote the moral rearmament of society in the face of terrorism. It was the small parties such as DCV or the PCE-EPK that were the first not only to denounce ETA forcefully, but also to call for a social reaction against that scourge, a work of education in society that would stand up to the violent and undermine their strength. It was necessary to wait until June 1978 for the first rally against ETA to be called, still a minority one, following the murder of the journalist José María Portell, promoted by the PCE. The first great demonstration, held at the initiative of the PNV in October of that year against terrorist "violence", had much greater breadth and reach. The PNV's initial call was against terrorism and, although it made no explicit reference to ETA and once again mentioned the responsibility of the Government, it generated deep unease among its membership. To mitigate this effect, over the following days the PNV toned down the call, making it vaguer, so that in later communications it extended the condemnation to the "other" violences, and ended up dismissing the UCD from the demonstration, accusing it of "co-responsibility" for the violence in Euskadi because of its refusal to accept "political solutions". None of this prevented the abertzale groups from organizing, as so many times before, a counter-demonstration under the slogan "Yesterday and today with our gudaris".

These facts can help us understand the behavior of Basque citizens in the face of that terrorist violence that spread through Euskadi without any significant social reaction against it being recorded. In Basque society there was a mixture of passivity, indifference and fear, if not complacency in some sectors, in the face of the dimension that terrorism took on. People learned to live with murder, bombs and kidnappings as if they were part of daily events, and terror came to be integrated as one more pattern with which to coexist. Citizens avoided certain streets, certain comments, or standing out when expressing opinions rejecting the violent, just in case. Indifference, the "as long as it doesn't touch me", gradually became the norm in society, which made silence its conduct. There was a transfer of silence from public criticism of Francoism to censure of ETA in the Transition. The result was that during this stage there was no mobilization of civil society against ETA.

One of the murders committed by ETA reflects the deterioration terrorism generated in society. The then councilor for the Interior of the Basque General Council, Txiki Benegas, recounted it thus:

"ETA murdered in the early hours in Villafranca de Ordicia a young Guardia Civil and his girlfriend on leaving a discotheque, when, already in their vehicle, they were getting ready to leave the place. The young man fell from the effect of the bullets, slumped over the steering wheel, and his weight set off the vehicle's horn, which began to sound. They stayed like that for twenty minutes with the horn sounding without anyone daring to help them. We do not know whether the attack was fatal, but supposing it was not, the truth is that twenty minutes after it happened, when the ambulance arrived, they were dead. Some witnesses later confessed that from time to time a light came on in an apartment, a shutter opened, which a few seconds later was half-closed, the light went off, and the horn kept sounding like a posthumous monotone symphony tolling for death."

This happened in January 1979.

Navarre: Foral Community

At the end of the 1970s Navarre retained its fueros (recognized by the Law Modifying the Fueros of 1841) as recognition of the contribution of its volunteers, in particular the requetés, to the success of the military rebellion that unleashed the Civil War in 1936. Its foral autonomy stood out all the more because, after the fall of Bilbao in June 1937, the government of the insurgents had abolished by decree the economic agreement in the provinces of Gipuzkoa and Biscay for their "betrayal" of the national cause.

For this reason Navarre, and to a much lesser extent Álava, escaped the relentless policy of cultural uniformity and administrative and legislative centralism imposed by the Francoist regime, since the foral administration had been a pioneer in the application of many of the measures, in particular the purge of the teaching profession and the handing over to the Church of control of education, through the Higher Board of Education, and of morality and customs. Not for nothing had the war become a Crusade in defense of the faith and against communism.

Franco granted Navarre the Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand for its heroism and contribution from the first days to the success of the military rebellion, a medal he presented at a solemn official ceremony in the Citadel of Pamplona, with a parade of the Navarrese volunteers behind the flags of their tercios and brigades:

Como recuerdo a las gestas heroicas de Navarra en el Movimiento Nacional y homenaje a quien tan reciamente atesora las virtudas de la Raza, concedo a la provincia de Navarra la Cruz Laureada de San Fernando, que desde hoy deberá grabar en su escudo.
(In remembrance of the heroic deeds of Navarre in the National Movement and in homage to one who so stoutly treasures the virtues of the Race, I grant the province of Navarre the Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand, which from today it shall engrave on its coat of arms.)

— Francisco Franco, 1937.

However, once the war was won and the new State established, its relations with the Navarrese foral regime had to be brought up to date, a regime whose roots were anchored in the so-called "Ley Paccionada" (1841), by which Navarre, after the First Carlist War, ceased to be a Kingdom of the Hispanic Monarchy and became a foral province.

