The persecution of Baltazar Garzón

ATLANTA — In October 1998, when Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzón electrified the world by ordering the detention of Chile’s bloodstained dictator Augusto Pinochet and then followed up by going after the torturers and murderers of Argentina’s military dictatorship, Spain’s major newspaper, the left-of-centre El País asked a leading question in an editorial:

“What would we think if a foreign judge were to formulate accusations against old men responsible for tortures and other crimes during Franco times ...?”

The answer has taken a long time coming. Baltazar Garzón, the judge who dared to challenge the immunity of military dictators, knows what the conservative establishment of Spain thinks of him. For daring to suggest that the crimes of the bloodstained Spanish dictatorship of Francisco Franco should be investigated and the secret graves of the victims disinterred, not only is the judge himself on trial, the human rights movement is also on trial by people opposed to the concept.

The major charge against Garzón is that he willfully violated the terms of a 1977 amnesty law which sought to draw a curtain on the past. The problem with the law, as Garzón contends, is that tens of thousands of people were killed by the Franco dictatorship after the end of the civil war and their bodies secreted away in unmarked pits.

It was surely significant that on the very day that the trial of Garzón opened last week, yet another burial ground, this time containing the bodies of only women rounded up and killed by Franco’s forces, was uncovered.

Because the three trials that Garzón faces appear politically motivated, all the major human rights organizations have sent observers to Madrid. Amnesty International’s legal adviser Hugo Relva, told the British newspaper, The Guardian: “On principle, Amnesty doesn’t give an opinion on the charges faced by a single person — but the Garzón case is an exception and we cannot remain silent on it. It is simply scandalous and unacceptable. The charges should be dropped and the case closed. This case affects the independence of judicial power in Spain. Other judges see it as a warning about what might happen to them if they continue with their own investigations.” Reed Brody, of Human Rights Watch commented: “This is the first time that an established democracy has tried a judge for investigating human rights abuses and applying international law,” He noted that by investigating human rights abuses committed under Pinochet and by Argentina’s military juntas, Garzón extended the global reach of human rights laws. “He is being tried for applying the same principles that he successfully defended” in ordering Pinochet’s arrest in London and the jailing of Argentine torturers in Madrid, said Brody. “Will Franco’s victims now have fewer rights than Pinochet’s arrest victims?”

Pedro Nikken of the International Commission of Jurists said Garzón had been right to ignore Spain’s amnesty law. “International human rights law comes into play when national laws do not provide enough protection,” he said. A judge is obliged to take that into account. We hope the Supreme Court takes this opportunity to make that clear.”

I cannot claim to know Garzón, but I followed his career long before I met him last year when he visited Buenos Aires. I have also read a voluminous official biography El hombre que veía amanecer (The Man who Saw the Sunrise) written by Pilar Urbano, a popular Spanish journalist. which was so laudatory that it has been described as a work of hagiography. The book got Garzón into trouble when it was published in 20001. He was brought before the general council of the judiciary, charged with revealing secret information, but was cleared by a unanimous decision of the disciplinary committee.

His biographer has remained loyal to him. A strong friendship based on respect grew during the two years that they worked together on the book. She continues to hold Garzón in high esteem and recently, during a visit to Ecuador, told the country’s major newspaper El Comercio that he was being persecuted. She dismissed allegations that he was influenced in handling a case involving the Santander bank, which sponsored a series of lectures at New York University. She said that he had declared all the honorariums he had received in Spain and the United States for giving lectures and that, furthermore, he had donated to humanitarian causes in Latin America some of his speaking fees. The third charge, that he ordered the taping of a conversation between a lawyer and a defendant, was justified, she said, to trace laundered money.

Garzón has a plenitude of enemies. At the height of his career, shortly after the hugely popular biography came out, the European columnist of The Economist, who writes under the pseudonym Charlemagne, gave an indication of the diversity of enemies that Garzón has made over the years:

“He tracks Colombian drug lords and Arab gun-runners, breaks up Basque terrorist units, pursues murderous Latin American brasshats, scrutinizes Silvio Berlusconi’s involvement in the Spanish media. In the early 1990s he went briefly into politics, saying he would fight corruption from the inside; a foray that ended in bitter attacks on Felipe González, the Socialist prime minister who had recruited him.

No wonder Mr. Garzón is alternately praised as a champion of justice and denounced as a publicity-obsessed hijacker of the law. Pedro Ramírez, the editor of El Mundo, a newspaper that has often teamed up with Mr. Garzón, calls him “infantile in his megalomania,” but also acknowledges his “indisputable record in serving the rule of law.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Businessweek took a similar view of him: “ A dashing figure with slicked-back hair and a bruising build who loves bullfights and flamenco, Garzón has become a national hero for his dedication to rooting out corruption. Critics say Garzón stretches the limits of his authority and relishes the limelight a little too much. But, after all, taking on everyone from the elite to the underworld is not for the faint of heart.” When I met him in the chambers of the Supreme Court in Buenos Aires I was surprised to encounter a man who bore no resemblance to the swashbuckling, dashing personality depicted above. Admittedly, I spent less than an hour in his company, but while I was with him he was restrained and of modest mien: a quiet man, I would say. On an earlier visit, I was present when he gave a speech in the former Navy Mechanics School, which housed the notorious ESMA torture centre and death camp. His speech was also notable for its appropriately judicial restraint. Garzón is no firebrand, but he does inflame certain people.

Miguel Bernad, who heads an obscure pro-fascist nongovernment organization called Manos Limpias (Clean Hands) that instigated the current court proceedings by alleging that he abused his powers as a judge, told The Guardian that Garzón is “a cancer inside Spanish justice.” According to Bernad, Garzón has discredited the prestige of other judges. “He showed off with the case against Pinochet. He showed off with the case against the Argentine dictators. Then he said, ‘Well, the last one will be the dictator Franco. I am a superjudge. I am the best and most wonderful man in the world.’ He has clearly committed the crime of abuse of power.” In Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who are Changing Our World, Garzón is quoted as saying, “It seems it’s always the crazy mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, or the crazy students of Tiananmen, or women in Morocco or in Jordan who ask for equal rights with men, or women in Iran who don’t want their faces covered, who are responsible for advancing human rights.” He doesn’t include himself, but people in Argentina and Chile should not forget that were it not for a crazy judge who went after Pinochet and the killers and torturers of the Argentine dictatorship, it is likely that the criminals in both regimes would continue to enjoy impunity and their victims would remain buried in secret graves.