Spain Charges Venezuela With Aiding ETA, FARC

(March 1) -- A Spanish judge today charged the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez with helping two terrorist groups coordinate the planning of political assassinations.

Judge Eloy Velasco's 25-page indictment accuses Chávez's government of fostering "the illicit cooperation" between the Basque separatist terrorist group ETA and the Colombian rebel group FARC. It names 13 members of the two groups and claims they met twice in 2000 and again "more recently" in Spain to make plans for killing former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana, as well as his successor and the current president, Alvaro Uribe, during visits in Spain. The attacks never occurred.

The document identifies the key figure in that cooperation as Arturo Cubillas Fontán, an alleged ETA activist who it says served as a longtime official in Venezuela's Ministry of Agriculture and is married to the director general of the ministry's public affairs office.

The charges came a day after security forces captured the ETA's alleged leader, Ibon Gogeaskoetxea, in northern France. His arrest is the latest in a series of setbacks for the terrorist group, which has seen five of its military chiefs seized in the past two years and is now facing calls to disarm from some of its most loyal supporters. Two other alleged ETA members were arrested with him, including José Lorenzo Ayestaran Legorburu, who had been sought for his role in 10 murders and spent many years in Venezuelan exile, according to Spanish security sources quoted in the Spanish daily El País.

The one-two punch is likely to have the most immediate effects in Spain, where over the past 40 years the ETA (an abbreviation of the Basque words for "Basque Homeland and Freedom") has killed some 800 people, including many Spanish officials, in its battle to win independence for the Basque country, a mountainous region that straddles the border between northern Spain and southwestern France.

Police who arrested the ETA members at a remote Normandy cottage found handcuffs, pistols and explosives, which suggested to Spanish authorities that an action was in the offing.

"It's not usual to find shackles with ETA commandos," said Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba today. "One of our hypotheses ... is that they [were] planning to kidnap someone." Rubalcaba had previously warned in December that the ETA might attempt a "spectacular" kidnapping during Spain's six-month stint in the presidency of the European Union, which began on Jan. 1.

That crime would fit with the three suspects' extensive perp sheets. Gogeaskoetxea, 54, has been on the run since 1997, when he allegedly attempted to blow up Spain's King Juan Carlos at the opening of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. His arrested colleagues, meanwhile, have been accused of murdering a Spanish politician and a businessman in 2008, and taking part in a foiled plot to assassinate former Prime Minister José María Aznar.

The ETA's ability to launch such headline-grabbing attacks has been hampered by new, increased cooperation among Spanish, French and Portuguese authorities. Since the beginning of the year, the three countries have caught more than 30 rebel suspects, dismantled a logistics base in Portugal and confiscated more than 4,000 pounds of explosives and munitions. The crackdown's success is reflected in the sudden drop in ETA casualties: The group hasn't been able to carry out a major hit since July, when two police officers died in a bomb attack on the island of Majorca.

The cleanup operation has also forced many of the ETA's long-term allies to reassess whether violence is really the best way to achieve Basque independence. Earlier this month, Rufino Etxeberria -- the head of ETA's political wing, Batasuna, which was banned by Spain's supreme court in 2003 -- called on the organization to put down its weapons.

"We consider that the [peace] process has to be done without violence, which means, of course, that it will have to happen without any armed activity by ETA," he said, adding that progress could be made through "peaceful and democratic" means.

Gerry Adams, president of Northern Ireland's Sinn Fein party -- once the political division of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) -- applauded this new push for peace. "There is a real opportunity for a fundamental change in the relationship between the Basque country and the Spanish state," he said in a commentary in the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper. "There is an onus on everyone to grasp this in good faith and to make every effort to bring an end to conflict in that region."

But while Adams was able to persuade the IRA to abandon violence and put its faith in the ballot box, it's unclear if Etxeberria wields such influence over the ETA. Batasuna was unable to stop the organization from putting an explosive end to the last set of peace talks with the government in 2006 by planting a car bomb at Madrid's airport. Two people were killed.

If the political wing distances itself from the ETA and leans too close to negotiations with the Spanish state, the very group that once refused to condemn any violent act by the ETA could be portrayed as traitors to the Basque cause, allowing military ideologues within the organization to gain the upper hand. "Now the guns are the ones in charge," said Interior Minister Rubalcaba. "[Batasuna] have only two options if they want to enter into democratic politics: Either they convince ETA to abandon violence or they totally break with them."

Spanish Prime Minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, who once had warm relations with Chávez, said during a visit to Germany that he had asked his foreign minister to request a response from Caracas to charges that it collaborated with the ETA and FARC. "We are waiting for an explanation from Venezuela, and the Spanish government will act accordingly," the Spanish news service EFE quoted Zapatero as saying.