"Look at how much they have done for Spain. And look what Spain is doing to them now."
Maria Silverio Velez, elderly, working class and feisty, could hardly contain her indignation. Fanning herself angrily against the oven-dry midday heat of Madrid last Thursday, she had joined a few dozen other Socialist Party (PSOE) members, mainly rank-and-file, outside the Supreme Court to show solidarity with an old comrade.
Jose Barrionuevo was once one of the most powerful ministers in the heady days of Mr Felipe Gonzalez's first governments in the 1980s. Last Thursday, he was coming to the court to receive formal notification of a conviction for kidnapping which will send him to jail for 10 years.
This kidnapping was the first action claimed by the Grupos Anti-terroristas de Liberacion (GAL).
The Grupos Anti-terroristas de Liberacion conducted a dirty war against the Basque terrorist group ETA from 1983 to 1987. It killed 27 people - one-third of them unconnected to ETA, and almost all of them on French soil.
According to a series of well-documented journalistic and judicial investigations, the GAL was a creature of the Socialist administration, used to "persuade" the French authorities to take a tough line against ETA members living in France. To find a parallel in Ireland, you would have to imagine British-backed death squads carrying out dozens of shootings and bombings in Drogheda and Dundalk.
The trial of Barrionuevo, and his most senior security officers, found them all guilty of illegal detention, though not of "membership of an armed gang". However, the former director of state security, a direct subordinate of Barrionuevo, admitted inventing the acronym GAL for the purposes of the kidnapping. Of the 12 defendants only Barrionuevo and his deputy had pleaded not guilty to the kidnapping.
The verdict, by a 7-4 majority, has reopened a chasm in Spanish society, which threatens to split the country once again into the "two Spains" which have fought three fratricidal civil wars in the last 150 years.
In the eyes of people like Maria, the former interior minister is the victim of a vicious antidemocratic political conspiracy, spearheaded by the conservative Partido Popular (PP), which could not dislodge the Socialist Party from power by legitimate means.
In an emotional address to his supporters outside the court, Barrionuevo made serious allegations against the court. He did not simply proclaim his innocence. He said that the seven magistrates who sentenced him had done so "without proofs", and "have not respected the constitutional principals of the rule of law".
The PSOE executive was concluding a series of crisis meetings as Barrionuevo was speaking. Supposedly "renovated" since Mr Gonzalez's resignation as party leader last year, the new leadership fully endorsed the record of the old one. It may not be coincidental that Mr Gonzalez broke off his holidays to attend their deliberations, though he holds no office in the party.
"We accept and respect the sentence," the PSOE's statement opens tersely. "But we disagree radically with it, because we believe that the trial has not shown any proof whatsoever" of Barrionuevo's guilt. In support, the party cites the strongly dissenting arguments of the four magistrates who voted against the sentence, all of whom are regarded, fairly or otherwise, as PSOE supporters.
The whole trial, the party argues, was the result of "a political operation to remove the PSOE from power. . . Intolerable political and media pressure has. . . contaminated the case and seriously undermined its development."
Mr Gonzalez himself described the verdict as radically unjust and alleged that the court had been under pressure from the current conservative government. He said he would support Barrionuevo and his former deputy, Mr Rafael Vera, until the end.
Asked if he thought the government of Mr Jose Maria Aznar had pressured the court, Mr Gonzalez said: "It's not that I believe it. It's obvious."
"I think the court declarations of deputy prime minister [Mr Francisco Alvarez Cascos] are clearer than anything I can say," said Mr Gonzalez.
There is no doubt that Mr e Maria Aznar's Partido Popular (PP) was deeply frustrated, almost desperate, at its failure to dislodge the PSOE and Mr Gonzalez after 13 years in power in 1993. Nor is there any doubt that the PP, and its allies in the media, hypocritically (and probably improperly) manipulated the GAL investigations thereafter. They had, after all, appeared to quietly applaud the dirty war when it was actually happening. This manipulation contributed to Mr Gonzalez's defeat in 1996.
But the politicisation of the judiciary, and the judicialisation of politics, cuts both ways. If the PSOE administration had not involved itself in corruption, torture and murder, there would have been no judicial cases to manipulate.
The PSOE has dug a hole for itself, and, to the horror of its more perceptive supporters, seems to making the hole into a bunker. Its cryptic references to an earlier dirty war, carried out under its conservative predecessors, suggest that both major Spanish political groupings believed it was all right to use to terrorist methods against terrorism.
The appalling vista for Spanish democracy is that crimes carried out in the 1980s will continue to poison political debate into the next century.
