Basque and Catalan Separatism, fiction and fact

First be advised that this is what would have been an average length magazine piece, back in the day. Its complexities cannot be captured in the new normal of 145 characters.

My third novel, “Sins of the Younger Sons,” from TCU Press, is the story of an American intelligence agent who falls in love with the leader of ETA, the Basque separatists and terrorists who battled the Spanish state for half a century.

One of my favorite movies of recent years is “American Hustle.” The opening credits included the tag line: “Some of this actually happened.” I’d say the same of “Sins of the Younger Sons.” 

The agent, Luke Burgoa, is an ex-Marine captain who grew up on a Texas ranch and is of Basque heritage. His ancestors were part of a diaspora of Basque whalers, cod fishermen, priests, soldiers, and in time vaqueros that came to the Americas with the Spanish Empire; Pancho Villa chased his grandparents out of Mexico. Luke constructs a gun running scheme involving Soviet-made weapons, captured by the Israelis in a brief war with Syria, that wound up in the jungle oilfields of South America. He pitches the scheme to his superiors, whom he calls the Outfit, as a sting. Without diplomatic immunity, Luke is charged with helping the Spaniards capture or kill Peru Madariaga.

A former Jesuit seminarian, Peru (Peter in our language) is wanted for his part in the assassination of Francisco Franco’s fascist heir apparent — an explosion that blew Luis Carrero Blanco’s car over a five-story cathedral in Madrid — and the bombing of a nuclear power plant imposed on the Basque Country into a ruin of wrecked concrete and razor wire. He is a revolutionary because he does not believe himself a Spaniard, and the Franco regime plundered and humiliated the Basques, making even speaking their language a penitentiary offense. Called Euskera, that language is the oldest in Europe. A folk adage has it spoken in the Garden of Eden.  

Luke suggests to Peru on their first encounter, “For all I know you’re Thomas Jefferson.”

Peru’s mostly estranged wife, Ysolina, lives in forced exile in Paris. The Spaniards believe she is an active member of ETA; the French think that’s nonsense. She wants to finish a dissertation about an ancestor imprisoned and tortured by the Spanish Inquisition on charges of making love to Satan in a witchcraft mania that consumed the Basque Country in the 1690s. Diaries of this woman, Enara, have been handed down for four centuries by Ysolina’s forebears, but essential archives are in Spain. More than that, she yearns for her beloved homeland in the whitewater canyons of the Pyrenees and the beautiful coastal city San Sebastián, or Donostia in Basque.

The love affair on the run of Luke and Ysolina puts them and Peru on a crash course with each other and, in the major subplot, construction of a Guggenheim museum in the post-industrial blight of Bilbao that makes ETA targets of the celebrated but American architect Frank Gehry and the charismatic king of Spain, Juan Carlos. Fictionalized takes on those men, of course.

I think a lot of my novel, and since its publication in June, I have been posting mini-essays drawn from research that fascinated me but really did not have a place in the love triangle and saga of the Guggenheim Bilbao.

In addition, recent events in Spain have prompted several friends and readers to ask for my opinion of the separatist furor and alarming news coming out of Catalonia, or Catalunya in the Catalan language, which originated with Latin during the Roman Empire.

The Spanish Basque Country, or el País Vasco, and Catalonia both have beautiful coasts (the Atlantic and Mediterranean) and rise into the Pyrenees to the French border. They both were major losers in the Spanish Civil War, and were subjected to ferocious retribution by the Francisco Franco regime. But their languages, cultures, and experiences of Spanish rule are not the same. And their separatist rebellions are different critters.

I don’t sugarcoat the tactics of ETA. They made their reputation killing Spanish police and prosecutors. They robbed banks, kidnapped people, and killed more than 800 people in an insurrection that began in 1967. But after some years of unofficial ceasefire, last spring ETA formally renounced violence, and as proof of its intentions, leaders surrendered their cache of weapons and explosives. The response from the administration in Madrid was cool and distrustful, and ETA took the precaution of making the gesture on the French side of the border.

With my family I returned to the Basque Country in the summer of 2016. Spared the suburban sprawl and high-rises that have taken over my adopted hometown of Austin, San Sebastián is still my favorite city on earth. In smaller towns parts of walls have been left standing, monuments without plaques to memory of the pitiless Luftwaffe bombing on behalf of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Euskadi, as the Basques call their cultural nation divided by France and Spain, looked prosperous and serene. Now I saw none of the burned-out cars in front of police stations or the pervasive separatist graffiti, much of which was wildly artistic. What little graffiti I saw called for free return of past Basque separatists living in forced exile. If the peace was genuine, why could they not come home?

