Eta's new generation of female fighters

The placards held aloft by the elderly marchers in Bilbao's Albia Gardens are neatly matched, each with an identically sized photograph in a green frame on a painted wooden stick.

About 50 protesters walk slowly in two disciplined lines under the towering plane trees of this well-tended city centre square.

They are mostly stern-faced women, though one old man has a black Basque beret stretched across a balding head.

It is a peaceful protest, largely ignored by the office workers and shoppers resting on the square's benches. The faces on the placards, however, are a reminder of violence.

They are the faces of Eta - the Basque separatist group that has killed 800 people in bombings and shootings over the past four decades.

The people in the photographs are jailed sons, daughters, husbands, wives and siblings. The older, grainy black-and-white pictures are mostly of men, some with the hairstyles and bushy moustaches of the era in which they were jailed.

The more recent ones, the younger faces, include many more women. They are among the 750 people now in prison for Eta-related crimes. Others are still at large, keeping Europe's last blood-soaked separatist conflict alive in the western borderlands of Spain and France.

And increasingly, they are women.

Somewhere across the French border, Eta's clandestine leadership is being reformed after a series of arrests. In the last few days a series of bomb blasts has sent Madrid and Europe a chilling reminder that the separatist group remains active and deadly.

This week, two police officers on the Spanish resort island of Mallorca were killed when a bomb wrecked their patrol car.

Less than 36 hours earlier, a car bomb destroyed a police barracks in the northern Spanish city of Burgos, injuring about 60 people.

In June, Inspector Eduardo Puelles, a senior anti-terrorist police officer, was burnt to death in the Bilbao suburb of Arrigorriaga, after a bomb attached to the underside of his car turned it into a ball of flames and molten metal. Neighbours who heard his cries said there was nothing quick or easy about his death. "Get me out of here! Get me out!" he had screamed.

Police believe his murder may have been ordered by one of two women, Iratxe Sorzabal or Izaskun Lesaka, who are thought to hold senior positions in Eta's increasingly fragile military apparatus.

For most Spaniards, Eta members are blood-thirsty, cold-hearted terrorists.

"They haven't achieved anything by murdering my husband. They don't defend anyone's freedom, in fact they just restrict it," Puelles' widow, Paqui, told a crowd of 25,000 people who marched through Bilbao to express their revulsion the day after his murder. "This is the only thing they know how to do: kill, kill and kill."

To the people holding up photographs in Albia Gardens, however, their sons and daughters are not murderers. They are "political prisoners" or "patriots".

Eta supporters choose their words carefully. Public backing for terrorism is punishable by a prison sentence, but the 100,000 or more votes regularly garnered by political groups identified with Eta suggests a small but obstinately solid support group. Occasionally, however, the guard slips.

"Why have we killed some enemies of our people? Because they obliged us to," is how Manuel, the uncle of Irantzu Gallastegui, a woman who took part in the infamous kidnapping and killing of a young Basque town councillor, Miguel Angel Blanco, put it recently.

"Who says that it isn't human to use violence?" Manuel says. "Don't think that we enjoy it or that we kill just because, or out of pleasure. Eta does it out of a sense of patriotic duty."

The letter left behind for his father by Asier Borrero, an Eta member captured a couple of weeks after Puelles' death, gave his reason for leaving home and joining the group.

"I know I am betraying you as a son by leaving you," he wrote. "But it is better this way, because I am not going to stop fighting for our people."

Today, Eta's leadership is based mostly over the border. A poster showing six of its members adorns the walls of police stations across southern France. "These people are dangerous and likely to be armed," it warns. Four are men, who have been captured since the poster was printed 15 months ago.

The two still at large are women: Iratxe Sorzabal and Izaskun Lesaka, all that remains of the group that police believe ran Eta's frontline militants.

The balance of sexes reflected in the poster, however, is a sign of profound change in a group with Catholic, conservative roots. "The imprint of Catholicism has been considerable," explains Jesus Casquete, of the University of the Basque Country. "You can't compare them to the Red Brigades or the Baader Meinhof gang, where women had considerable roles of responsibility." But this is changing.

In the fortnight following the murder of Eduardo Puelles, police carried out four separate operations against Eta, arresting 10 suspected members.

Half of them, including two of the three members of a new comando unit caught with 75kg of explosives, are women. One, Itziar Plaza, is said to be a senior military commander. Recent recruits include female students, journalists, nurses and even infant-school mistresses.

Women have, in fact, been present in Eta's history since the beginning, though almost always in background roles. They ran safe houses, hid activists, trailed targets or stashed arms. They tracked politicians or police officers to mass, sitting demurely in the back rows of the church.

