Judge indicted for investigating Spanish civil war

THE Spanish judge who became an international hero by going after Augusto Pinochet and Osama bin Laden was indicted yesterday for daring to investigate what is arguably Spain’s own biggest unresolved case — atrocities committed during and after its Civil War.

Baltasar Garzon has been charged with knowingly acting without jurisdiction by launching a probe in 2008 of tens of thousands of wartime executions and disappearances of civilians by forces loyal to General Franco. The crimes were covered by a 1977 amnesty.

Garzon could be removed from the bench for 10 to 20 years if convicted.

The indictment by Luciano Varela, an investigating magistrate at the Supreme Court, marks a devastating fall from grace for one of Spain’s most prominent and divisive public figures.

Garzon, 54, is a hero to leftists and international human rights groups, but in the eyes of Spanish conservatives he is a headline-loving egotist with a grudge against the right.

Garzon will probably be suspended from his post at the National Court within days and a trial could start in June, his lawyer Gonzalo Martinez-Fresneda said.

Emilio Silva, head of an association that helps Spaniards find the bodies of loved ones missing since the 1936-39 war, said Garzon was an exception in a country where no government ever tried to offer justice to such descendants, even as bodies keep turning up in mass graves. “And when a judge investigates the crime, they put him on trial. It is almost humiliating.”

Over the past decade Garzon gained fame worldwide as the most prominent symbol of Spain’s doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which holds that heinous crimes like torture or terrorism can be tried there even if they are alleged to have been committed elsewhere and had no link to Spain.

He used it in 1998 to go after Pinochet, having the former Chilean despot arrested during a visit to London, although Britain ultimately refused to extradite him to Madrid for trial. Garzon indicted bin Laden in 2003 for the September 11 terror attacks in the US.

In the summer of 2008, Garzon turned his sights on the murkiest chapter of Spain’s own past — an act many people said was long overdue and conservatives dismissed as grandstanding and digging up a past many wanted to let lie.

He argued that Franco and his cohorts engaged in a crime against humanity — Garzon cited a systematic campaign by Franco to eliminate opponents — during the war and in the early years of the regime.

It was Spain’s first official probe ever of a dark and largely unexplored chapter in its past, and it was widely seen as seeking an indictment, albeit a symbolic one, of the Franco regime itself. Garzon reluctantly dropped it in a matter of months after accepting that he lacked jurisdiction, and transferred it to lower courts.