Before we arrived there we spent several days in Barcelona. One day we hired a driver who was fluent in English, full of anecdotes and history, and rich humor until he went off the rails in an endless monologue about Catalan separatism. “We will be independent in two or three years, no more,” he swore. “But without violence!”

Therein lies a crucial distinction between Basque and Catalan separatism. Eight hundred thousand Catalans once marched in outrage when ETA blew up a supermarket in Barcelona. Tourists crowd into Barcelona to see the architecture of Antoni Gaudí and its storied main street, Las Ramblas. But for three centuries Catalans have demonstrated no love for any central government in Madrid. Their separatist movement has not been entirely peaceful; starting in 1978, a group called Tierra Iliure seemed to follow the decade-old ETA example, with shootouts with police and a high profile kidnapping of a journalist who wrote that speaking and writing in Catalan threatened the Spanish language. But riddled by defections and denunciations by ex-members, that group formally disbanded on a Catalan national holiday in 1995. Since then the separatists in Catalonia have pursued a strategy of winning elections and passing legislation.

Among the arguments against Catalan separatism: the euro could not be the currency, and Spain’s two largest banks, both Catalan, are relocating their headquarters because of the volatile situation. Yet Andorra, Monaco, and Switzerland are small independent nations in Western Europe, and they get by without membership in the European Union. And their existence has never lit a fuse of crisis.

The crux of this particular standoff is that Catalonia is by far Spain’s richest region. Spain’s economy suffered a near-collapse in 2008, and the belligerent response by the administration of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is an admission that Spain cannot continue its recovery without the Catalans’ wealth.

In the terms of its post-Franco constitution, Spain is a decentralized union of “autonomous communities” that have their own legislatures and carry out the day-to-day tasks of governance. If we take the Basque Country at its peaceful word, eleven of those official regions have organizations that seek independence or greater autonomy.

The leader of Catalonia’s government, Carles Puidgemont, won election as an advocate of independence. This past summer he and the regional parliament approved a binding up-or-down referendum on Catalonia’s independence. In Madrid Prime Minister Rajoy denounced the vote as unconstitutional, and the European Union has shown no enthusiasm for a nation of Catalonia.

Major polls have found that more than fifty percent of Catalans oppose secession, with about forty percent in favor. If the referendum had gone ahead unimpeded, the anti-independence vote probably would have prevailed. But on October 1 Rajoy sent in riot police to wield truncheons and rubber bullets against protestors in Barcelona and stormed voting stations, trying to halt the election. Rajoy then made the strange announcement that with certainty none of this happened.

Say again? The rest of the world does not have television?

In defiance the referendum went ahead and separatist leaders claimed 90 percent voted for independence. But the turnout was only 43 percent, and huge crowds of unionists have marched in Madrid and Barcelona chanting, “?Viva Espa?a!” Next Rajoy invoked Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, known in Spanish politics as “the nuclear option.” Never before imposed, the article allows “all measures necessary to compel the community to meet said obligations, or to protect the above mentioned general interest.”

Rajoy removed Puidgemont and his cabinet from office, jailed elected officials who can only be described as political prisoners, disbanded the regional parliament, scheduled new elections December 1st, and imposed direct rule by the national government. Rajoy mocked Puidgemont by inviting him to run for office in that election. Meanwhile threats circulated that the Catalan officials in jail and any more who resist could be tried for sedition and face decades in prison.

Still, the same day Rajoy issued his decrees, Puidgemont led a march of 450,000 protestors in Barcelona. And by a vote of 70 to 10 the Catalan parliament replied by declaring independence.

What should Americans make of this? By any strategic measure we don’t have a dog in that fight. My own thoughts are ambivalent. When some Texans raised a hue and cry about secession because Barack Obama was president I thought they were silly. The United States had a Civil War over that, and we lost.

We hear less about Texas secession now that our president is Donald Trump, who strongly supports Rajoy.  But the only word for the situation in Spain now is ominous.

Whatever becomes of Puidgemont and the move for independence, rebellious Catalans are expected to respond with civil disobedience. The government in Madrid has already used brutal force in an attempt to crush a separatist movement that for more than two decades has been peaceful. A reporter named John Carlin was fired from the El País, a national newspaper based in Madrid, for writing a blistering rebuke of Rajoy’s actions. Afterward, on October 29th, Carlin wrote in the London Sunday Times that “All sides seem to be living in Wonderland,” and that the gravest threat was a conclusion drawn “among highly energized independence-seeking youth that they have been victims of a Franquista coup d’etat.”

The analogy that comes to my mind is the martial law the fascist regime of Francisco Franco imposed on the Basque Country in the 1970s. Observers who can’t discern shadows and echoes of the Spanish Civil War are not paying attention.