ETA's killing of Miguel Angel Blanco, on July 12th last year, was supposed to be a final turning point in the bloody, intractable conflict in the Spanish Basque Country. The Spirit of Ermua, Mr Blanco's home town, was invoked to proclaim the unbreakable unity of democrats against terrorism.
"ETA has committed suicide," a prominent Basque nationalist politician declared.
He should have known better, but these were highly emotional moments. Millions of citizens, hundreds of thousands of them Basques, had spontaneously packed the streets of every Spanish city in unprecedented antiterrorist protest demonstrations. The cold-blooded shooting of this 22-year-old town councillor and amateur rock musician struck a chord untouched by most of ETA's hundreds of previous assassinations.
In a dramatic reversal of the usual balance of power on the streets of the Basque Country, supporters of ETA's political front, Herri Batasuna, had to hide in their homes for days. Their ubiquitous party offices, clubs and bars had to be protected from angry crowds by a police force reviled by HB and targeted by ETA. It really did seem to many people that a watershed had been reached.
The context for this outpouring of mourning and rage had been the liberation by the Guardia Civil, 10 days previously, of another man who had been kidnapped by ETA. He was held prisoner in an improvised cell barely three metres long, two and a half wide, and less than two metres high for 532 days. The TV image of Ortega Lara, as disorientated as a concentration camp victim, had deeply affected Spanish - and Basque - public opinion.
Mr Lara was a prison officer, and also a member of the government party, the conservative Partido Popular. He had been seized to pressurise the Spanish government to end the "dispersion" of ETA prisoners to jails hundreds of miles from their families, a humane demand in itself and supported by many people who abhorred ETA's actions. The chasm in sensibility between radicals and democrats was illustrated by the cynically ambiguous headline in a pro-ETA newspaper on the morning of the prison officer's release: "Ortega Lara goes back to prison."
ETA retaliated eight days later by kidnapping Miguel Angel Blanco, a minor local councillor for the PP in Ermua, a Basque industrial town. His captors announced that, if all 500 prisoners were not brought back to the Basque Country within 48 hours, he would be shot.
Perhaps it was the brutally unrealistic brevity of the deadline; perhaps it was Mr Blanco's youth, pretty girlfriend and relative political insignificance; perhaps it was the arrogance with which ETA ignored calls for mercy from some of its own closest allies; perhaps it was the callous manner of his murder - shot twice in the back of the neck, while kneeling and handcuffed, and left to die, an agony which would last more than 12 hours.
For any and all of these reasons, and more, the heartbroken and furious shout of Basta Ya! (No More!) seemed to echo from Cadiz to Bilbao on the weekend of July 12th, 1997.
Sadly, there has been more, and more again, and with each new killing there is a less numerous and less vociferous civic response, and a more bitterly divided political response to ETA from the democratic parties. Far from being deterred by last July's demonstrations, ETA has specifically targeted PP town councillors, and killed five of them. The most recent victim, on June 25th, Manuel Zamarreno, had himself taken the seat of another local politician shot by ETA earlier in the year.
While senior politicians have been killed by ETA in the past, the current systematic and sustained campaign is unprecedented, and has extended to councillors (and their families) as far from the Basque Country as Seville. A handful of Basque PP councillors have resigned. Many of them live away from home and almost all of them now accept police protection.
PP members have so far shown an admirable disinclination to retaliate against ETA in kind. They are no doubt restrained by the fact that senior members of the former Socialist government are currently facing charges for launching a disastrous "dirty war" against ETA in the 1980s. The PP made great political capital out of these charges in recent elections, and can hardly now indulge in similar "state terrorism" themselves.
Immediately after Mr Blanco's death, all the Basque democratic parties signed a declaration of unity in the fight against terrorism, and committed themselves to the isolation of Herri Batasuna in all public forums: "We will not be able to act in the defence of any cause, however legitimate it may be, with those who have made themselves accomplices of such an abominable murder."
This was certainly tempting fate: if HB (which has 15 per cent of the vote) proposed a motion in favour of better street lighting, for example, how could other parties oppose it? In any case, Basque politics is an intimate affair, with a single family often encompassing, rather uncomfortably, several hostile opinions.
The Madrid-led parties, like the Socialists and the PP, tend to see ETA as a problem for the police. The Basque nationalist parties tend to see them as "prodigal sons" who need to be brought back to the family table and taught democratic manners. Attracted by the Irish peace process, the nationalists, far from isolating HB, were again seeking to involve them in dialogue within months of Blanco's death.
There are signs that some HB elements are open to such a process, and there has been a curiously muted response to the jailing of the party's entire executive, on charges of collaboration with terrorism, last November. But the PP demands that the moderate nationalists break off their dialogue as long as ETA keeps killing its members. The Socialists have withdrawn from a 12-yearold coalition with nationalists in the Basque autonomous government, because of the latter's relations with HB.
A year after the Blanco killing, the "spirit of Ermua" seems like a phantom. Far from having "committed suicide", his killers have remained alive, and capable of dividing their democratic enemies.