BALTASAR GARZÓN, Spain’s best-known investigating magistrate, himself went on trial in Madrid’s supreme court yesterday. He is accused of abusing his powers in a corruption case.
Judge Garzón polarises public opinion like no other figure in the fractious and deeply politicised Spanish judiciary. What’s more, people who admire his handling of one case may well deplore his conduct in another.
He is charged with illegally using phone taps to monitor conversations between lawyers and suspects held in detention, during his investigation of the “Gürtel scandal”. This case involves alleged bribes to senior members of the right-wing Partido Popular (PP), recently voted back into power.
But that is just this week’s trial. In what a seasoned commentator, Iñaki Gabilondo, described yesterday as a “vendetta”, he is also accused of violating an amnesty in investigating the crimes of the Franco dictatorship, and of accepting bribes himself in exchange for dropping charges against a bank.
Garzón has rarely been off the front pages since he joined Spain’s Audiencia Nacional, the court specialising in terrorism and organised crime, in the late 1980s. He is a distinguished-looking man, though not averse to frivolous moments – he has been photographed dancing elegant Sevillanas in restaurants with beautiful women.
Indeed, the most substantial charge is one that carries no legal sanction: he has always been accused of being a “celebrity judge”, someone whose career is driven more by overweening personal ambition than by passion for justice.
In one famous early instance, TV crews filmed him leading police helicopters in a spectacular raid on alleged drug barons. That case later fell apart.
Yet he has a legitimately high profile in international human rights circles. This dates from his bold attempt to indict the former Chilean dictator, Gen Augusto Pinochet, in 1998, for the “disappearance” of Spanish citizens. Garzón’s unprecedented international warrant resulted in Pinochet’s long detention in London, though he was eventually released.
Judge Garzón cut his teeth investigating the highly controversial GAL death squads, which had killed 27 people and injured many others in a shadowy campaign against the Basque terrorist group Eta in the mid-1980s.
Though repeatedly obstructed by more senior judges, he succeeded not only in getting convictions against two policemen for organising some of these attacks; he also established that their orders came from very high up in Felipe González’s Socialist Party (PSOE) government.
But he then laid himself open to accusations of naked opportunism, accepting a personal invitation from González to run as a high-profile PSOE candidate in the 1993 elections. When he was not offered the ministry he apparently thought he deserved, he returned to the judiciary where he attempted, unsuccessfully, to prove that Mr González had been the mastermind of the GAL. In this case, and several others, he displayed a tendency to reach conclusions not underpinned by hard evidence. This has undermined his reputation even among those who admire his courage, intellectual brilliance and tireless energy.
Though he is often identified with the left, his pursuit of the PSOE top brass briefly made him a darling of the PP and Spanish right-wing media. Their support was not driven by any moral qualms about the GAL’s murderous record, but rather by their desperation to discredit the very charismatic González by any means to hand.
Judge Garzón was certainly even-handed in his pursuit of terrorism, prosecuting the revolutionaries of Eta with every bit as much zeal as the state terrorists of the GAL. He has lived under constant death threat as a result, always painfully aware that Eta had killed his close friend, prosecutor Carmen Tagle, in 1989.
Indeed, he was also an ardent supporter – and enforcer – of Spain’s draconian bans on a series of Basque radical organisations, some only very vaguely associated with Eta. This tarnished his shine with independent human rights groups.
In short, he has got up the noses of almost everyone at some stage. However, it is probably his dual challenge to the Spanish right – investigating the war crimes of the past and corruption in the present – that has landed him where he is today, exposed to disbarment if even one of the current charges sticks.
Whatever the outcome, the root problem of the Spanish judiciary lies not with a single flamboyant individual like Garzón, but with a system fatally subject to political pressures.