Two years ago, when Jose Barrionuevo, a former Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) minister, was found guilty of organising a 1983 "dirty war" kidnapping, the leadership of his party proclaimed his innocence and followed him, quite literally, to the gates of Guadalajara prison.

The image of Felipe Gonzalez, widely regarded as one of the EU's leading statesmen over the last 20 years, standing at those gates in solidarity with a criminal convicted by the Supreme Court was a disturbing indication that Spain's transition to democracy had been a less luminous process than most people thought.

This week when another senior Socialist and a Civil Guard general received long prison sentences for the kidnapping and murder of two members of the Basque separatist group ETA, also in 1983, the PSOE took a very different line.

The party raised no question about the sentence, but stressed that the acquittal of the defendants on charges of "membership of an armed gang" established that illegal actions against ETA "had never been initiated or accepted by the [Socialist] government." Most of the evidence accepted by the judges in this and similar cases, however, suggests the opposite. It is much too early for the leaders of the 1980s Socialist governments, including Gonzalez himself, to be sure that they have really awakened from the nightmare of allegations that they used terrorist methods, including torture, and indiscriminate bombings and shootings, to combat the terrorist offensive of ETA during their first years in power.

The evidence heard against Gen Enrique Rodriguez Galindo and a former provincial governor, Julen Elgorriaga, over the last five months has been dramatic and gruesome.

Along with three more junior civil guards, they were charged with kidnapping Jose Antonio Lasa and Jose Ignacio Zabala, two young and rather insignificant members of ETA.

Lasa and Zabala were seized by members of the Civil Guard in Bayonne at a time when the French government tolerated a virtual sanctuary for ETA in its own Basque region. They were brought across the border to a disused palace in the Basque provincial capital of San Sebastian, where they were tortured for several weeks.

Galindo and Elgorriaga, the senior Socialist official in the province, visited the victims, claiming to be agents of the Israeli secret service. Lasa and Zabala were then driven some 800km to Alicante. There they were shot in the back of the head and buried in quicklime, which destroyed their flesh but left their bones intact.

A call to a radio station claimed the killings in the name of the GAL, the so-called Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups, an organisation which had begun kidnapping and killing in the French Basque Country in 1983 and continued until at least 1986.

The call was not followed up, and when Lasa's and Zabala's bones were discovered by accident two years later, the Civil Guard did not investigate missing persons records outside the province. Only the diligence of an Alicante pathologist prevented the bones being thrown into a common grave.

It was not until 1995, when the journalistic and judicial investigation of the GAL was revealing its extensive links to the security forces and the Socialist Interior Ministry, that a policeman (not a civil guard) connected the twisted skeletons, still lying in an Alicante morgue, to the two Basques who "disappeared" in France at the start of the GAL's dirty war against ETA.

A new investigation quickly led to Gen Galindo (then a colonel) and his anti-terrorist units in San Sebastian. Galindo was the most charismatic and high-profile figure in the struggle against ETA, and bringing murder charges against him has not been easy for the Spanish judiciary.

There were many obstructions, some of them terrifyingly crude. One witness was sodomised with a blunt object before he could be given police protection. The case was also, of course, a propaganda gift to ETA's continuing, if greatly weakened, terrorist campaign.

The cool efficiency with which the case has been pursued by Jesus Santos, an impeccably impartial prosecutor, is an impressive demonstration of how Spanish democracy has matured. So is the fact that, in a country where the Civil Guard were virtually untouchable only 20 years ago, no sabres have rattled at the prospect of a lionised general going to jail for the murder of terrorists.

Santos had also brought charges of "membership of an armed gang" against the defendants, but the judges decided in the face of the evidence they accepted that this charge could not be proven. They also acquitted an Interior Ministry lawyer, Mr Jorge Argote, and a former deputy interior minister for the PSOE, Rafael Vera - already convicted for another GAL kidnapping - of covering up the crime.

There are now a series of convictions for GAL crimes against the anti-terrorist high command and Interior Ministry chiefs from the Socialist period, which ended in 1996 with Mr Gonzalez's defeat by the centreright Partido Popular (PP), led by Mr Jose Maria Aznar.

The GAL scandal, often blatantly manipulated by the PP, was a major contributor to the downfall of Mr Gonzalez. He resigned as PSOE leader in 1997, though he is still a heavily influential figure.

The PSOE has failed to renovate itself in the intervening years, and was subjected to a humiliating defeat by Mr Aznar in last month's general elections, when the PP won its first absolute majority.

THE PP has mostly ceased to actively pursue the PSOE on the GAL issue and, for "reasons of state", would probably be happy enough to see the story end with the conviction of Galindo, a hero to many of their voters.

Since the PP pardoned Barrionuevo and Vera, enabling both men to leave prison only months after their conviction for another GAL kidnapping, it is most unlikely that Galindo will serve even one of the 71 years to which he has just been sentenced. (All the convicted men have announced that they will appeal to the Supreme Court).

However, the wheels of justice have probably now turned too far on too many other GAL cases for political brakes to be applied. The failure to convict on the "armed gang" charges is a setback to establishing that the GAL was a stable organisation directed by the Interior Ministry, or even by Mr Gonzalez himself.

This latter idea has been floated, so far without judicial success, by Mr Baltasar Garzon, the formidable investigating magistrate who brought the extradition case against Gen Pinochet. But Garzon is deeply involved in several other GAL investigations, and is understood to believe that the evidence accepted in the Lasa and Zabala case will enable him to reach parts of the GAL which have eluded his grasp until now.

There is also the very human possibility that some of those convicted last week, seeing their Socialist mentors abandon them unceremoniously to prison, will change their minds about continuing to plead their innocence and start revealing information that could bring even more damaging GAL revelations to the courts in the future.