Juan Mari Jáuregui normally slept soundly, but on the night of 28 July 2000 he was disturbed by a nightmare. “I dreamed they killed me,” he told his wife the next morning, as he left his house in the village of Legorreta, in Spain’s verdant Basque Country, to meet a friend for coffee. She told him not to worry. It was just a dream.
Jáuregui was a big man – 6ft tall and 16 stone – with a voice and personality to match. He was 48, and between September 1994 and May 1996 he had been civil governor of Gipuzkoa, his wealthy home province, which lies in the north of Spain, on the border with France. “If he was in the room, you knew he was there, and not just because of his size,” said Xabier Maiza, a fellow local politician from the Socialist party.
The nightmare was not hard to explain. Although Jáuregui was passionate about his Basque identity and delivered speeches in the ancient local language of Euskara, he made no secret of his antipathy to the violent terrorist group Eta, which had been pressing for Basque independence since 1959. Jáuregui had lost friends and colleagues to Eta assassinations, some recently.
Jáuregui was a man of principle. During the dictatorship of General Franco, he had been a clandestine activist, peacefully campaigning for Basque independence. After Franco’s death in 1975, when Spain embraced democracy and Basques were granted a degree of self-government, Jáuregui publicly criticised Eta’s increasingly violent tactics. If that placed him in danger, so did his condemnation of the state-backed “dirty war” against Eta during the 1980s, in which suspects were assassinated by hired far-right hitmen, or disappeared, tortured and murdered by police.
During his time as governor, Jáuregui had pursued the key figure behind that dirty war, the local commander of the paramilitary civil guards, General Enrique Rodríguez Galindo. In January 2000, he had testified against Galindo in court, helping to convict him for the kidnapping and murder of two young Eta members. “I don’t know who will kill me, Eta or Galindo,” he joked to his wife, Maixabel Lasa, after the trial.
For his own safety, after the socialists were voted out in 1996, Jáuregui had moved to Chile, where he took a job working for a duty-free company. Since then, he had returned home regularly to spend time with his wife and their daughter Maria, who was now 19. On this visit, in the summer of 2000, he and Lasa were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary. He had not requested bodyguards, although such security measures were standard for Basque politicians who opposed independence. He was no longer in frontline politics and he had come to think he was no longer a real target for Eta. He was hoping he would soon be able to return to Spain permanently.
On Saturday mornings, when he was back home, Jáuregui liked to drive to Tolosa, a large town six miles downriver, to have coffee with Jaime Otamendi, the head of news at the Basque regional government’s public broadcaster. Their favourite meeting spot was the Frontón, a large art-deco cafe on a broad, tree-lined street. Only Jáuregui’s optimism could explain why they met openly at the same place, time and day for three consecutive weeks. A security detail would never have allowed it. “It was a mistake,” Otamendi admitted regretfully when we spoke earlier this year.
On 29 July 2000, Jáuregui and Otamendi entered the bustling cafeteria, settling into a window table shortly before 11.30am. At around the same time, two members of an Eta unit walked up to the bar. One of them disappeared into the bathrooms, emerging in a peaked cap and dark glasses, then heading straight to their table. Otamendi recalls suddenly sensing someone at his friend’s shoulder. Then he saw a pistol.
The gunman fired twice at point-blank range. The shots made a dry, sharp sound. “He aimed straight at Juan Mari’s head,” said Otamendi. The 9mm bullets from the Sig Sauer P226 pistol passed through Jáuregui’s skull and embedded in a side wall. He slumped to the floor.
“The strangest thing was that, within seconds, the place was empty,” Otamendi recalled. A few moments earlier, the room had been packed. It was as if nobody wanted to know, or come forward as a witness. Then Jáuregui’s phone rang. Otamendi did not answer it.
