Shoot the Messenger?

Judge Baltasar Garzón achieved international prestige in 1998 when he pursued the perpetrators of crimes committed in Argentina against Spanish citizens and began proceedings for the arrest of the Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet. But when he transferred his attention to his Spanish homeland he was put on trial for opening an investigation into crimes committed by Francoists. As result he now (February 2012) finds himself on the point of being expelled from the judiciary. The Garzón case is neither so absurd nor so difficult to understand if the record of the Spanish judiciary is examined through the prism of a series of representative cases since the transition to democracy. Key is the way the judiciary has dealt with those who have investigated cases of people murdered by the military rebels from July 1936 onwards. This book relates thirteen judicial cases that took place between 1981 and 2012. They range from the banning of the documentary film Rocío by Fernando Ruiz Vergara, because it named the person responsible for one of the massacres in southwest Spain, to the recent trial of Judge Garzón. The judicial outcome in each case reflected the prejudices and ideology of the judge in charge. The Francoist repression still constitutes a dead weight in Spanish politics as heavy as the gravestone that covers the remains of the dictator in the Valle de los Caídos. The nature of the transition from autocracy to democracy has made it difficult to overcome a black past that not even the post-Franco democratic governments -- Rodríguez Zapatero's "memory" policy included -- have dared confront. The potential defrocking of Judge Garzón puts the Spanish polity/judiciary back in the realm of Franco's end-of-year message on December 30, 1969, with what became the nautical catch-phrase of his twilight years, "all is lashed down and well lashed down" (todo ha quedado atado, y bien atado).