Spain has a long history of fighting—and defeating—hidden enemies. In 2011, Spain secured a ceasefire and gradual dissolution of the Basque separatist organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) after 60 years of violence. While recent extremist violence (most notably the 2017 Barcelona attacks) has kept Spain on high alert, vigilance has helped the country maintain relative security.

 

Now, a new threat has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the country, casting its otherwise venerated systems of protection into doubt. At the time of writing, nearly 12% of Spain’s 223,000 cases have been fatal, and given the country’s population density, its COVID-19 death rates top global charts, surpassed only by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Like terrorism, this specter is invisible until it strikes. However, Spain's preparedness and responses to these two threats have been markedly different.

 

Though Spain had suffered hundreds of deaths at the hands of ETA for many decades, the scale of the 2004 attacks, which killed 191 people and injured over 1,800, shocked the country into reforming the highly decentralized security, intelligence, and border control forces that made up its counterterrorism apparatus. In his account of Spain’s security reforms in the aftermath of the bombings, Fernando Reinares, an expert on Spanish and broader European responses to global terrorism, describes how the country’s national police and civil guard not only increased their staff by 35% in the years directly following the bombings, but also created several joint counterterrorism working groups across agencies and ministeries to better centralize information and coordinate response. Among them, the National Antiterrorism Coordination Center, created just two months after the attacks, instituted an integrated intelligence system between the two security forces to share information. These efforts were complemented by a crackdown in terrorism financing prevention, with the Commission for the Monitoring of Activities related to the Financing of Terrorism closing more than 730 files in the three years following the attacks.

 

ETA was already much weaker at the start of the twenty-first century than it had been at its peak in the 1980s, but headlines in the years following the 2004 attacks were peppered with news of the group’s decapitations, one after the other, suggesting that these coordinated efforts by Spanish officials (and their French counterparts) were increasingly effective in tracking down terrorists. As public support for the group declined and its structure became less hierarchical, ETA struggled from lapses in leadership, contributing to its ceasefire in 2011. ETA’s finances steeply declined over the same years. This partially coincided with the vacuum left by the outlawing of the group’s political wing, Herri Batasuna, in 2002, which previously offered substantial financial support, but another large part of the group’s assets were funded by criminal activities thwarted by the Spanish government’s strengthened security forces.

 

Though Reinares claims, and it seems at first, that the presence of two terrorist threats on Spain’s soil would be a obstacle to the country’s development of a national strategy towards terrorism, at second glance the consolidation efforts undertaken in response to one of these threats appears to have neutralized the other. With ETA completely disbanded, having delivered its weapons arsenal to French authorities in 2018, and not committing any attacks in nearly ten years, indeed, it seems that the Spanish government could afford to decrease its counterterrorism budget.
 

The country’s spending on internal security and prisons, which includes domestic counterterrorism activities through its formal security forces, increased steadily from the 1990’s until about 2011, after which it decreased slightly. One might infer this reduction was due to a recognition that ETA was no longer a significant threat, but in fact this decline was seen across many government ministries, including defense, education, and culture, suggesting this was a byproduct of the 2008 recession rather than a reallocation of funds. After remaining steady for half a decade, spending rose again in 2018. A concomitant increase in military spending signals this might have been in response to the 2017 attacks.

 

A look at the spending on Spain’s healthcare, in comparison, not only shows a budget half as large (four million euros against nine million euros in 2019), but also much slower growth in the past few years. Though Spain certainly has reason to continue to invest in counterterrorism response, especially given the 2017 attacks, the new worldwide crisis in healthcare poses the question of whether its return to mid-aughts levels of counterterrorism spending is an effective use of its funds. Though research shows that such spending by many countries in recent years has been associated with decreasing lethality of terorrism, optimal levels of counterterrorism funding are still up for debate. After all, if what made Spain’s early 2000s counterterrorism response so effective was its improved coordination, perhaps in this case, it is not necessarily the amount of money spent, but the efficiency in which it is used that makes the difference.

 

COVID-19 does not yet have a commercially available vaccine; caring for citizens in this pandemic will require a massive amount of spending. Healthcare is an efficient use of funds, whether to bolster hospitals or to invest in research and development for a vaccine. But Spain’s other hidden enemy will never have a vaccine. Given the neutralization of its greatest threats, counterterrorism is one area where Spain may benefit from spending less.

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