Change in Navarrese society in the 1970s

In the 1960s and 1970s the Council made large investments. The foral budget rose from 900 million pesetas in 1965 to 2,500 million in 1970, 5,000 million in 1975 and 12,500 million in 1979. But to these figures had to be added those of the extraordinary budgets that made foral public investment possible: 17,000 million in the 1972-1975 Plan and 30,000 million in the 1976-1979 Plan, which were financed through borrowing.

Neither the Council nor its organizational structure (in need of internal reform both among its officials and in its organizational models) was prepared to respond to the new tax, economic and social demands, nor to the democratic demands that were already beginning to stir in Navarrese society. As the corporation it was, each foral deputy had the same voting power in the Plenary of the Council, in which all matters had to be approved; but, as those responsible for each and every action carried out in their district, the deputies paid more attention to the wishes of their potential backers, the town councils of each Merindad, than to general needs. They were accustomed to receiving mayors and councilors (on whose support their election or re-election depended) and, on quite a few occasions, the residents of any small town when they turned to them asking for help.

Nevertheless, the Council modernized at the same pace as Navarrese society. At the beginning of the 1970s it had little to do with that of the years before the Civil War (when the Traditionalists and the parties of the right were hegemonic) and it found itself in the midst of a spectacular economic and social change that would turn Navarre into one of the most industrialized regions with the highest per capita income in Spain, although also one of the most conflict-ridden. It is worth asking, therefore, about the scope of the hegemony, otherwise undoubted, of Traditionalists and conservative parties, since the sediment left by liberals, republicans and socialists in the first third of the 20th century was considerable, above all in some areas: the Ribera, with a majority in numerous municipalities, and some valleys (Burunda, Aézcoa, Roncal) and the capital Pamplona. In addition, one would have to add the weight of Basque nationalism, also in the capital and in the northern area of its Merindad.

In any case, the demographic, social, economic and mental changes of these years showed that Navarre's seams were bursting everywhere. A good reflection of this are the profound demographic transformations. Between 1900 and 1960 the population growth of Navarre had been very slow, while it accelerated in the following two decades as soon as the industrialization process took off. The migratory balance, which had been negative since the mid-19th century (110,000 people between 1900 and 1960), changed sign to become positive in the last forty years of the 20th century. From 1960 the province became a receiver of immigrants, although the phenomenon did not reach great proportions.

During the last third of the 20th century the most relevant aspect is internal migration, from agrarian areas with a traditional economy, a significant part of whose inhabitants moved, together with those originating from outside Navarre, to the industrial and urban centers, attracted by their greater employment opportunities and better wages owing to the higher returns of industry and services compared with those of agriculture. As a consequence, the urban population rose from 33% in 1960 to 58.5% in 2001. In this respect it should be noted that there were only two areas of demographic expansion: the metropolitan area of Pamplona, which concentrates more than half the provincial population, and the southern area bordering the Ebro, the Ribera, above all that of Tudela. In the rest, except for some specific centers, stagnation or decline (particularly in the Mountain area) was the dominant note.

Democracy

ETA's indiscriminate attack on Calle Correo produced, during the holding of the VI Assembly in 1973, disagreements between the sectors advocating the absolute priority of terrorist activity and those wishing to subordinate it to political struggles. ETA suffered its most important split and divided into ETA(pm) and ETA(m). ETA(pm) would abandon terrorism in 1981, six days after the 23-F coup attempt, in view of the risk of political regression that endangered what had been achieved from 1975 until then. The party close to its political postulates, Euskadiko Ezkerra, evolved from Marxist positions to positions closer to Eurocommunism, ending up becoming a social-democratic party with a Basque-identity accent. After successive internal crises it would become part of the Socialist Party of Euskadi, the Basque branch of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, while its most important critical current ended up integrated into Eusko Alkartasuna. The other branch, ETA(m), would take shape as the vanguard of the so-called Basque National Liberation Movement, which groups together the socio-political structure of the so-called abertzale left. It considered that the democratic advances had been inadequate or insufficient and therefore continued the armed struggle, committing a multitude of terrorist acts that have cost the lives of more than 800 citizens. Its sister party, the Herri Batasuna coalition, took as its political project the KAS Alternative without accepting reformist or intermediate possibilities, and achieved some notable electoral successes. It maintained an anti-system stance, absenting itself from the various institutions for which it stood, and hostile positions toward other political movements until its reconversion into Batasuna in 2001 and its banning in 2003.

The PNV presided over the Basque Government from 1980 to 2009 (when, despite being the first political force in number of votes, it lost the presidency to the investiture pact between the PSE-EE and the PP), having faced a dramatic industrial reconversion. The internal split of this party, from which EA was born, led to coalition governments with the socialists under the presidency of José Antonio Ardanza for a period of 12 years.