* * *
Luis Carrasco moved urgently. The getaway car was 400 metres away. An assassination like this needed three people – a shooter, an armed lookout and a getaway driver – and this time Carrasco had played the role of lookout, covering the cafe’s doors while his colleague, Patxi Makazaga, fired the lethal shots into Jáuregui’s head. (It was the first of six assassinations with car bombs and pistols carried out by this Eta unit over the next year, with Carrasco as the shooter in one of them.)
The three Eta men knew very little about their target. “We were told he had held a position of responsibility in the Socialist party,” Carrasco told me when we first spoke last year, nine months after he was released from jail on parole. For Carrasco and his fellow assassins, this was enough. The Socialist Workers’ party had ruled Spain for much of the 1980s and 90s, and had dealt significant blows to Eta. They were the enemy.
The Eta unit had stolen a white Renault 21 as a getaway car, changing the number plates and hiding it in a garage in preparation for the killing. Now Ibon Etxezarreta, one of Carrasco’s local friends, was waiting in the driver’s seat, parked near Tolosa’s small bullring. The two men had joined Eta together five years earlier, when Carrasco was 23, proving their commitment with small-scale gun and bomb attacks, which injured several people. They had just moved up the ranks to join a recently formed, six-strong assassination unit named “Buruntza” after a prominent hill overlooking his home town, Lasarte, just a 20-minute drive from Tolosa.
Eta’s leadership was far away, living clandestinely in France. It chose assassination targets and ensured that the unit received arms and money. Apart from that, Carrasco’s unit was largely on its own, though they could count on informal support from the many Eta sympathisers in the region. Although most Basques disliked Eta’s violence, few were bold enough to say so in public, especially in the towns and villages of the Oria river and its hilly hinterland, such as Legorreta and Tolosa, where the group was strong. For years, Eta had imposed a suffocating atmosphere on the region, extorting a “revolutionary tax” from local businesses and hounding anyone who publicly opposed it. Thuggish youths known as borrokas, with hooped earrings and mullet haircuts, used violence and vandalism to target people who spoke out.
As Etxezarreta pulled into traffic, the three men found themselves behind a police car, but to their relief, it paid them no attention. They drove the car to a secluded spot four miles away. “We blew it up,” said Carrasco. Fingerprints and DNA disappeared in the blaze. They felt satisfied, he told me. The operation had gone perfectly. They did not see themselves as murderers, but as heroic soldiers in a war of national liberation.
The Basque provinces had been part of Spain for centuries, but had always enjoyed a degree of autonomy, with special laws and tax systems (though Franco suppressed most of what remained of them), as well as having their own language. Basque fears about losing such ancient privileges had helped spark three civil wars in the 19th century. In the late 20th century, Eta spiced these old grudges with the revolutionary glamour of Che Guevara, the language of colonial liberation and the horror of Francoist repression. Between 1968 and 2011, Eta killed around 830 people, yet to young recruits like Carrasco, it still seemed righteous and noble. It had been his ambition to fight for Eta since he was a teenager.
* * *
While Carrasco’s unit made their getaway, Maixabel Lasa was at home, washing her hair. She was still drying it when her sister, Lourdes, rang with a terse instruction: “Do not leave the house.” Lasa immediately recalled her husband’s nightmare.
Friends soon arrived and drove her to the small hospital in Tolosa, 15 minutes away, where Jáuregui was being treated. He died before Lasa could see him. When she finally entered his room, his head was bandaged and his face set in a rictus as if smiling. Lasa felt he was telling her something. “It was as if he was saying: ‘They might have killed me, but we can still become the winners in this story.’”
Lasa and I first spoke in Legorreta in the summer of 2022. She was dressed elegantly, with chunky silver rings on her fingers, her short grey hair swept up, brown eyes projecting both pain and pride. She still lives in the same house she once shared with Jáuregui, and when she talked about her husband’s death, she occasionally held back tears. They had grown up on the same street and attended primary school together, where the two native Euskara speakers learned Spanish. They had started dating at the age of 16. Lasa struggled to express how grief had hit her. The word “hate” did not fit, she said. “It was a kind of impotent rage. Why kill anyone? And why kill Juan Mari?”
