Ghosts of Spain (60 page)

On a Sunday afternoon in October 2011, I picked up the telephone and dialled a number I had been asked to call outside Spain. The person who answered the phone, and must remain anonymous, was excited. ‘It is time to write ETA’s obituary,’ he proclaimed. Over the next few days, he said, I would see a historic chain of events that would culminate in ETA declaring that it had renounced violence for ever. Europe’s oldest terrorist group was giving up the battle. Police work, Spanish democracy and the willpower of ordinary Basques had killed it off. I wrote a story for my newspaper, travelled north to San Sebastián and waited for it to happen.

Sure enough, four days later another phone call told me that in a few hours I would receive access to a video in which ETA announced the end. Three ETA leaders, wearing white silk masks and big black berets, sat at a table with an array of Basque flags behind them. ‘ETA has decided the definitive cessation of its armed activity,’ they declared. At the time of writing we still do not know who they were, but an educated guess would make them David Pla, Iratxe Sorzábal and Izaskun Lesaka – three of the few ETA leaders not to have been detained by late 2011. It was not a full rendition. Nor had ETA disbanded or given up its arms. But, peace negotiators involved in the process assured me, that would inevitably come.

I recalled some of the harsher moments of reporting over the previous two decades on Europe’s last violent separatist movement. A couple of years earlier I had walked through the police lines close to the charred wreckage of the Renault Mégane where police inspector Eduardo Puelles had been killed by a car bomb in a Bilbao suburb. ‘Get me out of here! Get me out!’ he had screamed as the flames spread. I remembered some earlier scenes: a small child in a dressing gown running around the San Sebastián apartment of Gregorio Ordóñez, a local PP city councillor who had been murdered by ETA a few weeks earlier; the bitter hatred felt by a wheelchair-bound Civil Guard officer whose
incontinence brought the daily humiliation of wearing, and changing, nappies; or the intense, tearful youths at the funeral of an ETA member in the Basque industrial town of Soraluze. Few pieces of news, I realised, had brought me such joy.

The end is not yet written. ETA has still to formally disband. A former interior minister warned me that ‘there is always the danger of a split, of a breakaway group like the Real IRA in Northern Ireland’. With Rajoy, ETA is unlikely to get anything more than slightly better prison conditions for the six hundred members in Spanish and French jails. The group’s decision to stop killing is, in short, a defeat. But Amaiur – a political party that incorporates separatists of all kinds – won 24 per cent of Basque votes in a general election held four weeks after ETA announced an end to violence. Politics is now a surer choice for separatists than violence.

Whenever the issue of Basque separatism raises its violent head, peaceful Catalonia somehow ends up being pulled into the debate. Discussion of the region’s medium-term future ended, however, when a new statute of autonomy was passed in 2006. The verbose statute (which, with 227 clauses, is longer than Spain’s constitution) gave Catalans still more self-government while nudging Spain further towards
de facto
federalisation. A new, and deliberately ambiguous, duty for people living in Catalonia to ‘know’ the Catalan language proved one of the most controversial clauses.

The debate, again, was heated. Lieutenant General José Mena, the head of Spain’s 50,000-strong ground forces, was sacked after he claimed the constitution gave the armed forces the right to act if the ‘unity of Spain’ was in danger. After reading an early draft of the statute, he warned that if ‘limits are broken … the armed forces have as their mission to guarantee the sovereignty and independence of Spain … There will be serious consequences for the armed forces as an institution and its members if the Catalan charter is approved in its current terms.’

