| Three members of Basque separatist group ETA call for a definitive end to 50 years of armed struggle, which has cost the lives of at least 850 people |
Basque separatist group ETA has completely dismantled all its structures, ending a 50-year guerrilla campaign, it said in a letter dated April 16 and published by online newspaper El Diario on Wednesday.
The group had been expected to announce its final dissolution later this week, after its ultimately unsuccessful drive for an independent state in northern Spain and southern France that killed around 850 people.
“ETA has completely dissolved all its structures and ended its political initiative,” said the letter, which El Diario said had been sent to several Basque organisations.
ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Country and Freedom) declared a ceasefire in 2011 and handed over weapons in April 2017, bringing Western Europe’s last major armed insurgency to a close.
These decisions were aimed at “shaking off the situation of the last decades and building a future from a new starting point,” ETA said in the letter published on Wednesday.
Anger in the Basque region of northern Spain over political and cultural repression under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco prompted the founding of ETA in 1959.
Violence escalated in the 1960s and Franco’s regime responded in kind, as the group assassinated politicians and officials as well as bombing public places.
Attacks including a 1987 car bomb at a Barcelona supermarket, which killed a pregnant woman and two children, horrified people in Spain and abroad, and effective crackdowns by Spanish and French police weakened the organisation.
Polls on support for independence vary, but one carried out in November by the university of Deusto showed just 14 percent of people in favour.
ETA apologised earlier in April for the harm caused to victims and their relatives. The April 16 letter said that, while ETA is now consigned to history, the drive for Basque independence would continue.
“The conflict did not start with ETA and it does not finish with the end of ETA’s journey,” it said.