text: Kidnapping: often as a punishment for failing to pay the blackmail known as "revolutionary tax", but was also used to try to force the government to free ETA prisoners under the threat of killing the kidnapped, as in the kidnapping and execution of Miguel Angel Blanco. ETA often hid the kidnapped in underground chambers without windows, called zulos, of very reduced dimensions for extended periods. Also, people robbed of their vehicles would usually be tied up and abandoned in an isolated place to allow those who carjacked them to escape.
  Robbery: ETA members also stole weapons, explosives, machines for registration plates and vehicles.
  Attacks
  Activity
  With its attacks against what they considered "enemies of the Basque people", ETA killed over 820 people since 1968, including more than 340 civilians. It maimed hundreds more and kidnapped dozens. ETA was opposed to Lemóniz Nuclear Power Plant.
  Its ability to inflict violence had declined steadily since the group was at its strongest during the late 1970s and 1980 (when it killed 92 people in a single year). After decreasing peaks in the fatal casualties in 1987 and 1991, 2000 was the last year when ETA killed more than 20 in a single year. After 2002, the yearly number of ETA's fatal casualties was reduced to single digits.
  Similarly, over the 1990s and, especially, during the 2000s, fluid cooperation between the French and Spanish police, state-of-the-art tracking devices and techniques and, apparently, police infiltration allowed increasingly repeating blows to ETA's leadership and structure (between May 2008 and April 2009 no less than four consecutive "military chiefs" were arrested).