Inevitably, in a country obsessed by history, the statute turned to the past to justify itself. The preamble contains a dozen dates stretching back to 1359. It also, however, planted the seed of future
arguments. ‘The parliament of Catalonia has defined Catalonia as a nation,’ it states, while going on to recognise that the Spanish constitution does not define it that way. The statute became another of those Zapatero compromises that angered almost everyone – especially after the Constitutional Court decided to water down some sections. (The court reined in attempts to make Catalan the senior official language above Castilian Spanish and took away the region’s new powers over local judges. A hair-splitting decision allowed Catalans to claim they belonged to a nation, while stating that the claim had no legal worth.) Catalan nationalists blamed Zapatero for these changes – as if he was somehow meant to control the court – and claimed they had been tricked. Many of the other sixteen autonomous regions into which Spain is divided also got new statutes in these years, each one grandiloquently proclaiming the unique nature of the region it applied to. But the Constitutional Court’s decision on the Catalan statute was a high-water mark in devolution. There is little room to give away more powers without a rewrite of Spain’s constitution (except in taxation – where Catalonia eyes the Basque system with envy). The new PP government is, in any case, against further devolution. Indeed, as Spain struggles to meet strict public deficit targets imposed by the European Union, there is even talk of some regions handing back some powers. That seems unlikely, but it is reasonable to expect a long pause in the process of decentralisation and federalisation of Spain. It is just as reasonable, however, to expect Catalans and Basques to become increasingly separatist. With the doors to further devolution closed, that becomes the only option for those wanting more regional power. Opinion polls in recent years have, in any case, thrown up curious results. A poll in Catalonia in the summer of 2010, just after the Constitutional Court decision on the statute, briefly gave more than 50 per cent backing for separatism. The poll was not an impassioned cry for independence but, as the polling company itself commented, more a case of Catalans giving a laconic ‘Why not?’ reply. Just a few months later only one in ten actually voted for separatist parties in regional elections.

As politics became increasingly vicious in the era of
crispación
, Spaniards began asking themselves if something deeper was going wrong. In the round of newspaper, television and radio interviews that accompanied the launch of the Spanish edition of this book, I was constantly asked whether the ‘Two Spains’ of the Civil War had reappeared. My answers, I am afraid to say, were equivocal. Some days I said ‘yes’. On others I answered ‘no’. It was not an easy question. On the one hand, the rift between left and right (and, along Spain’s other main fault line, between centralists and regional nationalists) was stronger, nastier and more verbally violent than I had ever seen. So, yes, the Two Spains had reappeared. On the other hand, no one was about to pick up a gun and start murdering their neighbours for political reasons (except, of course, ETA). So, no, this was nothing like the situation before the Civil War. I was angry that I could not find an answer, for the book obviously invited the question.

It was not until the
El País
newspaper invited me to the Camp Nou football stadium to watch Barcelona FC play and then be interviewed for a slot in the newspaper that combined soccer with politics and literature that I finally reached a conclusion. With the magical play of Leo Messi (then accompanied by Ronaldinho and Samuel Eto’o) to inspire me, I pondered the ‘Two Spains’ question that I was inevitably going to be asked. The answer finally came to me during the interview which, this being Spain, was conducted over a meal that started at midnight and ended some time after 2 a.m.

The answer, it seemed, was that Spain had entered a new phase in its, admittedly short, democratic history. A combination of José María Aznar’s second term in power, Zapatero’s social changes, the historical memory debate, the train bombings and the bitter debate over negotiating with ETA brought a true end to Spain’s transition to democracy. During that transition Spain reached a historically extraordinary, and invaluable, degree of consensus. This covered everything from foreign policy to terrorism. Most importantly, it lasted long enough for Spaniards to build a new state, with a new democratic constitution and decentralised
administration. The
Transición
, however, was not normal. It was, in fact, an exception in Spanish history.

In Zapatero’s first term the fig leaf of consensus was removed. Both sides played their part in the process. There had, anyway, been something false about that consensus – almost as if Spaniards, horrified by the past, were trying too hard to dissimulate the things that separated them. The gloves had started coming off during Aznar’s second term. His People’s Party, buoyed by an absolute majority in parliament, felt confident enough to tread a genuinely ideologically right-wing path. Spain had not experienced such a thing for decades. The Iraq war, which Aznar backed, definitively broke any consensus on foreign policy. The political left, for its part, broke the consensus that underlay the pact of forgetting by bringing historical memory, Francoism and the Spanish Civil War to the table.