In the wake of Eta killings, victims’ families often found themselves shunned by radical separatists in their local community. After Jáuregui’s death, some of the village’s separatists publicly visited Lasa to offer condolences. She appreciated the gesture. “Everybody could see who was coming into my house,” she said. “But other people whom I would have expected to see stayed away. I guess they were scared.” Friends, in other words, were also lost.
Lasa’s rage was increased by memories of Jáuregui’s courageous past. He had twice been imprisoned for his beliefs. As a young man, he had belonged to a non-violent branch of Eta and was first jailed for protesting against death penalties handed down to Eta leaders in 1970, before being locked up again for giving refuge and medical help to an Eta member who had accidentally shot himself during a bank hold-up. In 1973, he had left Eta with others opposed to its violence, moving to the Communist party, which Lasa also joined, before becoming a socialist in 1990.
But Lasa knew that a history of activism was no protection. Their close friend José Luis López de Lacalle – a columnist for the staunchly anti-Eta newspaper El Mundo who lived in a town nearby – had been shot dead outside his apartment block in May 2000, just two months before Jáuregui was killed. As a young man, López de Lacalle had been tortured by Franco’s police and spent five years in jail for organising a clandestine trade union. To Eta, that counted for nothing.
Lasa knew, too, that some people would celebrate her husband’s death. Eta’s political wing, the hardline Herri Batasuna party, routinely won one in seven Basque votes, rising to a quarter in Legorreta. Victims’ families were often abused via anonymous phone calls, graffiti or desecration of gravestones. On leaving López de Lacalle’s funeral, mourners found themselves staring incredulously at fresh graffiti that read “José Luis, go fuck yourself!” Not long after, a crosshairs target was spraypainted on Lasa and Jáuregui’s house.
Having lived through Franco’s rule, Lasa felt that life under Eta was just another type of dictatorship. “You realise that they just kill people for thinking differently to them,” she said.
* * *
For Lasa, activism was an escape from grief. When a silent march against Eta was organised in the Basque city of Bilbao three months after Jáuregui’s death, Lasa addressed the protesters. Despite the atmosphere of fear that it still imposed in much of its heartland, by 2000, Eta’s grip had steadily weakened over the previous few years. More than 100,000 people attended the rain-drenched demonstration. “Hate will not bed down in our hearts,” she told the crowd. It became the sentiment that guided her through life without her husband.
In the meantime, police concentrated their efforts on tracking down Carrasco’s unit, as it continued to carry out targeted killings over the next year. (Of five subsequent attacks, Carrasco was directly involved in two, according to court records.) By mid-August 2001, police had established surveillance on Carrasco. They followed his trips between his family home in Lasarte and the safe house he was renting in the nearby town of Zizurkil. On 22 August, they raided the safe house, capturing Carrasco and four other unit members, including Makazaga, the man who shot Jaúregui. Police found an arsenal of explosives, grenades and, among a dozen weapons, the Sig Sauer pistol used in the assassination. “I always knew I would probably end up in jail,” Carrasco told me. He saw prison as a worthy if unwanted price to pay for being a courageous gudari, or Basque soldier.
When news reached her of the arrests, Lasa was relieved. “At least I knew they couldn’t kill anyone else,” she told me. Four months later, in December 2001, she was appointed to set up a terrorism victims office for the Basque regional government, which was run by the moderate, non-violent Basque Nationalist party. Lasa brought energy and courage to the role. “She managed to place the victims centre stage,” said Paul Rios, former leader of the Basque Lokarri peace group. “Her natural empathy and calm, commonsense manner helped her bridge political divides at a difficult time.”
Carrasco was remanded in jail and, over the next few years, a series of trials were held – one for each murder and others for attempted murder – and guilty verdicts piled up. Although several sentences formally exceeded the amount, he expected to spend 30 years – then the maximum time a person could be locked away in Spain – in prison. When the trial for Jáuregui’s murder was held in Madrid in January 2004, Lasa was called as a witness.