The breakup of the PNV-PSE coalition, in the context of growing opposition to nationalism driven by the central government dominated by the PP, shaped a context of political confrontation between Basque nationalists and Spanish nationalists, in which the leaders of the People's Party sought to win the presidency of the Basque Government, which they did not achieve.

The governments that emerged from the new political situation were extremely weak, as they lacked sufficient support in the Basque Parliament. These governments, under the presidency of Juan José Ibarretxe, were formed as three-party coalitions with the participation of the PNV, EA and Ezker Batua, the Basque branch of Izquierda Unida. Even so, in order to pass some laws they have needed the occasional support of other organizations, including the one representing the abertzale left.

The present day

After the PNV's narrow victory in the 2001 regional elections, the Basque Government promoted the modification of the Statute of Guernica through a reform project called the «Ibarretxe Plan», which advocated a status of free association for the Basque Country. In 2004 the Ibarretxe Plan was approved in the Basque regional Parliament by an absolute majority with the support of the Basque nationalist parties (Basque Nationalist Party, Eusko Alkartasuna and Aralar) and of Ezker Batua (a party that was also part of the government in coalition with EA and the PNV). Three of the seven seats of the Ezker Abertzalea group (elected for Euskal Herritarrok) also gave their support to the project. The PSE-PSOE and the People's Party of the Basque Country opposed the text of the Plan, which was taken to the national Parliament in 2005, where it was discussed in a single plenary session, with no negotiation on it being proposed. Lehendakari Ibarretxe presented his Plan to the deputies present in Parliament, and it was rejected by 90 percent of the 350 deputies present. The Basque nationalist political parties and Izquierda Unida are committed to defending the right of self-determination of Basque citizens, as opposed to the PP and PSE-PSOE, which are against it, relying on the Spanish Constitution of 1978.

For various reasons, among which might be the banning of the political parties of the radical pro-independence left, also called the «Abertzale Left» (Herri Batasuna, Batasuna, ...), for their refusal to condemn ETA's violence; their exclusion from elections, with representation only through interposed electoral brands such as the Communist Party of the Basque Homelands in the Basque Parliament; the declaration as terrorist of various organizations in their milieu (Jarrai, Haika, Segi); the execution of court orders affecting their economic and political network; the pressure exerted by the sectors close to the parties that carry out their activity in accordance with the legality arising from the Spanish constitution of 1978; together with the growing explicit rejection of violence and murders by citizens, the abertzale left was led to a strategy of attempted dialogue with the non-nationalist forces and political normalization embodied in the "Anoeta Proposal".

After a series of secret talks between representatives of the PSE-PSOE and the abertzale left, ETA declared a «permanent ceasefire» in 2006 and entered into talks with the Spanish Government, previously authorized by the Congress of Deputies for that purpose. The talks bore no fruit and, at the end of that year, ETA murdered two people with a bomb in the parking garage of Barajas airport, which reduced the expectations of an agreement. Although the meetings continued over the following months, ETA definitively broke the truce in June 2007 by means of a communiqué. Relations between the abertzale left and the central Government deteriorated after ETA's official breaking of the ceasefire and the attacks that followed. The return to prison was decreed of De Juana Chaos, an ETA member previously released after serving the sentence imposed, with a new sentence for some articles in the press in which he was considered to have made threats. The judicial system continued to apply the Law on Political Parties and to pursue old cases, for which Arnaldo Otegi, at that date the top representative of the Abertzale Left, was arrested and imprisoned, increasing the pressure on the milieu of the MLNV. To this day Otegi remains in prison.

After a process of internal debate between the end of 2009 and 2010, in which the resolution Zutik Euskal Herria was adopted, rejecting the use of violence and committing to an alliance among sovereigntist forces, ETA declared a unilateral, permanent, verifiable and general ceasefire. The alliance among Basque sovereigntist forces materialized as Bildu, a coalition that brought together the abertzale left, Eusko Alkartasuna and Alternatiba, which Aralar would later join for the Amaiur and Euskal Herria Bildu coalitions. In 2011 ETA laid down its arms, decreeing the "definitive cessation of armed activity", and in 2012 the abertzale left was legalized with the party Sortu. The party had tried to register a year earlier, its registration being prohibited, and obtained its legalization after winning an appeal for protection (amparo) in the courts. This scenario has drawn four main forces in the Basque Country: the PNV (Basque nationalist center-right), Bildu (coalition of the Basque sovereigntist left), PSE-EE (Spanish-unionist center-left) and PP (Spanish-unionist right).