The train bombings shattered any remaining consensus. Even terrorism, whether by Islamists or by ETA, now became open territory for party political warfare. In many countries this would seem normal. Who would expect opposing political parties on the left and right to agree on such things? In Spain, however, it was both new and scary. It was made more frightening by the virulence with which, once released, these differences were expressed by politicians and opinion-makers in the press. That, however, is the nature of suppressed debates. Like suppressed emotions, they burst forth with uncontrolled vigour when they are released.

This state of confrontation reflects the historical – perhaps, even, natural – tensions within Spain. It may well be permanent, though it will not always be as virulent as it was in the early Zapatero years. There is, however, one huge difference between today and any time previous to the
Transición
. Spanish democracy is solidly established. It provides a stage upon which the old battles can be fought without blood being spilt. So yes, the Two Spains are back. They never really went away. The difference is that, in democracy, their arguments can be safely thrashed out.

Spaniards have now reached a moment of economic crisis, anyway, when they must worry more about the future than the past. That future no longer affects just the 40 million Spaniards who made up the country’s population at the turn of the century. For the first decade of the twenty-first century brought a social revolution that had little to do with politics and everything to do with a booming economy that needed fresh labour. Spain, a country with a vivid and recent memory of emigration, suddenly became a beacon for migrants from elsewhere. In a single decade some 5 million people arrived – possibly the biggest population shift seen in Europe for decades.

Carmen Tejada was one of the first to come, beating the rush by almost a decade. In autumn 1991 she flew to Lisbon after borrowing 2,500 dollars for a plane ticket from a loan shark in her home town of Pacasmayo, Peru. The extortionate interest rate was 20 per cent, or 500 dollars, per month. She had left behind her two children, Karina and Joey, aged eleven and thirteen, and a job earning 200 dollars a month working a sweatshop sewing machine. The following day she wandered down the white mo saic pavements of the Portuguese town of Elvas and tried to work out the best route across the nearby Spanish border. A taxi driver offered to take her all the way to Madrid – the same city where her sister Ana had been turned back at the airport and sent home to Peru a few months earlier – for 1,000 dollars. ‘But I worked out that I could probably make it if I just got on the train. At the worst, they might force me to stay in Portugal. I was very nervous, but when they checked our passports in the middle of the night I said I was a teacher who just wanted to do some sightseeing in Madrid. They let me through,’ she said. Carmen arrived on a Saturday. She found a job as a maid on Tuesday. Within three months she had paid off her loan. ‘I only needed 100 dollars a month to live on. I sent everything else back to Peru. The money even put a roof on the second floor of our house there,’ she said.

Within a year her eight brothers and sisters had all made the same trip. Within three years her husband Fernando (who, scared of border guards, paid the Portuguese taxi drivers’ 1,000 dollar
taxi fee) and her two children were with them. A middleman smuggled the children in via Germany and France. In all, some eighty people from her extended family came. ‘It was very easy for women to find work as live-in maids,’ she said. ‘The men had a more difficult time, but eventually construction took off and they too were working.’

Carmen was a pioneer, arriving in Spain just a few weeks after I had also returned for what would become a permanent stay. The country we both found was still racially and – barring regional differences – culturally homogeneous. For Carmen and her extended family it was an El Dorado. None of them would now consider going back – though, when cancer threatened, Carmen flew home to get a second opinion from a Peruvian doctor. Twenty years later she has Spanish nationality and Spanish grandchildren. She owns a small flat and a house with a little orchard in the countryside. Many of her nieces and nephews are studying at university. One has a master’s degree in marketing.

Hers is a tale that could be repeated by millions of immigrants. The drip-drip of new arrivals in the 1990s became a flood in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The number of foreigners living in Spain leapt from 2 per cent, to 12 per cent, or 5.6 million people – and Spain’s population jumped 10 per cent to 45 million as a result. Most came from Latin America, home to an endless pool of potential immigrants who already share cultural, linguistic and religious values with Spaniards. Some came from Morocco and Algeria. More desperate immigrants from Africa also arrived – often on perilous boat journeys to the beaches of the Canary Islands, where hundreds lost their lives at sea.