Spare a thought today for Baltasar Garzón, one of Spain’s most honest and fearless judges.
Over the course of his career, Garzón has — at considerable risk to his own safety — pursued drug dealers, terrorists, rogue police operations, and those responsible for past dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. He has investigated crimes committed during Franco’s dictatorship, daring to look directly at a wound that has been left unhealed for decades. And he has worked to end corruption at high levels of provincial government in Valencia, which is home to some of the dirtiest politicians in Spain.
As it happens, those dirty politicians are members of the party now in power. That party also has historical ties to the Franco regime (its founder, Manuel Fraga, passed away just this week). There’s no great love for the jurist in the Partido Popular.
Garzón now finds himself on trial before the Spanish supreme court for abuse of power. (He also faces prosecution in two other cases.) The charges against him are related to wiretaps he approved in the course of the corruption investigation. This is a “private” trial — that is, government prosecutors have refused to support the charges against him. Among his many supporters — who include a large number of jurists at all levels — there is a feeling that the verdict has already been determined. Garzón himself has said that he thinks the supreme court judges want to get rid of him.
This is what passes for justice in Spain, after more than 35 years of democracy.
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January 18, 2012 at 2:15 pm
neki desu
and i find sickly ironic that part of the gürtel trial is being held almost simultaneously.
January 18, 2012 at 2:16 pm
neki desu
oops left out: gúrtel corruption trial , corruption which he brought to the open
January 18, 2012 at 2:51 pm
rubiatonta
It’s repulsive. Human Rights Watch has a lot to say on the situation — shameful, just shameful.
January 30, 2012 at 1:25 pm
lagatta à montréal
Yes, it is ghastly. I have friends from and in the Cono Sur countries who have great admiration for Judge Garzón. A friend of mine from Argentina who was a refugee in Barcelona, and later came here for romantic reasons, and I were discussing him just yesterday.
Fascism (and dictatorship in general) leaves long shadows. When I was studying and living in Italy, there were still many statutes on the books from the Fascist era. The first place I studied in Italy, (for language and literature learning, and in my case pedagogia della lingua italiana) still bears its Fascist-era name, L’Università per stranieri.
Fortunately there is also a lot of support for Baltasar Garzón, and not only in Spain.
January 30, 2012 at 1:40 pm
rubiatonta
Until Spain is willing to take a hard look at the Civil War and its aftermath, this country that I love so much will never really be a democracy. And in the face of the current economic and political climate, it’s more democracy that we need here, not less.
That these charges, spurious at best, were ever allowed before the Spanish Supreme Court, makes it hard to be optimistic about their outcome.
February 2, 2012 at 8:59 pm
lagatta à montréal
Yes, there were some blips of that nature that really shocked me when living in Italy (which I love dearly). Of course there are “democratic deficits” in the North American countries as well, largely pertaining to race – not only slavery, but the Indigenous question which is an open sore throughout the Americas. But it isn’t quite the same as the impact of fascism, the pervasive fear and internalisation.
I don’t even want to get into what is going on in Hungary, after indigenous fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism…. There is a horrific clampdown on free expression and the arts, not to mention pogroms against Roma (Gypsy) people.