Txabi Etxebarrieta

On 2 June 2018 he was commemorated in Tolosa by 300 people.

During some time there was a bust of Etxebarrieta in the plaza of Urretxindorra, situated in the Bilbao neighborhood of Otxarkoaga, until it was removed by the local government of Bilbao in September of 2004, due to protests from various groups.

Afterwards Sarasketa was summoned to a Court Martial, the first since the Spanish Civil War, in which he was condemned to death. With the intercession of Francisco Franco before the General of the Jesuits, the father Pedro Arrupe, the death sentence was commuted to a life sentence; Sarasketa, brutally beaten, was hospitalized in prison, where he spent nine years until the amnesty of 1977.

Txabi Etxebarrieta was the third of four brothers. From childhood he suffered from a terrible case of bronchitis that affected all his life. One of his older brothers was José Antonio Etxebarrieta, a defense lawyer for Xabier Izko de la Iglesia in the Burgos Trials that took place in 1970. He graduated with an Economics degree in 1967, specializing in computing from the University of the Basque Country.

The rest of the militants automatically remained a part of what would be known as the ETA Zaharra (old ETA) until 1968, until it became known as simply the ETA again.

On June 7th, 1968, the car in which Etxebarrieta and Iñaki Sarasketa were traveling was stopped at a Civil Guard checkpoint in Aduna (Guipúzcoa). Fearing that they were discovered, Txabi Etxebarrieta got out of the car and shot the officer from behind, José Pardines Arcay. It was the first assassination carried out by the ETA. ETA had not yet made the decision to carry out an armed struggle and because of this his partner that day, Sarasketa, years after stated:

In the second part of the assembly, held in March of 1967 in a house of prayer of the Jesuits of Guetaria, Txabi Etxebarrieta was elected a member of the Central Committee and the Executive Committee of the ETA. In that assembly, furthermore, the first steps began to be made towards the elaboration of their own revolutionary theory; from Etxebarrieta originated the concept of a “Basque working nation”, used by the patriotic left of Basque nationalism since then. Likewise the activity of the organization was divided between four separate fronts: political, military, cultural, and workers’ concerns. In the latter, Etxebarrieta would have a prominent role.

In December of 1966 and March of 1967, he presided over the fifth assembly of the ETA, which would lead to the first split within the terrorist organization. In said assembly, that took place over two parts, tensions broke out between the workers’ current, oriented more towards communism and further away from Basque nationalism, that at the time controlled the direction of the ETA in the interior, and the other two currents, the so-called backward and race focused movements.

Etxebarrieta, his brother José Antonio and José María Eskubi from Navarre were the ones who headed the internal current that expelled the more prominent members of the workers’ current. The first part of the Assembly, held on the December 7th, 1966, in Gaztelu(Guipúzcoa), ratified the expulsion of the workers’ party member Patxi Iturrioz which was decided in advance by the Executive (leadership in exile), thus provoking the split of the workers’ current into a new organization called ETA Berri (ETA nueva, in Spanish), later Komunistak, the embryo of what would later be the Communist Movement of Spain (MCE).

He was fundamentally a poet and writer. Although unpublished in his life, his work is collected in Poesía y otros escritos. 1961-1967.

Txabi Etxebarrieta (14 October 1944 – 7 June 1968), also known as Xabier Etxebarrieta Ortiz, was a Basque nationalist and one of the founders of the terrorist organization Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA). He was the perpetrator of the first assassination carried out by this group, and also the first ETA militant killed in a confrontation with the Civil Guard, for which he became an icon within the inner circle of the terrorist group and its supporters Basque nationalism.