There is hardly any Spaniard today who knows who Bernard Oyarzabal Pedigori and María Lourdes Cristobal Elhorga are. The main reason is that when they planted the bomb in Rolando’s cafeteria, their names did not appear in the media or in the courts. No picture, … Well, the two terrorists managed to escape to France, unnoticed, thrive in civilian life and live peacefully in complete secrecy as if they had never committed a crime in their entire lives.
But they committed this attack, and not just one, but the deadliest attack in the history of ETA in Madrid and the second with the highest number of casualties in Spanish history to this day, preceded only by the Hipercor massacre in 1987. The attack by Oyarzabal Pedigori and Cristobal Elhorga occurred on September 13, 1974. The perpetrators wanted to cause as much damage as possible and there were few better places to do so than this cafeteria. It is located in the center of Calle del Correo, next to Puerta del Sol, which they blew away without caring at all that it was in one of the busiest places in the capital of Spain.
What is unusual about this case is that it is not unique. According to Florencio Domínguez and María Jiménez Ramos, authors of “Sin Justicia” (Espasa, 2023), of the 850 murders committed by ETA, the authors of 376 were never convicted, more than 40% of the gang’s crimes. In these numbers, it is necessary to distinguish between those to whom the Amnesty Law of 1977 was applied, as is the case with our two heroes, and those who committed after the time limits set by custom.
The first section began on June 7, 1968, when Eta committed her first murder: that of civil guard José Antonio Bardin. From that day until June 1977, the date that put an end to the application of the law, the gang killed 67 people. The killers of 63 of them were never tried, so 93% of the crimes committed by the terrorist group between the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and the beginning of the transition period went unpunished. The Horga and Oyarzabal killed 13 of them.
Maximum damage
The couple entered Rolando’s cafeteria on September 13, 1974 at 2:00 p.m. He sat at one of the tables in the main room, which was at that moment beginning to fill up. “They were a man and a woman, about twenty-five years old, and they were carrying packages, both with long, medium-length hair,” one of the waiters told the Security Forces and Corps. The terrorists had initially chosen the General Directorate of Security to kill as many police officers as possible, but they came to the conclusion that it was impossible to place the bomb there without being arrested.
They then chose the cafeteria across the street, where they assumed many customers went to eat. However, they killed only one National Police inspector: Felix, 46, who died two years later from his wounds. The rest are a mechanic, a salesman, a telephone operator, a teacher, a baker and his wife, a railway worker, a DGS manager, a graphic arts employee, a 20-year-old student, a cook and a cafeteria waiter.
“It was an important qualitative leap, because ETA went from attacking individual and selected targets to killing indiscriminately, regardless of how many people it killed or who they were. “They began to imitate attacks by terrorist groups such as neo-fascists in Italy or the IRA in bars in London or Birmingham,” Jasica Fernandez, author with Anna Escurriza of Dynamita, Nuts and Lies: The Attack on Rolando’s Cafeteria (Tecnos, 2024), explained to ABC a year ago.
“bulk”
Without any anonymous phone call to warn of what would happen, the cafeteria was blown up with all customers and employees inside at 2:30 p.m. The “package” received from Oyarzabal and Alhorga contained 30 kilograms of explosives and 2 cm diameter nuts to cause as much damage as possible. This was the first indiscriminate attack against civilians in ETA’s history. In addition to the 13 dead, there are 71 wounded. At the time, a witness told the ABC: “It was a dry, massive explosion. Suddenly, the light went out and a shower of rubble fell on us. At that moment, we didn’t even hear screaming, just the impressive, deafening noise. Glass flew into the air and then everything was in confusion.”
At the nearby Ruano Inn, a woman named Benilde was hanging clothes in the inner courtyard when she heard “a big explosion and felt, at the same time, a great sensation of heat, and saw how the rubble was rising,” Fernandez and Escurriza say in the article. The storm threw her two meters from the foundation. Some agents picked her up off the ground and she went down the street. The scene he saw there was Dantesque, as he admitted to the newspaper “Pueblo”: “I even tripped over a woman’s leg. It was separated from the trunk. It was terrible.”
Franco died a year later, having approved a series of laws to dismantle the dictatorship’s legal society. The goal was national reconciliation and amnesty for political prisoners, at the request of the anti-Franco opposition. Its approval was supported by centrist and right-wing political groups, and the effects of the new law were imminent. Under Article 10, the competent judicial authority must order the immediate release of persons who have been in prison, and search and arrest warrants for defendants declared in absentia shall be invalidated.
Criminal record
Beneficiaries include workers punished for defending democratic rights, such as strikes and unions; representatives of underground political parties, such as the PCE and PSOE; Public order officials and agents who committed crimes during the Franco regime; Soldiers and members of the security forces who have been imprisoned for refusing to participate in repressive actions against the population, and in other cases, those convicted or accused of crimes considered terrorist.
“Criminal responsibilities have been dropped from all of them. The law also stipulates that his criminal record and negative notes in his personal files must be removed, even if the person being punished is dead,” Dominguez and Jiménez state in their article. This is not the case for Oyarzabal and Elhorga, whose massacre went unpunished and the Spaniards ended up forgetting about them and what they did. “They are still alive! They were never arrested. There is a report from the newspaper “El Mundo” and a documentary from Telemadrid, where, ten years before that, “they were found in a town in France, had children and grandchildren and lived a happy and prosperous life. Bernard even went to work at the Basque Language Academy in France and became a relevant academic, without anyone reprimanding him for the massacre.”
In total, 89 prisoners involved in blood crimes linked to terrorist gangs benefited from the 1977 amnesty law. The vast majority of them belonged to ETA, to which some from Grabow were added. This means that none of the 67 murders committed by ETA members were solved until the rule was implemented midway through the transition period, and 63 of them were unsolved and their perpetrators were never tried. The 63 deaths were the result of 39 attacks carried out by the Basque terrorist organization. The most serious deaths were those mentioned in Rolando’s cafeteria.
If we analyze what happened after the amnesty law and during the half century of democracy that passed, the statistics are not much better. According to the investigation published in “Sin Justicia”, of the 312 murders committed by ETA in 240 attacks after 1977, none of the authors of the materials they committed had been convicted. Pending unresolved issues were considered. All of them represent approximately 40% of the total fatal crimes committed by the terrorist group in this time period. “The families of these victims did not have a court decision that would give them justice,” the authors conclude.