ETA

abbreviation of Euzkadi Ta Azkatasuna (Basque: Basque Homeland and Liberty), Basque separatist organization in Spain that adopted violent methods in its campaign for an independent Basque state. ETA grew out of the Basque Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista Vasco; PNV), which had been founded in 1894 and which managed to survive, though illegally, under Francisco Franco's fascist regime by maintaining its headquarters in exile in Paris and keeping quietly out of sight in Spain. In 1959 some youthful members, angered at the party's persistent rejection of armed struggle, broke away and founded the ETA. Within the next few years the new organization developed groupings associated increasingly with Marxist positions, setting revolutionary socialism as their end. In 1966 at the ETA's fifth conference, the organization divided ideologically into two wingsthe nationalists, or ETA-V, who adhered to the traditional goal of Basque autonomy, and the ideologists, or ETA-VI, who favoured a Marxist-Leninist brand of Basque independence and the use of public sabotage and, later (from 1968), assassination to achieve it. The Franco regime's attempts to crush the ETA in the Basque provinces were severe, the police using arbitrary arrest, beatings, and torture. By 196970 the principal leaders had been rounded up by the police and subjected to military trials in the city of Burgos. Factionalism continued to plague ETA in the 1970s and '80s, with various internal factions pursuing alternately violence and political action. After Franco's death in 1975, Spain's democratic governments moved to establish regional autonomy for the Basque provinces and to offer pardons to ETA members renouncing terrorism, but in the decade after Franco the number of ETA killings by bombing and assassination multiplied tenfold over what had existed under Franco's ironhanded repression. Most of those assassinated were high-ranking Spanish military officers, judges, and government officials. The ETA came to rely financially on robberies, kidnappings, and revolutionary taxes extorted from businessmen. It formed political front organizations to contest elections in the post-Franco period while also continuing to engage in assassinations and car bombings to achieve its goals. Successive ETA leaders were captured by the Spanish government or killed in factional disputes, but the organization remained active into the 1990s.