The frontline stuff, of planting bombs and shooting people, was largely a man's thing.

The first women to join comandos found their gender an obstacle. One anonymous Eta gunwoman recalled the first time she and a female friend were sent out with pistols.

"We said: 'Well, depending on how we do it tomorrow, they will accept us or not.' And that was because we were women. You have a lot more to prove when you are a woman," she told the anthropologist Miren Alcedo. Indeed, early gunwomen gained a reputation within Eta as more bloodthirsty than the men.

The most infamous was Idoia Lopez Riano, alias La Tigresa, the tigress.

It is hard to separate myth from reality in the case of a green-eyed, glamorous gunwoman who police, journalists and some repentant former companions have painted as a man-eating, man-murdering monster.

Legend has her cruising discotheques for young policemen for one-night stands and then calmly pumping bullets into others a few days later. In police lore she was said to straddle her lovers while thinking: "I'd love to shoot the bastard in the mouth."

Her love of nightlife, an ability to attract men and the fact that she once picked up a policeman who came to her aid after a traffic accident are among the few hard facts.

Her own comando members tired of her indiscipline as they scrambled to safe houses when she failed to return home after an evening out.

During one attack in Madrid she was detailed to cover another comando member as he opened fire on a car full of army officers. She could not, however, resist spraying it with bullets first.

She is now serving a 30-year jail sentence for 23 murders. "She used to complain that women had to prove themselves twice as much as men," a former companion-in-arms said.

Over the past decade, however, a new trend has emerged. The first symbol of change was Olaia Castresana, a 22-year-old infant-school teacher from San Sebastian. On weekdays Castresana looked after children under six; at weekends and during the holidays she blew up things, and people, for Eta.

A bomb eventually exploded in her hands in the eastern resort of Torrevieja in July 2001. The force of the explosion sent masonry and body parts raining down on a nearby swimming pool. Another of her bombs had killed a policeman a few weeks earlier. Castresana became a new female "martyr", praised at her funeral by radical separatist politicians such as Arnaldo Otegi, the man many hope will prove to be Eta's Gerry Adams.

"Eta will never be defeated by police measures," he said the day before Puelles was killed.

Castresana's school sweetheart, Anartz Oiarzabal, a funeral parlour employee who was also her bombing partner, contacted the separatist Gara newspaper while on the run. He placed a death notice to her: "I love you", it said in large, bold print. Eta later named a comando after her.

On the day of Eduardo Puelles' death, life continues as normal in the world of radical Basque separatism. At the separatist Herriko Taberna bar in Santutxu, a nearby barrio of Bilbao, like-minded radicals gather to drink.

Three rows of coloured photos hang on the wall, the 24 people from this barrio alone who are in jail. Seven are women, including recent additions Anabel Prieto and Maialen Zuazo - both arrested last year and accused of killing a policeman in a bomb attack that destroyed part of a Guardia Civil barracks.

The photos are not the grim, identity card mugshots that appear in Madrid newspapers but pictures taken by friends of the young women, giving the camera their best smile. They leave little doubt about who the heroes are for those who come here.

The bar girl admits she knows them, but does not want to talk. "I'm an ex-prisoner myself," she explains as she fills glasses of beer. "I don't want to risk trouble."

50 YEARS OF REVOLT

It is 50 years to the week that the armed organisation Eta has waged a bloody campaign for independence for the seven provinces in northern Spain and southwest France that Basque separatists claim as their own.

Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna, whose name means Basque Homeland and Freedom, emerged as a student resistance movement bitterly opposed to General Franco's repressive military dictatorship.

Under Franco the Basque language was banned, their distinctive culture suppressed, and intellectuals imprisoned and tortured for their political and cultural beliefs.

But with the death of the dictator in 1975 and the transition to democracy the area and its two million population won home rule and now enjoys more autonomy than any of Spain's other 16 regions.

Eta and its hardline supporters have however remained determined to push for full independence. The organisation is responsible for killing more than 850 people, many of them members of the Guardia Civil, Spain's national police force and local and national politicians.

At the height of its violent campaign the early 1980s, Eta was claiming more than 100 lives a year but in recent years attacks have rarely been deadly and many came after warning calls designed to allow authorities to clear the area and minimise casualties.

The group called a "permanent ceasefire" in March 2006 but ended it nine months later with a surprise bomb attack at Madrid's Barajas airport leaving two people dead.

As a result Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero called off peace talks and vowed to crush ETA embarking with renewed energy on rounding up suspected members of the group. Political parties suspected of holding any links with the group have been banned.

- OBSERVER