"I know I'm going to be unemployed, but if this is really over, I'll celebrate"

When the Popular Party councilor in Ermua, Miguel Ángel Blanco, was kidnapped by ETA on July 10, 1997, Josefa Vega's brother called her in tears. He had been a private bodyguard in Durango, Bizkaia, and she did not live in the Basque Country. "I remember those days well - the anguish, the impotence... I was a decorator but I had always wanted to join the police, to work for people's security. On the day they killed Miguel [July 12] I decided to train as a bodyguard and move to the Basque Country."

Since that day, she has protected politicians, a judge and the artist Agustín Ibarrola. For the past 12 months, Vega has been guarding the Basque Socialist Party (PSE) councilor in Zarautz, Patxi Elola, where Bildu now governs. On the first Sunday after ETA announced a definitive end to violence, Elola was in the bar at PSE headquarters with his family. Everything is calm, but a man and a woman don't take their eyes off the councilor. Vega explains that, until they are told differently, protocol remains in place. "I know I'm going to be unemployed, but if this is really over, I'll celebrate," she says.

Vega is an employee of security company Ombuds, subcontracted by the government. She and her colleagues work long hours, between 12 and 18, and tense ones, especially in some towns in Gipuzkoa, where separatist sentiment runs high. Vega decided to live in Zarautz, but she pays a price for it: everyone knows who she is. "People have refused to serve me in shops. I've been spat at. They tell me to go home. People don't want to rent you an apartment for fear that someone will set fire to the door. They see me as an oppressor when I am fighting for freedom in the Basque Country." A while ago she joined a Basque language class. "They looked at me strangely. I left."

One day, at 4am, Vega crossed paths with a drunken youth in the street. "He said he hated me for what I represent, that he wanted to kill Patxi, that he wanted to hit me. There has been a lot of pressure - that's why I admire Patxi, because he has not held his tongue. I'm proud of him."

Elola remembers the worst days, when a silhouette appeared next to his house with a bloody head. In the same paint a target was daubed on the door of his neighbor, the journalist Gorka Landaburu, who had five fingers mutilated by a letter bomb on May 15, 2001. Today, Elola feels a "very self-contained joy." "The blow of the last [breaking of the 2006] truce was very hard and now I can hardly believe it, but I'm hopeful. Now it is time to learn how to live in liberty."

"All I ask is for a little recognition for all the bodyguards that have risked our lives for freedom in Euskadi," says Vega.

Three years and seven months ago, the former PSE councilor in the town of Mondragón, Isaías Carrasco, was gunned down at the door of his house, in front of his wife and eldest daughter. He was on his way to work at a toll booth at Bergara, on the A-8 highway. It was the middle of an election campaign. Aritz Arrieta, the current PSE councilor, says his former colleague was the first person who sprang to mind when the ETA announcement was made. "He's somewhere now, watching us. They killed him for nothing, to later recognize their defeat and that nothing can be achieved with arms."

Last Thursday, Arrieta felt strange. Was he now free? "What do we do now?" he asked his bodyguards. As a Socialist councilor, from a nationalist family in a fiefdom of the radical abertzale left, Arrieta has received many threats. But the other day, he left his house alone for the first time in six years to buy food for his dog. "In all these years I have not been able to do something as everyday and normal as that. All of a sudden, I feel free."

Last Friday, he bumped into a fellow councilor who, for the first time, attended the regional parliament on his motorbike. "He told me he wanted to breathe and feel the air," says Arrieta, who spoke to EL PAÍS in a park without his bodyguards. "I gave them the afternoon off," he says. "We still don't know what the protocol will be, but I want to start doing some things on my own, as if everything were normal. My parents were incredulous. They said this can't be that simple, but I think time has been called on violence. We have our freedom back. Another matter will be peace, coexistence... that will take generations."