By this time, Eta was seriously weakened. More than 700 of its members were in jail, and thanks to the work of undercover agents and informers, as well as close collaboration between French and Spanish law enforcement, police were now capturing new Eta units before they could carry out attacks. Under a new law, the successor parties to Herri Batasuna were banned and placed on EU and US terrorist lists – effectively expelling the radical separatist movement from local politics.
In her job, meanwhile, Lasa was helping wrest popular support from Eta by highlighting the suffering of its victims. More controversially, she widened the scope of her office to aid victims of all political violence, whether inflicted by police, agents of the “dirty war”, or violent far-right groups from the 1970s and 80s. Lasa identified 66 such killings. Many of the dead were Eta members or supporters. Those who thought Eta deserved only defeat and humiliation accused her of going soft on terrorism. But by ensuring human rights were applied to all, regardless of their political beliefs, she felt she was carrying on Jáuregui’s work. “In a way she became Juan Mari,” said Otamendi. “She was bold and very independent.”
In 2007, Lasa’s name was found on an Eta list of potential targets. Like hundreds of other politicians and officials, she now needed bodyguards and had to renounce simple pleasures that might expose her to risk of assassination: bicycle rides, trips to the beach, even coffee in a public square. “In a small village, everybody always knows where you are,” she said. By now, her daughter María was at university in Huelva, on Spain’s southern Atlantic coast, and insisted her mother visit regularly to escape the Basque Country. One weekend a month, Lasa headed south. Those trips felt like freedom. The return to Legorreta was harder. She did not want María to lose both her parents, but this was home – and she had work to do.
* * *
Early in 2002, Carrasco was sent to Almería jail, 1,000km away from his home town. His parents – who had been shocked to discover that as well as working in a brick factory, their son belonged to Eta – would visit twice a month, a 10-hour road trip each way. His anger grew. “I became more radical,” he told me.
At the same time, he got to know some former senior Eta leaders in prison. He was surprised by these encounters. The men, whose example and orders he had once followed, struck him as mediocre. It was a first disappointment, and more would come. Over the next few years, as Eta was ground down by police activity, Carrasco started to believe that the group’s violence – and his own – had always been futile, misguided and cruel. “I had provoked tremendous suffering, which a veil of hatred and fanaticism had stopped me seeing,” he said.
Carrasco told me he could not pick out a single event or moment that changed his mind, but his rebellion had become absolute by December 2006, when Eta broke a nine-month ceasefire by planting a bomb at Madrid’s Barajas airport, killing two people. Carrasco recalls some Eta prisoners celebrated the news. “They were grinning with satisfaction,” he told me. From then on, he ate at a separate table with two fellow prisoners who were also dismayed by the attack.
Carrasco had plenty of time to ponder how he had become a killer. As a teenager, he had joined pro-Eta street protests in the nearby city of San Sebastián, which often ended in violent confrontations with the police. He started carrying hammers to protests, ready to smash up bank machines and windows. Eta members watched over the violent youths closely, directing them from a distance through contacts on the ground. By taking part, Carrasco was proving his loyalty and effectively auditioning for a role in Eta. He was careful not to attract the attention of police, unlike some of the more loud-mouthed pro-Eta youths. “The end game was always to get into Eta, so I didn’t want to stand out too much,” he told me. He also kept his participation secret from his parents, a working-class couple whose quiet politics veered between socialism and the lightweight nationalism of the Basque National party.
In 1995, his dream of joining Eta came true when he and his old friend Etxezarreta were approached by an intermediary. Carrasco did not go into detail, except to say that it was a discreet tap on the shoulder. An Eta instructor took them to a remote country spot for a one-day training course in how to use weapons and explosives, according to testimony later given to police by Etxezarreta. Then he gave them two Browning pistols, a MAT submachine gun and 5kg of ammonal explosives. For the next five years, they carried out non-lethal bomb attacks on infrastructure and police stations. Then they joined the Buruntza unit.
