The two men were buried far from home, in the dry hills inland from Alicante, and their killers poured quicklime over the bodies to make sure they would never be found. For a long time the plan worked. The graves held two young Basques, Jose Antonio Lasa and Jose Ignacio Zabala - Joxean and Joxi to those who knew them - both from the town of Tolosa in Gipuzkoa, more than 500 kilometres to the north. In 1983 they were kidnapped, tortured, and shot dead in one of the first operations of the GAL, a death squad that later trials traced to figures inside the Spanish government itself. This is not a story Alicante tells about itself, but the hills above the city hold it all the same.
Joxean Lasa and Joxi Zabala came from Tolosa, a manufacturing town in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa. Spain in the early 1980s was a young democracy still shadowed by the armed campaign of ETA and by the state's brutal response to it. The two men were described as members of ETA, but they were never tried, never convicted, never given the day in court that even the accused are owed. Whatever they were suspected of, what happened to them was not justice. They were young; they had families; and in October 1983, getting into a friend's car in the French Basque town of Bayonne, they became targets.
The men who took them wore no uniforms, but they were members of the Spanish police. Lasa and Zabala were seized in Bayonne, on French soil, and driven south across the border to San Sebastian. There they were locked in a government building known as La Cumbre, held in the hands of the Guardia Civil. For a long stretch of days they were interrogated and tortured. The interrogation produced nothing that spared them. In the end, the order that came down was not to release the two men from Tolosa, or to charge them, but to kill them.
To carry out the killing, their captors drove them the length of the country, to the province of Alicante. In a lonely spot in the hills the two men were forced to dig their own graves. Then they were shot. Their killers covered the bodies with quicklime, meaning to hasten their decay and erase any trace of the crime. The remains would lie unidentified for years. That the caustic lime failed to dissolve the evidence - and that the truth eventually surfaced - became, in Spain, a kind of grim shorthand: the quicklime did not bury the dirty war.
The GAL, the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion, presented itself as a shadowy vigilante group. The courts found otherwise. Subsequent trials concluded that it had been organised by figures within the governing party of the day, and three men were convicted for the killing of Lasa and Zabala: Enrique Rodriguez Galindo, a general of the Guardia Civil stationed at the Inchaurrondo barracks; Angel Vaquero, a lieutenant colonel there; and Julen Elgorriaga, the civil governor of Gipuzkoa. The sentences handed down totalled hundreds of years. The men served only a fraction of them - Galindo little more than four and a half years before he was released and later pardoned. In 2014 the director Pablo Malo told the story on screen in the film Lasa eta Zabala, keeping the two names, and what was done to them, from vanishing into the quiet the killers had wanted. Each year, in Tolosa and beyond, people still gather to remember Joxean and Joxi - not as the suspects a shadow war made of them, but as two young men from a small Basque town who were owed a trial and given a grave instead.
The location associated with the case lies at 38.481 degrees N, 0.420 degrees W, in the arid inland hills north of the city of Alicante, above the coastal plain. It is rugged, sparsely built country of scrub and limestone ridges. Alicante-Elche Airport (LEAL) is the nearest major field, roughly 20 km to the southwest; Valencia (LEVC) lies well to the north. Skies over this stretch of the Costa Blanca interior are usually clear and dry.