When history professor Jose Portillo returned to his car parked on the campus of the University of the Basque Country one afternoon in December 1998, he found that it had been set on fire. He immediately suspected that the ETA, the Basque separatist movement, was responsible. "I was a university professor," Portillo explains, "but I also wrote news-paper articles criticizing radical nationalism." A specialist in modern and contemporary Spanish, Basque, and Latin American history, Portillo had taught at the university since 1989. He was also active in a group called Basta Ya (That's Enough) that encouraged citizens to protest the violent acts of the ETA. Founded in 1959, the ETA aims to establish an independent socialist Basque state spanning an area of northern Spain and France's southern Atlantic coast. During its campaign, the organization has killed more than eight hundred people, including journalists, academics, police officers, judges, politicians, and businesspeople. The group's favored techniques are car bombings and assassinations.