Written by Katie Llanos-Small

Katie Llanos-Small is the founding editor of foreign-correspondence.com. She graduated from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) in 2005, with a degree in Political Studies and Latin American Studies. She also studied Chinese (Mandarin) and Arabic at university. Recently Katie spent a year studying advanced Spanish and teaching English in Madrid. Currently she is studying towards a Graduate Diploma of Journalism from the Auckland University of Technology. Her main areas of interest include global migration and refugee issues and the politics of underdevelopment.

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Back with a Bang

By Katie Llanos-Small, January 11th, 2007

Official tape blocked the main exit from the arrivals hall when I got back to Madrid, sending jet-lagged arrivers like myself into confusion as we wheeled our trolleys around looking for an alternative way out. The tape was due to ETA’s New Year’s Eve Eve fireworks: the dormant terrorist group set off a car bomb in the airport carpark on the 30th of December which killed two people and the shaky ceasefire-based peace negotiations.

I heard about the bomb reading the Summer Herald (aka “NEWS LITE!”) in a tent in the remoter reaches of New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsular. It seemed a world away. It was a world away. There I was, sheltering from the sun in possibly the most pacifist place on earth, reading the few paragraphs the Herald could spare the space for amongst tales of international freaks and celebrities.

Seeing the ditch diggers, dwarfed by several stories of once-was-carpark, scraping away at the rubble under floodlights in the 7pm darkness, was quite a welcome home.

I had been so optimistic back in March when ETA came out and announced a ceasefire. The group had driven a low level conflict in Spain for nearly forty years, occasionally killing people, but more often just threatening to do so as they agitated for independence of the Basque region in the north of the country. The ceasefire announcement was followed by government negotiations to dismantle the terrorist group once and for all, negotiations which gradually became less and less convincing. Pro-independence vandalism continued in the Basque country, French police seized a haul of around three hundred firearms near the Spanish border, and everyone kept flinging mud in the media: ETA and related parties, the government, and the opposition.

Two Ecuadorians were killed in this bombing, as foreigners they are even more innocent than the other innocent victims that have been killed by ETA. ETA blames the government for the deaths because they didn’t evacuate the car park following a bomb alert by phone. Please. I never quite felt the hatred that many Spaniards evoke when speaking about ETA, but now I can see it.

A march is planned for Saturday by an Ecuadorian association in Madrid, denouncing ETA and calling for peace. The opposition party refuses to take part in the march because the slogan doesn’t include the phrase “defending freedom”. I didn’t really think it could be possible, but Spanish politicians may be even more petty than New Zealand ones.

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