Eta imposed tight discipline on jailed members. They were ordered to shun the perks of good behaviour, including early release or visits home. They saw themselves as political prisoners rather than common criminals, and their policy was to shun “individual favours” until all were released under an amnesty. An Eta prisoners’ support group provided lawyers, arranged buses for family visits and maintained discipline. “It’s a sect,” Carrasco explained.
As with all sects, thinking for yourself was not permitted. Once Carrasco started expressing doubts, he was treated like a traitor. The support his family had received from the radical separatist movement in Lasarte now fell away. Breaking with the group was dangerous. “It gets aggressive,” Carrasco told me. In 1986, Maria Dolores Katarain, a former senior member who broke ranks, was shot dead while playing with her three-year-old son in a busy square in her home town of Ordizia. Locals were so terrified that an El País reporter could only quote “people quoting other people who spoke to supposed eyewitnesses who won’t speak to the press”. The message was clear. You could join Eta, but never leave.
By 2006, however, Eta was losing its once iron-cast control over prisoners and a small number of them had turned against the group. After decades of violence, there was still no prospect of Basque independence. Some prisoners wondered whether they had wasted their time and lives. Others, like Carrasco, realised they had only spread horror. Neither group could understand why the violence continued. “The armed fight is no longer useful,” a group of jailed former Eta leaders, who were then expelled, had protested in a letter published in a newspaper two years earlier. The moral standing of these one-time “heroes” gave their protests added weight, creating a crack in the monolithic facade of radical separatism.
The Spanish government eventually seized on this opportunity, grouping these rebel Eta convicts together in a single jail near the Basque capital of Vitoria. Carrasco was one of the prisoners transferred there in February 2010. His former unit companion, Ibon Etxezarreta, who was taking his own path out of Eta, was also moved to the same jail.
And it was from this jail, in late 2010, that an extraordinary letter was sent. A repentant Eta convict wrote to Lasa’s victims office to ask how they might apologise to their victims’ families for what they had done.
* * *
After receiving the letter, Lasa’s office contacted a 30-year-old Madrid lawyer called Esther Pascual, a no-nonsense expert in restorative justice – a process whereby wrongdoers meet and sometimes make amends to their victims. Early in 2011 Pascual drove 200 miles to meet some of the repentant Eta prisoners. Carrasco and Etxezarreta were among the 30 Eta prisoners, jointly responsible for dozens of assassinations, waiting for her in a packed room.
“It was the most difficult meeting of my life,” Pascual told me when I visited her apartment outside Madrid. Among her audience were infamous terrorists such as Idoia López Riaño, known as the Tigress, who was serving time for 23 murders in bomb and gun attacks, and José Luis Urrusolo Sistiaga, who had stalked Barcelona in the year before the 1992 Olympic Games, gunning down cops and soldiers as he added to a tally that, according to police, rose to at least 16 victims. All had repudiated Eta. Several had very strong personalities and they did not all seem to get along.
The meeting did not go as Pascual expected. “I had never dealt with terrorists before,” she explained. They were very different from the dysfunctional, damaged or drug-addicted prisoners she knew from other projects. Most had deeply held views about right and wrong, although this attitude had once led them to kill. Some were well read. Others were strong-willed and argumentative. “They were deeply suspicious of me,” Pascual said. Was she a spy for the Spanish intelligence service? Or an undercover journalist?
Pascual is not easily intimidated. Lasa describes her as “very strong, with clear ideas.” Pascual explained that she was only there because one of them had written a letter asking for help. Anyone who wanted to apologise to victims’ relatives, she added, must submit to a serious preparation programme. Victims’ families, she warned, may well refuse to meet. Either way, there would be no benefits in terms of release dates, furloughs or prison conditions.
Her audience seemed nonplussed. The initial consensus in the room appeared to be that Eta itself should apologise for their crimes, since it was a collective in which everyone was equally culpable. When Pascual was winding up the session three hours later, she felt her visit had been futile. She was sure none of those present would actually want to pursue a meeting with an Eta victim.
