Description

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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Description

On 11 June 1980, José Miguel Etxeberria Álvarez (22) went to an assignment with some members of the organisation of ETA militar in the French town of St-Jean-de-Luz to discuss his contacts with an arms dealer. The young man did not return from the meeting and his body was never found.

José Miguel Etxeberria, alias Naparra or Bakunin, had formed part of the special units of ETA político-militar, and later joined ETA militar, before eventually leaving the organisation. In 1978 he fled to France. At the time of his disappearance, he was a prominent leader of the Autonomous Anti-Capitalist Commandos (Comandos Autónomos Anticapitalistas, CAA). The Basque-Spanish Battalion (Batallón Vasco-Español) claimed responsibility for his murder, although some years later, in a book, the CAA blamed ETA-m for killing him over disagreements between the two organisations.

Description

On 26 June 1975, Fernando Fernández Moreno and a colleague went to leave an item of furniture at the Naval Command Headquarters in Ceuta. Around 4.30 pm, when the two workers were entering the main door, an explosive device, which had been planted on the landing of the first floor, went off. Fernando Fernández caught the full impact of the blast. He was taken to the Red Cross Hospital but was dead on arrival. It was the second attack in Ceuta in barely an hour and a half. It was never established who was responsible for the killing, although some information indicated that it was perpetrated by pro-Moroccan terrorist groups.

Fernando Fernández was a carpenter. He had been married for just over a year and had a baby daughter. He was posthumously awarded the Ceuta Medal by the city council.

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On the morning of 28 May 1990, an employee of the transport and parcel services went to the offices of Sociedad Intermedios Financieros in Valencia to deliver a package to Juan Antonio Pérez Herrero.

At around 12.15 pm, when the recipient tried to unwrap the package, an explosive device inside exploded. The blast wrecked the room, blew Juan Antonio Pérez out the window and injured another six people. The victim lost a hand in the blast and was taken to hospital, where he died that same evening. An initial investigation determined that it was unlikely that GRAPO or ETA were involved in the attack, and the case was closed without establishing who was responsible for the attack.

Juan Antonio Pérez was the sales manager of Intermedios Financieros. His father had been the secretary general of the Civil Government of Valencia and his uncle Fernando Herrero Tejedor, minister and General Secretary of the National Movement.

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Description

In the early hours of October 8, 1975, a shooting occurred at the Verneda barracks in Barcelona. Initially attributed to the GRAPO, later investigations indicate that this group was not active in Barcelona until 1976, and the attack was a tragic error in a context of high political tension. Five people were killed: the family of Antonia Pérez Cervantes (49 years old), her husband José Martínez Vélez (50 years old), and their son Antonio Martínez Pérez (22 years old), who were traveling in their car after attending a wake, and two police officers, Juan Antonio Alba Escalera (30 years old) and José San Nicolás Sánchez (27 years old), who were in their patrol cars at the time of the attack. No perpetrators were identified or punished, and no effective judicial investigation was carried out, denying the victims the truth and justice.

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Description

In the early hours of October 8, 1975, a shooting occurred at the Verneda barracks in Barcelona. Initially attributed to the GRAPO, later investigations indicate that this group was not active in Barcelona until 1976, and the attack was a tragic error in a context of high political tension. Five people were killed: the family of Antonia Pérez Cervantes (49 years old), her husband José Martínez Vélez (50 years old), and their son Antonio Martínez Pérez (22 years old), who were traveling in their car after attending a wake, and two police officers, Juan Antonio Alba Escalera (30 years old) and José San Nicolás Sánchez (27 years old), who were in their patrol cars at the time of the attack. No perpetrators were identified or punished, and no effective judicial investigation was carried out, denying the victims the truth and justice.

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Description

In the early hours of October 8, 1975, a shooting occurred at the Verneda barracks in Barcelona. Initially attributed to the GRAPO, later investigations indicate that this group was not active in Barcelona until 1976, and the attack was a tragic error in a context of high political tension. Five people were killed: the family of Antonia Pérez Cervantes (49 years old), her husband José Martínez Vélez (50 years old), and their son Antonio Martínez Pérez (22 years old), who were traveling in their car after attending a wake, and two police officers, Juan Antonio Alba Escalera (30 years old) and José San Nicolás Sánchez (27 years old), who were in their patrol cars at the time of the attack. No perpetrators were identified or punished, and no effective judicial investigation was carried out, denying the victims the truth and justice.

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Description

In the early hours of October 8, 1975, a shooting occurred at the Verneda barracks in Barcelona. Initially attributed to the GRAPO, later investigations indicate that this group was not active in Barcelona until 1976, and the attack was a tragic error in a context of high political tension. Five people were killed: the family of Antonia Pérez Cervantes (49 years old), her husband José Martínez Vélez (50 years old), and their son Antonio Martínez Pérez (22 years old), who were traveling in their car after attending a wake, and two police officers, Juan Antonio Alba Escalera (30 years old) and José San Nicolás Sánchez (27 years old), who were in their patrol cars at the time of the attack. No perpetrators were identified or punished, and no effective judicial investigation was carried out, denying the victims the truth and justice.

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Description

At 8.45 am on 29 September 1975, five members of a terrorist unit killed police officer Diego del Río Martín during a raid on the cashier’s office of the Valle de Hebrón Hospital in Barcelona. The assailants mingled with staff who were queuing to pick up their pay packets. They then fired on Diego del Río Martín and his fellow officer, who were on guard duty, with pistols and machine guns. The assailants made off with money from the payroll. Diego del Río Martín died from his injuries. His colleague, Enrique Camacho Jiménez, managed to survive.

Most sources believe that the attack was perpetrated by the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups (GRAPO), but others suggest that it may have been the work of FRAP or EPOCA.

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Description

Juan Manuel Sarmiento Somoza was a retired man on vacation at Salou beach with his wife and daughter on February 13, 1999, when he spotted an explosive device made of chlorate gunpowder. He attempted to deactivate it but was unsuccessful and died.

The Guardia Civil linked the explosion to the sending, the previous week, of three anonymous letters to the tourism boards of Salou and Cambrils, in which a payment of one hundred million pesetas was demanded under the threat of detonating bombs on the cliffs of both towns.

For the family, it was an additional suffering that Juan Manuel was investigated as a suspected author of the letters and the placement of the explosives. “They killed him. The ones who didn’t inform that there could be bombs on the beach killed my husband,” complained Cándida Lasbats, his widow, in statements to El País upon learning that the Salou City Council had not disclosed this campaign against the region’s tourism interests. Cándida could not understand how her husband was linked to working with explosives when “he had only worked at the Cercs thermal power plant.” “He had never even owned a pellet gun,” she assured. However, for her, the greatest grievance was that the threats the municipality had received were not disclosed: “They did it just to avoid alarming tourists and losing clients.” “They killed him when he had no guilt at all.”

A few days after the attack that took Juan Manuel’s life, a Guardia Civil officer was injured when another homemade explosive device detonated, also on the same beach.

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