Judge Baltasar Garzon is known in his native Spain, quite simply, as the superjuez — the super-judge. It is a double-edged compliment, implying not just the crusading zeal of a comic superhero but a weakness for pursuing both outlandish, eye-catching causes and personal fame.
With his neatly slicked-back hair and earnest, bespectacled gaze, Garzon bears a passing resemblance to that most famous of superheroes, Clark Kent. As with Superman, the sudden, frenzied bursts of action of this most controversial of judicial activists are dramatic and dazzling.
Last week Garzon dominated both newspaper headlines and the tapas-time conversations with his decision to launch a case against the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco for crimes against humanity. The judge is chasing a ghost: Franco died 33 years ago. By doing so, however, he has delved dangerously into the darker reaches of the nation’s subconscious and blasted away a tacit agreement not to rake over the past.
One outraged conservative politician likened his initiative to trying to put Napoleon on trial.
“It is outlandish,” stormed Manuel Fraga, founder of the opposition right-wing People’s Party and a former Franco minister. “There were amnesty laws.”
Garzon has never thought small. He is putting an entire era of Spanish history on trial. The 64-page document he released laid out the charges. Franco was not just a reactionary right-wing rebel who ousted an elected government, plunged his country into a bloody three-year civil war and ruled as dictator for 36 years. He was also a monster who set about the deliberate annihilation of more than 100,000 opponents.
Franco was aided and abetted by men who, like the dictator, still have streets and squares named after them. None, however, will face his accuser — for all are dead. As such, some point out, they cannot defend themselves.
Even those he is trying to help are not all appreciative. Garzon ordered 19 mass graves to be dug up. One contained the body of poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca.
“That is profanation of my uncle’s grave,” complained Garcia Lorca’s nephew, Manuel Fernandez-Montesinos.
Time will tell whether Garzon, like Don Quixote, is tilting at windmills. The case against Francoism, however, comes as no surprise to seasoned Garzon watchers.
He was an atypical magistrate from the start. The child of a petrol-pump attendant from a poor corner of the southern region of Andalucia does not normally make it this far. The reputation of his fellow southerners, however, was never for him. Garzon’s father insisted that, to get on, “You have to see the sun rise.”
Even as a radical left-wing student during the last days of Francoism and early days of democracy, he never forgot that advice. He became the youngest magistrate at the immensely powerful National Court in 1988. He was just 32.
An investigating magistrate wields, by British standards, extraordinary power. He does not conduct trials, but prepares them. He helps coordinate the police enquiry, jails or bails suspects and, eventually, decides whether to bring charges. For a magistrado in the National Court the power is even greater. From drug barons and terrorists to international arms dealers and corrupt bankers, this is where Spain’s biggest crooks and highest profile cases end up.
Garzon was a new kind of magistrado. He was instinctively left wing, intensely hard working and aware of his own abilities and the importance of his job. Even now, he complains, some judges still work mornings at their court and then earn money, cash in hand, in the afternoons by teaching.
“Nobody tries to do anything about it and, presumably, nobody will,” Garzon complained in a bestselling autobiography.
State corruption soon fell into his sights. Garzon, it became apparent, liked to aim high. Almost immediately he locked horns with the Socialist government of then-prime minister Felipe Gonzalez over a state-run dirty war against the Basque terror group ETA. It claimed 27 lives, though a third of the victims had nothing to do with the group. The footsoldiers were hired mercenaries and assassins working under the name of the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion (GAL) — a group founded and funded by the interior ministry.
Garzon shocked the government by arresting police officers and interior ministry officials. He soon became famous and lauded. He even began to make celebrity appearances at pro-am charity soccer matches, donning the goalkeeper’s jersey. Some, inevitably, began to accuse him of deliberately seeking to be center stage.
Gonzalez eventually decided to neutralize the biggest thorn in his side by appealing to Garzon’s weak spot — his vanity. Rather than fight the judge, he hired him. In 1993 Garzon became an “independent” socialist candidate in the general election — No. 2 on the party’s Madrid list behind Gonzalez himself. It was a brilliant move by Gonzalez. Garzon was a star. He added so many points to the socialists’ poll rating that it instantly drew level with its right-wing opponents in the People’s Party. Gonzalez, against the odds, won a fourth term.
Garzon, having helped win votes, was sidelined. He did, however, have a chance to catch sight of the corruption around the interior ministry.
“There was a room full of watches, ties, scarves, pens ... that were for giving away as presents; and there was another room full of paintings. The truly amazing thing, however, was that it all disappeared in 24 hours,” he said.
When Gonzalez refused to sack a corrupt former interior minister, Garzon resigned.
He returned to his old job at the Audiencia Nacional where one of his first moves was to reopen the GAL case and look at interior ministry corruption in general. Some smelled revenge.
The dirty tricks department of the interior ministry went into full swing. He was followed, his phone was tapped and his house broken into — twice. Once the visitors left a banana skin on a bed. It was a sinister calling card, a deliberate sign that they had been there.
“It was Kafkaesque. They investigated to see whether I snorted cocaine, if I had orgies with champagne and prostitutes, if I was in charge of a network of police corruption or money-laundering, or if I was inclined towards pedophilia or homosexuality,” he said later. “More than anger, it made me sad to see how far our democracy had degenerated.”
He went on a radio show to denounce what was going on.
“If you don’t show cowardice, if you keep going ... they end up assassinating you. That is what they did to Judge Giovanni Falcone [the Italian anti-mafia magistrate],” he said.
It was a game, however, that Garzon eventually won. The corrupt minister ended up in jail.
Garzon, who moves in armor-plated cars and is accompanied everywhere by bodyguards, knew from the beginning that his was not a safe job. One of his closest friends, the prosecutor Carmen Tagle, was murdered by ETA in 1989. Garzon swore to carry the fight back to them. Nowhere, indeed, has he been more controversial than in his willingness to take on ETA and its supporters.
It was the discovery of international human rights law, however, that brought Garzon fame beyond Spain — and a call that he be awarded a Nobel prize. His general willingness to test the limits of the law meant groups hoping to use the untried conventions of international human rights turned to him in the 1990s as they pursued Latin American military leaders who had escaped prosecution at home.
When he discovered that Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet had traveled to London in 1998, Garzon had the general arrested — and one of the most intriguing battles in recent British legal history began. The British judiciary eventually backed Garzon, though then Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw used his powers to send Pinochet back to Chile.
That did not stop Garzon pursuing others. An Argentine navy captain, Adolfo Scilingo, was arrested, tried and convicted for his role in the death flights in which opponents of his country’s military junta were pushed out of airplanes into the sea.
Criticisms, however, were also made. Garzon was applying international law to pursue human rights’ abusers from almost any country — except Spain itself. Had not Spain had its own dictator, death squads and repression? How dare he assert Spanish jurisdiction over the world without first looking at his own country?
With last week’s attempts to bring a case against Francoism, Garzon has gone some way to answering that.
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