But she was wrong. “One of them stood up in front of the others and said they wanted to try,” Pascual said. As they chatted informally afterwards, five more made the same request, including a man who had remained silent for much of the meeting. It was Luis Carrasco.
* * *
For the next few months, Pascual regularly left home at 5am to drive to the jail for individual sessions with Carrasco and the five other volunteers. Before he could meet Lasa, Carrasco first had to reckon with his own past. Pascual had a long list of blunt questions, which they discussed in their fortnightly meetings. How many times have you killed? Why? How? How did it feel the first time? Did you sleep well the night before? Did you celebrate afterwards? How many people have suffered because of your crimes? When did you realise how much hurt you have caused? Why not earlier? Do you think anyone could forgive you? Is there anything good inside you?
“These are questions they have often never been asked, or even thought about,” Pascual told me. “They are difficult.” Yet these are exactly the questions that victims’ relatives ask. Carrasco recalled these sessions as gruelling but useful. Most of the prisoners Pascual was working with were terrified by the idea of meeting their victims’ families. “It’s tough, because you can start to imagine yourself in the actual meeting [with the victim’s loved ones],” Carrasco told me. As a man of clear ideas but few words, Carrasco was not sure how to express himself. The sessions allowed him to work that out. A common question that victims ask, Pascual told me, was “whether they had looked [the target] in the eye” before shooting. (The answer was usually no, since doing so would humanise the victim, who the terrorists preferred to see as “military targets”.)
Pascual was training the former terrorists, but she was also testing them. Would she dare present them to a victim’s family? Pascual rejected one volunteer who argued that only some Eta killings were wrong. “They can’t have a meeting if they want to justify violence,” she explained. Pascual only approaches victims’ relatives once she considers the convict is ready, but few family members actually agree to meet the killers who devastated their lives. Victims’ loved ones are often consumed by hatred. “Many say that this hatred ends up destroying them,” says Pascual. Meetings are pointless, even counterproductive, until they overcome that. Understandably, some never do.
* * *
Lasa knew from the start that Carrasco wanted to meet, but it was with some trepidation that Pascual finally told her that he was ready. It would be the first direct meeting between an Eta prisoner and the family of someone they had killed. (Pascual had already overseen meetings in which victims met repentant Eta members not directly involved in the killings of their loved ones.)
Lasa told me she agreed to meet Carrasco out of a sense of duty to the Basque Country. She did not expect it to help her personally; she wanted to encourage repentant Eta members. A few months earlier, in January 2011, Eta had declared another ceasefire and now seemed serious about peace. People like Lasa were already thinking about the future, and the battles that would need to be fought over how Eta was remembered. The group’s supporters now mostly favoured it giving up arms, but they still viewed its members as heroes, and the hundreds of deaths they had caused as justified. That needed to change. “I went in there thinking these people would leave jail eventually and it was better if they did so believing they had done something bad, rather than seeing themselves as heroes,” she told me. “People are capable of doing both terrible and great things.” She was also sure that her husband would have approved.
On 26 May 2011, Lasa and Pascual drove together to the prison, to meet Carrasco. Both women were nervous – Pascual about whether Lasa and Carrasco were ready for this moment, Lasa about meeting her husband’s killer.
As Lasa made her way through the jail’s security checks, an equally nerve-wracked Carrasco was ushered into a small, windowless meeting room. It was filthy and shambolic, with plastic chairs piled high and dirt on the table. Carrasco felt Lasa deserved more respect, so he frantically wiped down the table and arranged the chairs.
Lasa did not know what to expect. She hadn’t even seen a photograph of Carrasco. When she finally entered the room, she found herself in front of a large man with brown hair and gentle manners who spoke in short sentences punctuated by silences. He was 41, and had spent half of his adult life in jail. “I found someone whose self-esteem had disintegrated,” Lasa told me. “He seemed so unhappy that I actually felt sorry for him, perhaps because I am old enough to be his mother.”
