The hounding of the divisive Baltasar Garzón tells us much about Spanish democracy
THE SPANISH General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) yesterday suspended Baltasar Garzón, the country’s most famous – or notorious – investigating magistrate, from his professional duties.
This severe sanction was probably inevitable after a supreme court judge charged him with perversion of justice because he had opened investigations into the crimes committed by the Franco dictatorship.
According to Judge Luciano Varela, Garzón took up this case in the full knowledge that Spanish law excluded such investigations through an amnesty law passed during the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1970s.
It is still not clear whether this suspension will affect the magistrate’s recent appointment as an adviser to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. This is a position that would sit well with his role as an advocate of prosecuting human rights cases across national frontiers.
Garzón first came to the world’s attention when he tried to have former Chilean dictator Gen Augusto Pinochet extradited while he was under medical care in Britain in 1998.
His supporters claim that the magistrate is the victim of a political witch-hunt to remove him from office. They say his zeal for justice over the last three decades has embarrassed the entire Spanish establishment.
Certainly, it is hardly a coincidence that Garzón today faces two other charges at the supreme court.
He is also accused of exceeding his powers in the use of phone-taps while investigating corruption in the Partido Popular (PP), currently the main opposition party. And he is charged with accepting a bribe, on the grounds that lectures he gave in New York were subsidised by a bank and that he later dropped a case against its president.
These cases have been taken by an unsavoury melange of far-right groups, lawyers associated with the deeply conservative PP, and business people with issues against the Banco de Santander.
The hounding of Garzón undoubtedly tells us a great deal about Spanish democracy, about its inability to confront an ugly past and, above all, about a judiciary saturated in political intrigue.
But the magistrate himself is a very complex figure. The Spanish Right now hates him, but this was not always the case, and the Spanish Left does not universally admire him. In any event, several extraordinary episodes in his distant and recent past certainly tarnish the shining armour in which his die-hard admirers often paint him.
Judge Varela, who is giving him no quarter on the Franco case, has an impeccable democratic record. Some other senior judges with strong human rights records have shown conspicuously little solidarity with him.
You could put this down to professional jealousy. Garzón’s towering media profile – he has been dubbed a “star judge” since the 1980s – and his rash willingness to cut legal corners has not endeared him to his colleagues.
But many others in Spain’s centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE), currently in government, also regard him with deep distrust.
Some of this can be traced back to his tenacious investigation of the “dirty war” against the Basque terrorist group Eta in the 1980s. Garzón, more than any other figure, exposed the role of senior ministers in Felipe González’s PSOE administration in organising the state terrorist death squads known as the GAL.
Typically, however, not even this issue is clear-cut. In the midst of these investigations, González offered Garzón a top spot on the PSOE’s electoral list for Madrid in 1993.
The magistrate accepted, dropped the cases, and became an MP. But when he found that he was not to be made a minister, he returned to the courts and did his utmost – though he failed – to implicate González directly in the GAL scandal. He was the darling of the PP of the period.
His recent investigation of PP corruption might suggest that he is indeed a most politically impartial judge. But once again he muddied the waters by going on a private hunting trip with the PSOE justice minister while pursuing the case.
The most telling source of PSOE resentment of Garzón, however, is the fact that his attempt to open the Pandora’s Box of Francoist criminality is feared almost as much by the Socialists as it is hated by the PP.
Spain’s much-hyped transition to democracy was based on a “pact of forgetfulness” between the democratic opposition and the regime figures who gave birth to the PP. That pact stands in embarrassing contrast to Germany’s ability to confront its Nazi past, and to the courageous moves by Latin American countries to bring their former tormentors to justice.
The PSOE does not like to be reminded of this, and that bodes ill for Garzón in such a politicised legal system.
Paddy Woodworth is the author of
Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy
(Yale 2003)