On Monday May 24, judge Baltasar Garzón began a seven-month stint at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague. The move came 10 days after an emotional farewell from the Spanish High Court, where for the last 22 years he has presided over some of the country’s most infamous cases. He was suspended from his duties in Madrid after his nemesis, Luciano Varela, the presiding Supreme Court judge whose enmity toward Garzón is no secret, hastily brought forward trial proceedings into allegations that the magistrate had overstepped his authority by investigating the crimes of the Franco era. Varela’s decision was widely seen as a deliberate move to humiliate Garzón by preventing … [Read more...] about Baltasar Garzón: a judge too far?
Franco
Garzón, the PP, and a Byzantine justice system
As growing numbers of people around the world will know by now, investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzón is in hot water. The man best-known for having ordered the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in 1998 is being investigated by his colleagues in the Supreme Court on three counts. If found guilty, his career will be over. There is something of a whiff of conspiracy about this sudden fall from grace. The first investigation is into accusations that he dropped tax fraud charges against executives of Banco Santander in return for $302,000-worth of sponsorship by the bank for a series of lectures on human rights he gave at New York University in 2003. This hearing is currently underway. The … [Read more...] about Garzón, the PP, and a Byzantine justice system
Farewell to Delibes’ rural dissent
Miguel Delibes, who died on March 12 at the age of 89, was born in Valladolid, the capital of Castile, where he lived his entire life. He was typically Castilian in many ways: serious, courteous and unostentatious to the point of austere; less common in this conservative region, he was also a liberal democrat. Delibes described his work as “Castile speaking”; he spoke of the lives of rural people and the disappearance of rural communities as Franco tightened his stranglehold on the countryside in the 1950s and 1960s through an unholy alliance between landowners and the Catholic Church. Like many other artists who lived through the Franco years, Delibes spent his life fighting a … [Read more...] about Farewell to Delibes’ rural dissent
March 11’s divisive legacy
In the middle of February, the Spanish government announced that it was going to “repair” the memory of the poet Miguel Hernández, a Republican former goatherd who was jailed by the dictator Francisco Franco and died in prison in 1942, at the age of 31. The Socialist government pledged to offer Hernández, whose centenary is being celebrated this year, “the tribute, the memory and the admiration that his work merits,” said Deputy Prime Minister María Teresa Fernández de la Vega. “We all share that same rejection of any form of oppression, that same rebellion in the face of injustice and that determination to dream and create a decent country and a better world.” The news of this homage … [Read more...] about March 11’s divisive legacy
Only the lonely: bank robbery with a political conscience
Despite the fact he was Spain's most-wanted man for 13 years, there has been relatively little media coverage of the recently published autobiography of Jaime Giménez Arce, aka El Solitario (the loner). The 54-year-old former bank robber is serving a 47-year sentence for the murder of two civil guards in 2000, so he won't be doing the rounds of the chat shows any time soon to promote Me llaman El Solitario: autobiografía de un expropriador de bancos (They call me the Loner: autobiography of an expropriator of banks). So what does El Solitario, who was arrested in Portugal in 2007 as he plotted his next heist, tell us about those 13 years of bank jobs, what motivated him to take up a life … [Read more...] about Only the lonely: bank robbery with a political conscience