Carrasco, meanwhile, concentrated on finding the right words in order to answer Lasa’s questions without increasing her pain. “I expected resentment and reproaches, which would have been fair,” he told me. Instead, he was soon soothed, in fact amazed, by Lasa’s measured manner, natural warmth and chattiness. “He’s not talkative. You have to ask lots of questions,” she told me later. She found Carrasco genuinely repentant, bearing a burden that seemed to weigh physically on his posture.
“Everything about me is bad,” he told her. “There is nothing good in me.”
“If that was true, neither of us would be here now,” she answered.
Pascual sat close by, watching the encounter begin to flow. Carrasco answered Lasa’s questions honestly. “I did my best to tell her what I thought,” he told me. “And that I knew I had done her a lot of harm.” He had been in Eta for most of his adult life. “It is not as though I could put a positive spin on my life for her.”
“When you speak to someone you begin to understand them – how they idealised Eta, and saw themselves as saviours of the nation,” Lasa told me.
She felt a need to boost his morale. “You’ve stood up to the group you belonged to. You’ve gone from being a hero to your people to a traitor, with all that means when you are in prison, and to your family,” she told him. “But you’ve recovered your dignity.”
Carrasco asked forgiveness. Lasa did not give it. She doesn’t like the word (perdón in Spanish), which she sees as devalued by overuse and the Roman Catholic church. (Lasa calls herself “a non-believer”.) What she wanted for him, she said, was a “second chance”.
They talked about family. “I’d rather be Juan Mari’s widow than your mother,” said Lasa. (“It must be terrible for a mother to learn that her son is capable of killing someone,” she told me.) That comment hit him hard, Carrasco recalled.
After two and a half hours the meeting ended with a promise to meet again. Carrasco was drained, but he felt relief. “I’d done what I had to do. It was one of the few good things that I had done in a long time,” he told me. Lasa had impressed him enormously. “She has a lot of class,” he said.
Lasa felt euphoric. “I feel liberated, as if I had shed a weight,” she told Pascual as she squeezed her hand in the car afterwards. It was a feeling, Pascual told me, that other victims have experienced after similar meetings.
When Lasa’s friends learned about the meeting, they were amazed, but not entirely surprised, by her boldness. “I don’t know if I would do the same, and the opportunity has never appeared, but Maixabel is very brave,” her old friend Mari Paz Artolazabal, the 84-year-old widow of José Luis López de Lacalle, told me when I visited her earlier this year.
For Lasa and Carrasco, however, this was just a beginning. They have met many times since, and still share a meal together every few months. So, too, do Lasa and the getaway car driver, Etxezarreta, who has made a new life for himself in a new city, and works at a bakery. He politely declined to talk to me. Both men are in regular contact with Lasa, swapping WhatsApp messages or chatting on the phone about jobs, girlfriends, families and politics. In fact, last year Lasa introduced Carrasco to a secondary school teacher in Madrid who had asked her to speak to her pupils about restorative justice. The teacher and Carrasco have since begun a romantic relationship.
Carrasco is astounded by Lasa’s generosity, but also feels it is important that she keeps him thinking about his past. “There is an invisible connection between victims and perpetrators that only disappears when one of them leaves this planet,” Lasa told me.
* * *
Last summer I walked along a sunken green track lined with ferns and blackberries on Mount Burnikurutzeta, a steep hill above Legorreta. There were about 40 of us, mostly friends and family of Juan Mari Jáuregui. Eventually we reached a clearing overlooked by tall pines, where a 17th-century stone marker topped with an iron cross indicated the crossing of ancient pathways. Beside it sat a waist-high stone monument with a green metal plaque bearing the words: “Those who loved you remember you.”
