Free The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning Page A

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    That was a message from very early in our correspondence. Obviously, there had been some problem with Santutxo’s server. He said he’d composed two long and carefully drafted messages but somehow they got lost before he could send them. That had also happened to me before. As I said in my message, I kind of like that about e-mail.
    I’m having a flashback to that dinner party in New York, when Slavoj Žižek and Gayatri Spivak were standing there politely chewing on my edible flowers while Analia Hounie poured Santutxo a Coke.
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    When I got the very first e-mail from Santutxo, I wasn’t sure I could believe it was from him. One of the things that seemed weird was that he had a Yahoo! account. On the other hand, what should I have expected? His own address at arranobeltza.com? Obviously I can’t publish his e-mail address, but it’s a kind of lame joke involving one of his aliases. Because he opens up the Yahoo! page to check his e-mail, he often reads the Yahoo! news. Every time he mentions something he’s read there, he refers to it as Yahoo!, with the exclamation point. You can see why this all seems kind of funny, coming from an iconic revolutionary figure. He seems to take seriously the news flashes
he reads on the Yahoo! homepage. Sometimes they’ll prompt him to ask me for an update on political events unfolding here. He also displays a surprising curiosity about pop culture items. He says that Cameron Diaz seems like an interesting person.
    So in a way, it would seem that Santutxo’s use of the internet for personal correspondence and general websurfing is like the average person’s. But every once in a while, one or the other of us gets a little paranoid about who might be looking in. These days, of course, he’s not planning any violent actions. Excommunicated from the ETA, even his broadcast political missives are what you might call ex-communiqués. Swerving unpredictably from the radical to the reactionary, nobody actually thinks they’ll come to any material end.
    But it wasn’t always like this. He spent the ’70s practically running the ETA show from Mexico City. A lot of people would take issue with this account, and of course there was only so much he could help with in terms of practical strategizing for individual operations. But the Arrano Beltza’s broadcasts were the poetic heart and soul of Euskadi Ta Askatasuma, simultaneously the clearest and most lyrical expressions of its fundamental political philosophy. I’m talking, of course, about the ETA-PM, the Political-Military Front. Santutxo already had friction with the more militant faction, the ETA-M, but he had this uncanny ability to persuade even some of the most extreme to let go of their bloodiest dreams. He believed in “blood, when necessary,” but never civilian.
    Still, 1980 was the ETA’s bloodiest year since its formation. It was a difficult time for Santutxo. Amets was supportive but she was getting increasingly frustrated by his emotional unavailability. She didn’t blame him – she knew it was for a higher cause, but it’s hard to love a saint, and Amets needed affection. Aitor was still pretty little, but even then, he seemed to know that as dedicated a father as he was, Santutxo’s idealism made him extremely vulnerable. To this day, I think Aitor feels protective of his dad.

    Around 1983, the “anti-terrorist” terrorist organization GAL was formed to fight a dirty war against the ETA. Things got really scary. Santutxo knew he had to go back. Amets and Aitor stayed behind. It was terribly sad for everybody, but they knew it had to be this way.
    For the next four years, Santutxo was back in the trenches. He didn’t carry out any actions himself, of course, but he was now deeply involved in the practical strategizing. He continued sending out communiqués, and you could see that while