ETA left a clear and chilling message with the dead body of Juan Maria Jauregui on the floor a Tolosa cafe last Saturday morning.
If this man is a target, his killers were saying, then no one who is not a signed-up Basque nationalist can walk the streets without fear.
Jauregui was an unusual man in many ways, but his most exceptional quality was his ordinariness, in the Basque context, and the places that ordinariness took him.
He was a native speaker of the Basque language, Euskera. He was born in a rural area often referred to as "the womb of ETA". Like many young Basques in the 1960s, he was drawn to the anti-Franco opposition.
While he joined the non-nationalist Communist Party, he had some empathy with the leftist radicals who then dominated ETA. He was jailed for his role in the huge democratic protest movement sparked by the show trial of ETA leaders held in Burgos in 1970.
With the advent of democracy in the late 1970s, his section of the Communist Party merged with an ETA faction which had abandoned terrorism. Most of this grouping, Jauregui among them, eventually joined the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE) in the late 1980s.
Jauregui was a low-profile PSOE town councillor in Tolosa when he was suddenly plucked from this obscurity in 1994 and appointed civil governor of Guipuzcoa, his native province.
This position gave him (theoretical) control over state security forces there. He shocked the guardia civil by giving his formal acceptance speech entirely in Euskera.
He had been appointed because the PSOE was tarnished by allegations that its senior officials had used state terrorism in a dirty war against ETA in the 1980s. Madrid needed someone with clean hands in charge. Jauregui had not only become an automatic target for ETA, he also had to watch his back, as he undertook to purge rogue elements in the guardia civil. One of the worst dirty war incidents had concerned two ETA members from Tolosa. Joxean Lasa and Joxe Zabala, were kidnapped, tortured, killed and buried in quicklime by guardia civiles in 1983.
Jauregui supported a sensational investigation, which eventually led to the jailing of one of his predecessors as Socialist civil governor, and of a guardia civil general, last April.
He even appeared as a prosecution witness during the trial. Many Socialists regarded his conduct as a betrayal of the party.
He was equally distant from many of his party colleagues on broader political issues. He had a gut sympathy with Basque nationalist culture, which is alien to many within the PSOE. He was willing to change the Spanish constitution to accommodate Basque nationalist demands.
And even when ETA was killing his own comrades, he took the minority position that the Basque conflict could only be ultimately resolved by negotiation, not repression.
The change of government in 1996 put him out of a most difficult job, a job most observers acknowledged he had carried out with a unique combination of courage, openness, and affability. Nevertheless, threats from ETA forced him to make a living abroad. He was killed while on a brief holiday visit home. His death will make it harder than ever to build bridges between the nationalist and non-nationalist camps in the Basque Country. Specifically, it will drive a deeper wedge between the PSOE and the moderate nationalist minority administration which currently runs the regional government.
The moderate nationalists condemn ETA's violence, but refuse to abandon a common programme for Basque self-determination, which is anathema to the PSOE. ETA hopes that isolation will decant the moderate nationalists towards their side of the conflict. Meanwhile, Jauregui will no longer be able to urge his Socialist comrades to take a risk for peace.
Yet again, the gun has silenced a voice for dialogue in the Basque Country.