Lasa placed the plaque here shortly after her husband’s death. This was where they had liked to hike, making the steep climb with friends and stopping here for wine and sandwiches. It is where Lasa chose to scatter his ashes. In the years after the monument was erected, pro-Eta thugs twice smashed it up, but each time it was quickly rebuilt. (Since vandalising Eta victims’ graves was a routine form of harassment, the family had spare plaques ready.) I brought a red rose to place in front of the plaque, as did others at this annual homage. The group toasted Jáuregui and sang. Parts of the song sheet, written in Euskara, were unintelligible to me. Others were rousing Spanish socialist hymns. Emotion swept through me as the voices floated up into the trees.
Eight years earlier, in 2014, on furlough from prison, Ibon Etxezarreta had appeared at this homage with a large bunch of carnations. He had come with Lasa, driving up the twisting road to Mount Burnikurutzeta in a borrowed car. “How strange that 14 years ago, I drove the escape car after we killed Juan Mari, and now I’m driving you,” he told her.
Lasa had told just a few friends about her guest that day. When he arrived there was some muttering among the people assembled, but her close friend Mari Paz Artolazabal went up to talk to him. “He told me that he might easily have been ordered to kill José Luis and would have done so,” she told me. Artolazabal found herself asking him whether Eta members were people or robots, but dug deep into her Christian faith to find forgiveness. “You won’t find hate in either my house or that of Maixabel,” she told me.
By that time, Eta was on its way to becoming history. The 2011 ceasefire had held and the group eventually handed over its arms in 2017 before disbanding the following year. Unlike the IRA and Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the peace was neither negotiated with the government, nor has it ever come unstuck. Eta got nothing in return and its remaining 154 prisoners are serving out their jail terms. The radical separatist movement has now turned to democratic politics and proved good at it. It now polls much better than when Eta was active, winning 29% of the vote at May’s local elections through a party called EH Bildu. Strangely, this “peace dividend” has coincided with a fall in support for their main demand – independence – from 30% to 25% over a decade.
Today, the most heated battle is over the past, just as Lasa foresaw. Was Eta always bad? Was that 20% of Basques who supported it always wrong? Will they publicly admit it and express shame? That seems unlikely. Eta veteran Arnaldo Otegi, now aged 65, led the radical separatist movement away from violence and continues to head EH Bildu. His vague public apologies for “the damage done” lack Carrasco’s profound repentance. “It is time their leaders said that what Eta did was wrong,” Lasa told me.
Carrasco frets that former Eta supporters prefer to forget, rather than confront past horrors. Lasa is more optimistic, especially since the story of her encounters with her husband’s killers have spread through the Basque Country and the rest of Spain. “You don’t know how many people who I have never met, including from that [radical separatist] world, have stopped me in the street to thank me,” she said.
When I last saw Carrasco earlier this summer, he remained profoundly repentant, constantly questioning his past. “It’s not as if everyone from my neighbourhood joined Eta. It was only a few of us,” he said after showing me the thick black electronic tag on his ankle that he wears as a condition of his parole. Now with a job at a mill and the love of a girlfriend, he hoped he might still recover some of the innocence of his childhood: “That 14-year-old kid who had still not wreaked such damage, who still felt some fear or reservation about taking a life,” he said.
Carrasco’s idea of a return to childhood innocence chimed with something I had asked Lasa the previous day. I wanted to know if she would describe her feelings toward Carrasco and Etxezarreta as maternal. She smiled and held a finger and thumb close together, indicating a small measure. “A little bit, yes,” she said. “Otherwise, how can I explain why I worry about whether they find work and such things?”
I asked both Lasa and Carrasco if they saw anything remarkable in the fact that the widow of a terrorist victim should introduce her husband’s killer to a new girlfriend, bringing love into his life. Carrasco was immediately and painfully aware of a cruel paradox. “After all, I took her husband away from her,” he said.
Lasa saw something else, knowing that Jáuregui would have applauded. “I realise people will be dumbfounded by this,” she told me. “But Juan Mari would have liked seeing these people take responsibility for their past and wanting peace. They have a right to remake their lives after prison. He would approve.”
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