Does Spain have the right to look at its past or not?
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Version 0 of 1. <em>No habrá paz para los malvados.</em> "No rest for the wicked". That's the biblically inspired title of a recently released Spanish thriller about crime and revenge. But in the real Spain, the wicked may be having some rest after all. While prominent corruption trials come to nothing, star judge Baltasar Garzón, seen all over the world as an embodiment of the principle of universal justice, sits in the dock, facing not one but three separate indictments that are expected to put an abrupt end to his hyperactive judicial career. Garzón stands accused of opening an investigation into the killings of the Franco dictatorship (1936-1975). You may be surprised to learn that looking into these 114,000 murders is a punishable crime in Spain, but that is how it is. The specific charge against Garzón is "perverting the course of justice". What Garzón did, at the behest of hundreds of relatives of people who were murdered during and after the civil war, was to open an inquiry to account for the tens of thousands of bodies still scattered around the country, secretly buried by their executors in ravines and ditches. For decades, their loved ones have tried to give them a proper burial. Some bodies have been retrieved with the help of volunteer archaeologists but the law is so fuzzy, and the attitude of many local judges so hostile, that only a fraction of the corpses have been unearthed. Spain continues to be a gigantic neglected graveyard. Garzón, who had helped with the investigation of similar crimes in Argentina and Chile, thought the same principles could be applied to Spain. We're talking about non-natural deaths here, so the operation had to include a criminal investigation, which meant indicting Franco and his henchmen. When judge Garzón proceeded to do just that, even symbolically – they're all dead now – two far-right organisations sued, one of them the very Falange Española (the Spanish fascist party) which carried out many of the killings back then. Picture Radovan Karadzic successfully suing The Hague. The fact that Garzón is facing two other charges (one an obscure corruption allegation, the other a rather technical misdemeanour in the handling of a corruption case) detracts from, rather than adds to, the credibility of the case against him. The timing seems all too suspect and the number of simultaneous accusations against a single judge unprecedented in Spain. But if you think this means the Spanish justice system is still in the hands of ultraconservative judges and Francoist nostalgics you're missing half the picture, because only about half of them are. The other half hates Garzón for other, less ideological, reasons. Some of them have always resented his desire for prominence, or feel his reputation is undeserved. Socialist politicians never forgave him for going after the death squads that were set up in the 1980s to kill the armed Basque separatists of Eta. And he angered the conservatives too when he investigated a corrupt network affecting the now ruling People's party. I'm not a Garzón fan myself, for my own reasons. I never liked his self-righteousness, and he represents an approach to justice I don't trust: that of the all-powerful judge with a mission. I believe that the ultimate guarantor of justice should be a clear law and not the mood or the idealism of a judge, and I guess Garzón is beginning to agree with me as he is becoming the victim of a confusing law and a few judges with a mission of their own: to put him out of business. My personal feelings aside, I think there's more at stake here than his professional future, the petty quarrels of his trade or the intractable fuzziness of Spain's laws. What is at stake is whether we have the right to look into our recent past or not, and whether it is not the wicked, but the innocent, who will never be able to rest. • Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree |