Spain - ETA says “basta” to armed struggle

For El País, which leads with “The end of terror,” the ETA announcement puts “an end to the nightmare”:

Spanish democracy has triumphed against the fanatics, who, by arrogating to themselves the mantle of representation of the Basque nation that the Basque people never gave to them, have killed over 800 people… The most tragic problem that Spanish democracy has suffered has now vanished, not because peace has come, but because a sect of fanatics has given up waiting for Spanish democracy to quit the fight. This is the strongest reason to be proud today, but also to remember and to mourn the many people [killed]. – El País

El Mundo, headlining with “ETA plays its cards with an eye to elections”, stresses the importance of electoral gains that the ETA statement will give its political arm in the legislative elections coming up on November 20:

One must be cautious, however, for the collective fascination with a Spain free of car bombs has been felt before. Today's announcement is even more dangerous, given its timing just a month before the elections, when the political arm of ETA [the Amaiur coalition, which will join together Bildu and other groups of the Abertzale] will seek to win many seats in order to launch its separatist challenge in Parliament [...]. The absence of attacks does not mean that ETA has disappeared. We will believe this when it surrenders its weapons and disappears without any political pay-off. – El Mundo

Over at La Vanguardia, which headlines - “Faced with surrender, prudence and political talent prevail”, an editorialist writes:

ETA is laying down its weapons because its methods were irrational, its structures increasingly enfeebled under the pressure of law enforcement, and because Basque and Spanish society first, and then its own entourage, rendered it impotent […]. A period of dialogue will now open, to discuss the handing over of weapons and explosives, and in which the state will have to re-examine the status of ETA prisoners with firmness, but with generosity too. This difficult task will fall to the government that emerges from the elections of 20 November. – La Vanguardia

“ETA will neither disband nor hand in its weapons,” headlines ABC, whose editorial “honours the victims”:

This is not the time to abandon the need for justice that ETA's victims deserve, in honour of whom it may be written that this perhaps is the epilogue of the terrorist gang [...]. Generosity, in the form of memory, justice and reparations, are due only to the victims. – ABC

The Basque newspaper El Correo leads with “At last”. The declaration of October 20, writes the paper, is a decision that ETA “should have taken decades ago.” The reasons:

... its extreme weakness after the blows [dealt by the police] and the fact that the leftist Abertzale [the left-wing nationalist Basque movement] eventually won the power struggle for leadership of the independence movement, with 'Bildu's magnificent results' in the municipal elections of last May. – El Correo

Finally, an editorial in Gara, a daily close to the separatist left, writes -

Now it's time to show that without violence everything is possible. Only Basque society can ensure that it will be able to vote to decide what it wants to be in the future. – Gara