Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  The son of a small farmer turned petrol-station attendant from Jaén, Garzón became one of the youngest magistrates of the all-powerful Audiencia Nacional court in 1988. A meteoric and controversial career has seen him take on everything from state-sponsored terrorism and ETA to international drug-trafficking and former Latin American military strongmen like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. An ability, often deliberate, to get himself into the limelight, means that his name is familiar to Spaniards of all origins and classes. A devoted following fights, yearly, to get him awarded a Nobel Peace Prize

  Perhaps his finest attribute, however, is to generate the sort of bile and anger that Spain often reserves for its greatest sons. He is, in a great Spanish put-down that has much to do with envy, accused of the cardinal sin of buscando protagonismo, seeking to be a protagonist. The fact that this accusation comes from across the political spectrum – in a country where the tendency to join one political tribe or another leaves few true independents – only adds to his allure. Envy is one of those features that Spaniards, in moments of introspection, consider one of their worst weaknesses.

  ‘I will never join in the Gregorian chants intoned by the high priests of envy. This is a sly country where we not only mind doing things but we mind other people doing things too, because they show us up,’ the writer Francisco Umbral said, defending Garzón. ‘So what if he seeks protagonismo? Only those who seek to be protagonists move history.’

  Garzón’s greatest service to preventing the spread of corruption through official Spain was his determination to prove state involvement in a police-run dirty war that claimed twenty-seven lives. That dirty war was fought against ETA, though a third of the victims – who included an elderly French shepherd, a teenage girl and a couple of gypsies – had nothing to do with the group. It was carried out by an outfit that called itself the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación, popularly known as GAL. The group was founded and funded by the interior ministry under Felipe González’s Socialists. It used Portuguese and French mercenaries to carry out the attacks. González professes that he was never told what was going on. His most famous comment on the affair was: ‘The rule of law is defended in the courts, and in the salons, but also in the sewers.’ There was, he implied, nasty work to be done down there.

  An investigating magistrate is someone who, by British standards, wields extraordinary power. He does not conduct trials, but prepares them. It is his job to help co-ordinate the police inquiry, decide whether there is a case to be answered, decide which suspects should be jailed or bailed and, eventually, whether they should be charged. To that extent he is, in the initial stages of a case, not just judge but also prosecutor and policeman. An appeal process is there to make sure the magistrado does not abuse that power.

  For a magistrado in the Audiencia Nacional – an unremarkable looking modern office block across from the Supreme Court – the power is even greater. For this is where Spain’s biggest cases end up. It has always given me a thrill to visit it. Sitting around in its nondescript landings, waiting for a chance to speak to this or that judge or public prosecutor, I have rubbed shoulders with some of the nation’s greatest villains. Drug barons, crooked bankers, British murderers awaiting extradition, Italian mafiosi and ETA gunmen wander by with their handcuffs and police escorts. The more interesting trials happen in a basement courtroom shielded off from the public by bullet-proof glass.

  The Audiencia Nacional is where the young Garzón, still just thirty-two years old, began an inquiry in 1988 into two police officers, Michel Domínguez and José Amedo. The two officers were involved in hiring mercenaries to carry out bomb attacks, shootings and kidnappings of suspected ETA members. The killings had mainly taken place on French soil, and in the first few years of the Socialist government.

  Garzón was a new kind of magistrado: an outsider, working-class, instinctively left-wing and arrogantly aware of his own abilities and the importance of his job. The Audiencia Nacional had, in 1977, replaced Franco’s Tribunal de Orden Público – the court that gave the persecution of political opponents its legal gloss. TOP’s remit had been ‘to try crimes which show a tendency to subvert, to a greater or lesser degree, the basic principles of the state, disturb public order or sow anguish in the national conscience.’ Some of the Audiencia Nacional’s first judges and prosecutors moved straight from one court to another. ‘They didn’t even wait the usual three days to rise from the dead,’ according to one observer. The new democratic regime, however, needed judges and prosecutors to administer justice. It had to turn to those who knew how. People who had once pledged to ‘serve Spain with absolute loyalty to the Caudillo’ and observe ‘strict loyalty to the principles of the Movement and other Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom’, joined the new upholders of democracy. Several would later reach the Supreme Court.

