“With the assassination of the President of the Government, Luis Carrero Blanco, and the murder of 13 people in the Rolando cafeteria, on Madrid's Correo Street, due to the explosion of a bomb, ETA intended to provoke a repressive reaction from the dictatorship to obstruct what he considered the bourgeois-democratic path, and promote a revolutionary solution to Francoism.” That is the conclusion of Eduardo Sánchez Gatell, who witnessed the preparation of both attacks—the first in December 1973, and the second in September 1974—due to the relationship he had at the time with Eva Forest, ETA's main collaborator in Madrid. and with José Miguel Beñarán, Argala, a member of the ETA commando that killed Carrero. Many years later, Sánchez Gatell – who was arrested and granted amnesty for those events – walked away from the world. abertzale and obtained a seat with the PSOE in the Madrid Assembly.
Sánchez Gatell, a 68-year-old from Madrid, belonged to a family close to the PCE and a friend of the couple formed by Eva Forest and the playwright Alfonso Sastre. Gatell frequented the couple's home because, in addition, he was a friend of his son Juan. In January 1973 he was arrested and mistreated by police officer Billy the Kid for participating in student struggles. He became radicalized and approached the couple, who led a Vietnam Solidarity Committee that ended up supporting ETA. In September 1973, Forest proposed to Gatell to create an armed group in Madrid and he thus entered her circle of trust. “An armed group that did not act, but that supported ETA in Madrid,” he says.
On September 11, 1973, the day of the coup d'état in Chile against President Salvador Allende, Gatell met Argala at Forest y Sastre's home. “Eva introduced him to me as an ETA militant and I was surprised that he celebrated the fall of Allende. She said that she demonstrated that armed struggle was the only way. Eva knew that in my house there was a lot of sensitivity towards Chile because of my mother's friendship with Pablo Neruda. [Angelina Gatell era poetisa y biógrafa de Neruda] and disapproved of the celebration of Argala. But he told us that Sastre had warned Allende of the need to take up arms,” Gatell recalls.
Between September and December, the month of Carrero's murder, Sánchez-Gatell – who claims that he was unaware that this attack was being prepared – attended a dozen meetings in the couple's home in which Argala participated. “It was a seminar in which we discussed Capital of Marx,” he says. He remembers Argala as “a shy, educated and pleasant man.” On those same days he participated in a youth excursion to Boca de Asno (Madrid), organized by the Catholic Workers Youth (JOC), he joined the group and they listened to him fascinated.
Gatell assures that Forest had a lot of influence on Argala. He believes that she was the one who reported the ease of attacking Carrero. “Forest spied on Carrero, attended mass with a headscarf and dark glasses and informed ETA, according to what he told us some time later. But the person who intellectually influenced Argala was Sastre, who was very prestigious at the time,” she maintains.
Sastre maintained in those meetings, Gatell recalls, that it was necessary to avoid the exit from Franco's regime being a “bourgeois democracy” as, in his opinion, the PCE of Santiago Carrillo intended. His alternative was for a group, through armed actions, to provoke a repressive reaction from the regime, thus encouraging the revolution. “The instrument to achieve this was to create a military organization separate from the political structures. Argala assumed these theses and they were reflected in ETA,” continues Gatell.
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However, the attack against Carrero did not provoke a brutal repression of the Franco regime and in 1974 its weakness in the face of worker and student mobilizations and its confrontation with the Church was already evident, in an international context of change with the fall of the Greek and Turkish dictatorships. Portuguese. “Sastre and Forest were worried. They were urged to act to avoid the bourgeois-democratic exit from the fading Franco regime. This urgency explains the brutal attack on Post Office Street in September 1974″, he adds.
In June, three months before that attack, Forest commissioned Gatell to participate in the installation of a shelter on Avenida de América in Madrid, with three ETA militants: Fausto Villanueva TxapuJuan Manuel Galarraga Potxolo and José María Arruabarrena tanke. “They were different from Argala. Sexist, bullies, they boasted of a brutal and anti-socialist nationalism,” says Gatell. One day, Forest told me that there was going to be a more important action in Madrid than Carrero's. When the attack happened, on September 13, I connected the dots.”
Gatell assures that Forest celebrated it. “Have you seen, Eduardo? We have hit the heart of the regime,” he told me. To my astonishment, he said that the dead were police officers. Sastre commented in prison that the attack was our Moncada, in reference to the armed action with which Fidel Castro launched the Cuban revolution.”
On September 16, Forest was arrested at her home, in the presence of Gatell. He was arrested in October following Forest's statements. Sastre fled to Portugal, but returned to Spain and surrendered. “The Military Court prosecuted us for terrorism. To me for preparing the shelter on Avenida de América. Sastre was provisionally released in July 1975. The accusation of terrorism was dropped from me and I went to the TOP for illicit association. I was free in January 1976. Forest, in June 1977. And the case of Correo Street, like that of Carrero, amnestied.” The couple lived in Euskadi until her death. Gatell, a psychologist, joined the PCE in 1976 and in 2001 he joined the PSOE. He was a regional deputy in Madrid for two terms.
Gatell believes that “the egg of the snake” from ETA was hatched by Argala in Madrid, influenced by Sastre and Forest. After the attack on Correo Street he led the military split of ETA, which imposed militarism on the band until its end. The former deputy celebrates that today “the nationalist left debates social issues, defends its national demands in Parliament and contributes to forming progressive majorities.” “It is the greatest defeat of ETA that we can conceive,” he says.
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