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ABSTRACT
This essay examines the rise of government-sponsored anti-terrorist death squads in Spain that accompanied the return to power of the Left since the interwar Second Republic. It locates the roots of this disturbing and puzzling development in the institutional culture of the military inherited from the Franco regime as shaped by its history of counter-terrorism policies. This argument challenges widespread assumptions about a clean break in authoritarian practices in Spain following the democratic transition of 1977. It also calls into question the claim that civilian supremacy over the military was established in Spain by the time democracy was deemed to have reached "consolidation" in 1982. The conclusion culls the lessons of the Spanish experience of battling terrorism with terror for the comparative study of democratization. It suggests that dirty wars intended to eradicate terrorist organizations can erode the legitimacy of a nascent democracy and, paradoxically, prolong the fight against terrorism.
I. INTRODUCTION
Undoubtedly, the biggest stain in Spain's otherwise stellar democratic performance in the post-Franco era is the dirty war waged against the separatist organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, (ETA), (Basque Country and Liberty). Since the return of democracy in 1977, ETA's terrorist campaign on behalf of Basque independence made Spain the epicenter of domestic terrorism in Western Europe.1 As a counter-terrorism strategy, between 1983 and 1987, a government-sponsored paramilitary force, the Grupos Anti-terroristas de Liberación (GAL), (Anti-terrorist Liberalization Groups), battled ETA using ETA's own tactics: assassinations, kidnapings, and bombings. The GAL's aim was the complete eradication of ETA by eliminating its leadership. To that end, the GAL unleashed a wave of indiscriminate violence on both sides of the Spanish-French border, which resulted in the deaths of numerous innocent civilians. A full third of those killed by the GAL had no connection to terrorism whatsoever. Not surprisingly, once exposed by the media during the late 1990s, the GAL's existence created the most sensational political scandal in recent Spanish history. Among the scandal's consequences was accelerating the end of the fourteen-year reign of Felipe González, whose administration is generally credited with modernizing Spanish political and economic institutions.
At the center of this analysis is unpacking the puzzle of why one of the world's most celebrated new democracies adopted a dirty war as the cornerstone of...