The October 3 arrest in southwest France of ETA (Group Profile) leader Mikel Antza and other ETA members (Terrorist Incident) will have done little for the morale of ETA, especially those languishing in jail. The group?s fortunes have been in decline for some time, a fact that seems to have been recognized by senior members of the group in a communiqu? they issued from jail in August. They did not call upon ETA to lay down its arms because they had rejected the group?s aims and objectives or its use of violence to achieve them. It was simply a recognition that the group no longer possessed the ?firepower capacity of armed resistance.? However, before this is seen as another nail in the coffin of ETA these comments and the arrests need to be placed into a greater context.

This is not the first time that ETA has suffered apparently debilitating losses. Its future looked equally bleak in the early 1990?s when the authors of the communiqu? were themselves arrested. At that time, those members still at large regrouped, began a new recruitment drive, and reorganized to create a new cell structure that was less vulnerable to detection and penetration. It is, therefore, entirely possible that the remaining rump of ETA may regroup, reorganize and remerge leaner and even meaner than before.