They belonged to rival but friendly groups - communists, Maoists, socialists and anarcho-hippies. I was teaching English there at the time, and sharing a flat with half a dozen student revolutionaries of one kind or another.
That afternoon, fires had been lit on the bridge leading into central Bilbao from the student quarter of Deusto. I remember in particular one grey afternoon in the Basque city of Bilbao, in the early spring of 1976. If that was when the roots of the book began to sprout in my mind, the seeds had been sown well before the GAL death squads began to make their grim mark on Spanish politics. The dirty war of the 1980s, waged by a shadowy group known as the GAL, suddenly became a story I felt compelled to find out about, and write about.
They had been unearthed from a quicklime grave ten years earlier, and had lain in a mortuary ever since, until a bright policeman linked them to a 'disappearance' in the Basque Country. Since its subject, political violence, is bitterly contentious, it may be helpful to try to expose those roots at this stage, so that the reader will have some idea where this writer is coming from.Īs far as I can tell, the roots of this book began to grow in a taxi in Barcelona in 1995, when I heard on the radio how the broken, tortured bones of two young Basque radicals had been identified in Alicante. This is a political story, but it has personal roots. Prologue: T he view from a Basque balcony
0 kommentar(er)