In Navarre the Governments of the PSN, the Navarrese federation of the PSOE, immersed in various episodes of corruption for which the last two socialist presidents of Navarre went to prison, were replaced by those of UPN, the Navarrese representatives of the PP, which have pursued a policy of affirming a Navarrese-Spanish identity as opposed to the Navarrese-Basque identity linked to Basque nationalism, whose supporters have recently been organizing into common fronts that have resulted in the coalitions Nafarroa Bai, Bildu, Geroa Bai and Amaiur. The positions represented by CDN, a now-extinct splinter of UPN, gradually rejoined the parent party and its political conception.

At present both the Basque Country and Navarre are statistically among the communities with the highest progress indices in Spain, at levels even higher than the European average.

The political status of the French territories has remained unchanged since the 19th century. There are movements which, in view of the French territorial decentralization reform, promote institutions of their own for the Basque Country, without having been able to find sufficient echo in the Government in Paris.

Illustrious Basques

There are many personalities of Basque origin. They always stood out as renowned sailors, explorers and active participants in military enterprises (such as the conquest of America), economic or religious ones, from both sides of the Pyrenees.

Sailors and soldiers

• Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the first circumnavigation of the world, and Biscayan pilots took part in the Carrera de Indias.
• Alonso de Salazar, Elcano's successor in command of the expedition of García Jofre de Loaísa, discovered the Marshall Islands and Bokak Atoll.
• Juan de Urbieta, soldier. He took part in the Battle of Pavia, capturing the French Monarch Francis I.
• Miguel López de Legazpi conquered the Philippine Islands for the Spanish Crown.
• Andrés de Urdaneta established the route from the Philippines to Acapulco.
• Blas de Lezo, soldier, defended the city of Cartagena de Indias from the attempted English invasion in the course of the War of the Asiento.
• Pedro Navarro and Machín de Rentería fought in the Mediterranean campaigns.
• The squadrons of Biscay and Gipuzkoa took an active part in Spanish naval actions. Noteworthy are the actions of the Gipuzkoa squadron under the command of Miguel de Oquendo at the Battle of Terceira Island, or the appointment of Oquendo and Recalde, admirals of the squadrons of Gipuzkoa and Biscay, as lieutenants of the Duke of Medina Sidonia in the England enterprise of the Grande y Felicísima Armada. Miguel de Oquendo's son, Antonio, was also a renowned sailor of the Spanish Navy.
• At the Battle of Trafalgar the Gipuzkoan sailor Cosme Damián Churruca died heroically in command of the San Juan Nepomuceno.
• Miguel de Aguinaga y Mendigoitia, founder of the Colombian city of Medellín on November 2, 1675.

Writers

Some of the most prominent (in chronological order):

• Bernard Detchepare (Sarrasquette, Lower Navarre, c. 1480 - 1545), Priest, Parish priest of the church of Saint-Michel-le-Vieux (in the locality of Eyheralarre, near Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port), author of the first book written in Basque. His only work, titled Linguae Vasconum Primitiae (First fruits of the language of the Vascones), was first printed in Bordeaux in 1545.
• Jean de Liçarrague (Briscous, Labourd, 1506 - La Bastide-Clairence, Lower Navarre, 1601), Pastor of the Reformed church, translated the first version of the New Testament into Basque, which, together with his Calendar of religious festivals and his Rudimentary lessons for learning to read and the doctrine, were first published in La Rochelle in 1571.
• Pierre Topet (Barcus, Soule, 1786 - 1862), versolari and bard.
• Miguel de Unamuno (Bilbao, 1864 – Salamanca, 1936), philosopher, is the most internationally recognized Basque writer (especially for his work Niebla).
• Pío Baroja (San Sebastián, 1872 – Madrid, 1956).
• Ramiro de Maeztu (Vitoria, 1875 – Aravaca, 1936).
• Ignacio Aldecoa (Vitoria, 1925 - Madrid, 1969).

Painters

• Ignacio Zuloaga
• Vicente Ameztoy

Sculptors

• Jorge Oteiza (Orio, 1908-2003)
• Eduardo Chillida (San Sebastián, 1924-2002)
• Agustín Ibarrola (Basauri, 1930)
• Néstor Basterretxea (Bermeo, 1924)
• Patxi Xabier Lezama Perier (Zalla, 1967)

See also

• Euskal Herria
• Euskal Herria as a political project
• History of Basque nationalism
• Basque race
• Origin of the Basques
• Late Basquisation

Citations

• Artículo periodístico hablando de diferentes estudios que avalan la hipótesis sobre el orige prehistórico de los vascos (in Spanish)

Bibliography

• Braudel, Fernand (1984). The Perspective of the World.
• Gutiérrez Arosa, Jesús (2007). La guerra civil en Eibar y Elgueta. ISBN 978-84-89696-46-4. (in Spanish)

External links

• Cronología del Euskera (in Spanish)
• Historia del País Vasco y el euskera (in Spanish)
• Historia en Hiru.com (in Spanish)