Fifty years ago, at 2:30 p.m. on September 13, 1974, a powerful bomb reinforced with shrapnel exploded in the Cafetería Rolando, on the corner of Calle del Correo and Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, next to the then General Directorate of Security of the Franco regime. Eleven people died instantly, another a week later and the thirteenth, two years later from the after-effects of the attack. They were diners at Rolando and at the Tobogán self-service restaurant, next to the cafeteria. It was ETA’s biggest massacre until the Hipercor in Barcelona in June 1987, with 21 dead, and its first indiscriminate attack. Only one of the victims was a police officer. The use of shrapnel was intended to spread the damage.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary, two books address the massacre and its consequences. Historians Gaizka Fernández and Ana Escauriaza, linked to the Vitoria Victims Memorial Centre in Dynamite, nuts and bolts and lies (The attack on the Rolando café) they reconstruct in detail the attack and its consequences. Eduardo Sánchez Gatell, then a young leftist linked to the ETA support network in Madrid, develops in The Serpent’s Egg (ETA’s nest in Madrid) an enlightening personal testimony.
The ETA attack was carried out in the context of the third wave of international terrorism, which began in the late 1960s and was carried out by far-right, far-left and radical nationalist groups. ETA, which, since the successful assassination of Francoist President Carrero Blanco in December 1973, gained prestige among international terrorist groups, strengthened its relations with the provisional IRA (Irish Republican Army) and followed its patterns of action and organisation.
The attack was surrounded by an aura of mystery because ETA did not claim responsibility. Its indiscriminate nature and unpopularity provoked a debate within the ETA leadership between those who wanted to take responsibility for it and those who were against it. The latter won. But a few weeks later, ETA split between the military branch (the millis) and the Political-Military (the poly-millis).
The massacre on Calle del Correo was the culmination of the dispute between the ETA members who wanted to subordinate armed actions to the political leadership – ETA politico-military – and those who wanted the commandos to be autonomous from the political leaders – ETA militar. It was the leadership military the one that promoted the massacre without consulting its political sector. This sector reproached its colleagues for having acted like a “Basque Black September”, alluding to the Palestinian terrorist group that carried out the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Games.
Sánchez Gatell abounds, in his testimony, that the marriage formed by Alfonso Sastre and Eva Forest and the ETA member, José Miguel Bañarán Argala, The ETA, which led the military faction in the split, “wanted, with forceful actions by ETA, to prevent the reformist evolution towards a bourgeois democracy, which was beginning to emerge, and to achieve a revolutionary change.” In this sense, the massacre on Correo Street can be interpreted as the founding act of military ETA, which wanted to destabilize the democratic process with terrorism and which remained until its dissolution in 2018, says Gaizka Fernández. The other branch, political-military ETA, was dissolved in 1982, a month before the PSOE won its first elections.
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The opposition of a sector of ETA to claiming responsibility for the massacre generated an ambiguous statement that did not recognise it, but indicated that it understood the position of its authors. The void was filled by other radical organisations that attributed the massacre to the extreme right. The confusion continued for some time. In the nineties, texts from the ETA environment implicitly recognised its authorship. But it was not until 2018 that ETA, on the occasion of its dissolution, explicitly recognised its authorship.
It was the ETA leader Josu Urrutikoetxea, Josu Ternera, who gave voice to the dissolution of ETA, the one who in 1974 had gone to Belgium, accompanied by Isidro Garalde Mamarruto deliver to the press the statement claiming responsibility for the massacre in 1974, but he had to give up doing so due to opposition from the other sector of the ETA leadership. Josu Ternera did in 2018 what he wanted to do in 1974, underlines Gaizka Fernández.
The confusion over who was responsible was the main mystery of the massacre. The course of the investigation was also confusing. It was handled by a military court, but with the amnesty of 1977 the investigation was left in limbo in the Madrid courts. It has been difficult for historians to get to it. It is striking how, at the end of 1974, the investigation accurately records the main events. The frivolous actions of ETA facilitated the work of an incompetent police force like the Francoist one, points out Gaizka Fernández.
On July 5-6, 1974, ETA members José María Arruabarrena arrived in Madrid TankStanislaus Villanueva Txapu and Juan Miguel Galarraga Potxolo. They were picked up by Eva Forest, wife of the playwright Alfonso Sastre, who headed the Madrid support network for ETA. Her main mission was to check whether the attack on the Rolando café, near the General Directorate of Security, was feasible, a clue to which Forest had offered. They had lunch with Forest in the café and decided to report favourably to the ETA leadership. “A café full of txakurras [perros, término con el que los etarras se referían a los agentes]”, Galarraga said, according to Sánchez Gatell. Tanke wrote in his diary “Rolando 2.15 to 2.45”. On July 23 they returned to Euskadi.
On August 28, Tanke and José Antonio Garmendia were shot and arrested by the Civil Guard in San Sebastián Tupa. Despite Tanke’s arrest, both the military leadership of ETA and Forest decided to continue with the attack, due to recent ETA failures, such as the attempted kidnapping of Luis Gómez-Acebo, husband of Infanta Pilar de Borbón and brother-in-law of Juan Carlos I, and the power dispute they had with the political sector, which they did not inform about the attack. Forest announced to Sánchez Gatell: “We are going to carry out a very important action, better than the one against Carrero.”
15 kilos of dynamite and 1,000 nuts
On September 4, the Basque-French ETA members Bernard Oyarzabal and Lourdes Cristóbal traveled to Madrid. Eva Forest was waiting for them and accommodated them in an apartment in Alcorcón, in the support network. They carried 15 kilos of dynamite and bought a thousand nuts. They had lunch for two days at the Rolando cafeteria, drew a sketch, and on September 8, the ETA military leadership gave the green light for the attack “on the most opportune day and time.” On the 11th, the two ETA members notified Forest that the attack would be on the 13th.
Forest picked them up on the morning of the attack. Oyarzábal was carrying a black briefcase and Cristóbal a heavy cloth bag. They assembled the bomb and at two in the afternoon they settled into the Rolando café. They deposited the bomb. Cristóbal pretended to be dizzy and they went out into the street. The bomb exploded at 2:30 p.m. Forest picked them up at five in the afternoon in the Plaza de Callao and hid them in the apartment in Alcorcón.
Three days later, on the 16th, the police arrested Forest. The thread he pulled was Tanke’s diary, in which the inscription appeared: “Rolando, 2.15 to 2.45”. Tanke betrayed Forest and she betrayed her network o
f collaborators in Madrid: Antonio Duran, Lidia Falcón, Mari Paz Ballesteros, Eliseo Bayo and others. Forest presented herself as a member of the PCE and diverted police attention from this party and its collaborators in order to save the perpetrators of the massacre, who were hiding in Alcorcón.
The perpetrators of the massacre escaped to France. Weeks later, the police identified them because they left clues: a bank exchange of francs for pesetas. Forest, during the interrogation by the Francoist police, indicated that the perpetrators changed money in a branch in the Salamanca district. Spain requested their extradition, but France refused, arguing that it was a political attack. This was Francoist Spain, which, furthermore, had not wanted to collaborate with France in the extradition of the French fascists of the OAS, who had attempted to kill General De Gaulle. By the end of 1974, there was already a summary, but the case was never tried. The dictator Franco died in November 1975. The amnesty of 1977 closed it.
The families of the 13 dead and 70 injured received no compensation or psychological care. They had to wait for the 1999 Victims Act, well into the democratic era, for their consideration.
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