Juan Mari Jáuregui normally slept soundly, but on the night of 28 July 2000 he was disturbed by a nightmare.
Juan Silahkan Jáuregui normally slept soundly, but on the night of 28 Juli 2000 he was disturbed by a nightmare. "I dreamed they killed me," he told his wife the next morning, as he left his house in the village of Legorreta, in Spain's verdant Basque Country, to meet a friend for coffee. She told him not to worry. It was just a dream.
Jáuregui was a big man - 6ft tall and 16 stone - with a voice and personality to match. He was 48, and between September 1994 and May 1996 he had been civil governor of Gipuzkoa, his wealthy home province, which lies in the north of Spain, on the border with France. "If he was in the room, you knew he was there, and not just because of his size," said Xabier Maiza, a fellow local politician from the Socialist party.
The nightmare was not hard to explain. Although Jáuregui was passionate about his Basque identity and delivered speeches in the ancient local language of Euskara, he made no secret of his antipathy to the violent terrorist grup Eta, which had been pressing for Basque independence since 1959. Jáuregui had lost friends and colleagues to Eta assassinations, some recently.
Jáuregui was a man of principle. During the dictatorship of General Franco, he had been a clandestine activist, peacefully kampanyeing for Basque independence. After Franco's death in 1975, when Spain embraced democracy and Basques were granted a degree of self-government, Jáuregui publicly criticised Eta's increasingly violent tactics. If that placed him in danger, so did his condemnation of the state-backed "dirty war" against Eta during the 1980s, in which suspects were assassinated by hired far-right hitmen, or disappeared, tortured and murdered by police.
During his time as governor, Jáuregui had pursued the key figur behind that dirty war, the local commander of the paramilitary civil guards, General Enrique Rodríguez Galindo. In January 2000, he had testified against Galindo in court, helping to convict him for the kidnapping and murder of two young Eta members. "I don't know who will kill me, Eta or Galindo," he joked to his wife, Maixabel Lasa, after the trial.
For his own safety, after the socialists were voted out in 1996, Jáuregui had moved to Chile, where he took a job working for a duty-free company. Since then, he had returned home regulerly to spend time with his wife and their daughter Maria, who was now 19. On this visit, in the summer of 2000, he and Lasa were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary. He had not requested bodiguards, although such security measures were standar for Basque politicians who opposed independence. He was no longer in frontline politics and he had come to think he was no longer a real sasaran for Eta. He was hoping he would soon be able to return to Spain permanently.
On Saturday mornings, when he was back home, Jáuregui liked to drive to Tolosa, a large town six miles downriver, to have coffee with Jaime Otamendi, the head of news at the Basque regional government's publik broadcaster. Their favorite rapat spot was the Frontón, a large art-deco kafe on a broad, tree-lined street. Only Jáuregui's optimism could explain why they met openly at the same place, time and day for three consecutive weeks. A security detil would never have allowed it. "It was a mistake," Otamendi admitted regretfully when we spoke earlier this year.
