By Barnard R. Thompson

Barnard Thompson is traveling this week and his column will resume upon his return. During his absence two past columns (that just may be topical), with possible links to terrorists and acts like the horrifying March 11, 2004, train bombings in Spain, appear.

August 18, 2003. — The latest round of arrests (and pending extraditions) of alleged ETA terrorists by Mexican authorities calls into question a number of issues, not the least being just how many Basque guerrillas are in the country? As well, what might they and/or their allies actually be up to in Mexico — are they guiltless or could they be otherwise engaged?

The ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Fatherland and Liberty), founded on Marxist principles in 1959, has the paramount aim of establishing an independent Basque homeland in the northern Spanish provinces of Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa, Alava and Navarra, and the southwestern French departments of Labourd, Basse-Navarra and Soule. And to do so the anti-Spanish and anti-French government separatist group has become progressively more violent as it radically tries to reach its goal. Since it began its deadly attacks in the early 1960s, the ETA campaign of bombings and assassinations has taken at least 840 lives and injured thousands more. Additionally, to finance its guerrilla and terror operations the ETA has victimized countless others through kidnappings, robberies and extortion.

Six Spanish and three Mexican ETA suspects were detained at different locations in Mexico on July 18, following an investigation that began last year and now the receipt of formal arrest requests from the Spanish government. The ten people (one additional subject was taken into custody in Spain) have been accused of setting-up a covert financial network to funnel funds from Spanish to Mexican banks for ETA member activities in Mexico and possibly beyond. Reportedly the funds were sent as cash transfers and cashier’s checks so that the transactions and individuals would be difficult to trace or identify.

Mexican officials have yet to specify what the ETA guerrillas have been planning or doing, but investigations continue. In one frightening interconnection, Mexico’s Attorney General issued a press release following the July arrests that described the search of a suspected ETA cell safe house in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca. The search exposed a cache of manuals on how to make chemical weapons and ETA operations, as well as incriminating videotapes, bank statements and other evidence.

Defenders of the detainees (who are incarcerated as they await extradition hearings) maintain that the Basques and their friends have done no wrong. Supposedly they are simply refugees, retirees and visitors who happen to be in Mexico, innocent people with Mexican family ties but with no links whatsoever to past, present or future guerrilla activities or terrorism. As to money that has been sent to whomever from Spain, it is simply to help loved ones maintain a better standard of living.

Or could all of this be to help fugitives in hiding escape Spanish justice? No matter what, there is sufficient reason to suspect that a well-established ETA presence in Mexico exists.

In 2002 an official with the National Migration Institute (INM), Felipe Urbiola Ledezma, said that the INM had identified a significant number of foreigners in Mexico with ties to terrorist organizations, and he suggested that some of those were part of the ETA. He also said “in the last seven years at least a dozen presumed members of the ETA have been deported and handed-over to Spanish authorities.”

Later in the year, in November, José Antonio Borde Gaztelumendi was detained in Baja California and almost immediately extradited to Spain. Borde, a ten year resident of Ensenada who owned the popular Basque restaurant Kaia, was charged with terrorist activities in Spain between the years of 1978 and 1983, crimes that included the deaths of 16 individuals.

Kidnapping — the ETA moneymaker — today is a cottage industry in Mexico, with some security experts tracking its rise to the 1994 kidnapping of banker Alfredo Harp Helú — and thus maybe by extension to Basque planners or perpetrators. (One thing for sure, it must have made a lot of people drool when the family of the then chairman of Mexico’s largest financial group paid US$30 million in ransom for his release.)

Subsequent to the release the Mexican magazine Proceso reported that Harp Helú’s name had been found on a list of 150 wealthy Latin American executives who were potential kidnap targets. The list was found during a raid on a clandestine arsenal in Nicaragua that purportedly belonged to the ETA. In connection with that discovery, former Spanish interior minister Juan Alberto Belloch told Proceso “it would be sad if Mexican society had to discover the character of ETA criminals by suffering it themselves.”

How prophetic.