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On 23 July 1976, Eduardo Moreno Bergaretxe, aged 25, disappeared in the French town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. That morning he left the apartment where he was living to attend a meeting that had apparently been arranged through the Mugalde bookshop in Hendaye. The meeting was due to take place at ten o’clock in the morning at La Consolation café in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, but the managers of the establishment stated that Moreno Bergaretxe never entered the premises.
Eduardo Moreno Bergaretxe, also known as ‘Pertur’, had been born in San Sebastián on 13 October 1950. In September 1972, he fled to France after escaping from the police in Bilbao. He was a leader of political-military ETA and head of its Political Office together with Javier Garaialde, also known as ‘Erreka’. In the months leading up to his disappearance, the two drafted the Otsagabia paper, which advocated opening up a political path in the new context that had emerged after Franco’s death and relegating the “armed struggle” to a secondary role.
His position clashed with that of the bereziak, the special commando units of political-military ETA, who were in favour of continuing violence. This internal tension worsened particularly after the kidnapping and murder of industrialist Ángel Berazadi in April 1976. According to testimony collected years later, ‘Pertur’ was the only member of the leadership who voted against Berazadi’s execution. Shortly afterwards, members of the hard-line faction even held him to prevent him from attending an internal conference of the organisation; a vote decided his release by a very narrow margin.
The last known trace of ‘Pertur’ places him at around 9:40 a.m. on 23 July 1976 in Saint-Jean-de-Luz with Miguel Ángel Apalategi Ayerbe, ‘Apala’, and Francisco Mujika Garmendia, ‘Pakito’, both members of the hard-line sector of political-military ETA. According to their own statements, Moreno Bergaretxe asked them to take him to Behobia, on the border with Spain, and they left him there at around 11:30 a.m. Since then, nothing more has ever been heard of him, and his body has never been found.
This is a case of disappearance and unclear authorship. In the days that followed, several far-right and parapolice groups, including the Batallón Vasco Español, claimed responsibility for his death. On 31 July 1976, El Correo Español-El Pueblo Vasco received a statement from the BVE claiming that ‘Pertur’ had been executed and buried in a village in Navarre.
However, from the outset there were also suspicions that his disappearance may have been the result of an internal purge within political-military ETA, because of his disagreements with the bereziak and because ‘Apala’ and ‘Pakito’ were the last people to see him alive. Both denied any connection with the disappearance in the proceedings carried out in France.
In 2008, Eduardo Moreno Bergaretxe’s family filed a complaint before the Audiencia Nacional in an attempt to clarify the facts. Judge Fernando Andreu spent four years investigating the two main hypotheses: one pointing to the bereziak of political-military ETA, and another pointing to far-right groups or Italian neo-fascists acting in collusion with Spanish police services. In September 2012, the case was provisionally closed due to the lack of sufficient evidence to charge any specific person.
Almost half a century later, ‘Pertur’s’ disappearance remains unsolved. His family continues to demand the truth about what happened and the recovery of his remains.
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