  Garzón was the latest shot of fresh blood to be introduced into the system. If his superiors expected another 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. functionary of the ‘Vuelva Vd mañana’, ‘Come back tomorrow’, bureaucratic fashion so caustically described by the nineteenth-century Madrid chronicler Mariano José de Larra, they could not have been more wrong. Garzón’s father had driven into him the idea that, to get on, ‘you have to see the sun rise’. Garzón was not just ambitious and clever, but hard-working and obstinate. Even now he is by no means typical. Some judges still work mornings at their court and then earn money, cash in hand, in the afternoons – coaching people for law exams. ‘They never ask whether this is compatible (with their role as a judge) or declare what they earn to the tax authorities … These are secretos a voces that nobody tries to do anything about and, presumably, nobody will,’ says Garzón. A little bit of rule-breaking, it seems, can be tolerated, even amongst those who watch over the nation’s rules. Perhaps that is why, as Garzón also says, there is still a worrying amount of ‘desidia, desinterés y desmotiviación’ – ‘laziness, lack of motivation and lack of interest’ in a sluggish court system that can take more than a decade to resolve a case.

  When Garzón eventually took evidence from Domínguez and Amedo, they appeared with a lawyer paid for by the Interior Ministry. Garzón shocked the González government by jailing them.

  The GAL scandal was slowly exposed by a number of newspapers and by a handful of police officers working with Garzón. The Socialists fought dirty, however, and not just against ETA. The controversial young editor of Diario 16 newspaper, Pedro J. Ramírez, was sacked as a result of his newspaper’s GAL coverage.

  After both had appeared on television, Interior Minister José Luis Corcuera issued the following warning, according to the version provided by Ramírez’s new newspaper, El Mundo: ‘You feel sure of yourself because you are the editor of a newspaper – but you may stop being so very soon.’ Corcuera was right. Diario 16 bowed to government pressure and sacked him – a move that started a decline that would eventually see it disappear altogether. Ramírez went on, within just a few months, to found El Mundo. From there he doggedly maintained his pursuit of GAL and the Interior Ministry. One of the highlights came when two of his reporters dug up a GAL arms cache in a place known as the Col de Corlecou, in south-west France. The cache included pistols, photographs from police archives and ammunition used by the Spanish police.

  The GAL campaign was, at least partially, paid for with fondos reservados – a multi-million-peseta secret fund with no accounting. Money was handed out, in brown envelopes or by the briefcase, at the discretion of senior ministry officials. The funds were, it turned out, not just used to pay for a dirty war but also to provide double salaries to some ministry officials. Jewels and gifts were bought for their wives. In generous monthly payments, it was also buying the silence of Amedo and Domínguez. Some lined the pockets of ministry officials. The GAL affair, in fact, was just the visible part of an iceberg-full of corruption in the interior ministry.

  The mid-1990s was an extraordinary period in Spain. The scandals came so thick and fast – each one seemingly more incredible than the one be
fore – that it became difficult to keep up. Amongst the most startling revelations was that one of the biggest thieves in the land was none other than Luis Roldán – the Socialist chief of the Civil Guard police. Roldán had bought himself apartments, country estates, cars and girlfriends with money from fondos reservados or with bribes from builders wanting contracts for new Civil Guard barracks. ‘How could anyone have suspected that the parish priest would have turned out to be a brothel owner?’ Corcuera commented, in his party’s defence, when the Roldán scandal broke. Soon after that it was revealed that the governor of the Bank of Spain was keeping secret, tax-opaque bank accounts. Even the Boletín Oficial del Estado – where the formal decisions of government are published – was being printed on corrupt paper, its director having taken bribes from paper suppliers. At the same time the Socialist party was shown to be taking – or demanding – illegal contributions from major companies. A network of front companies helped launder these ‘contributions’. The party’s finance chief kept some for herself. The money helped build a refrigerated wardrobe for her fur coats. In a sign that all parties were involved in the same dirty game, there were calls from all sides for the first Socialist to be caught in a two-million-dollar illegal funding scandal to be immediately pardoned. ‘The sooner we turn the page on this matter, the better it will be for all of us,’ said one Basque nationalist politician.

  Some blamed the political version of enchufe for this. In 1988 the Socialist party estimated that forty thousand of its members, one-third of the total, occupied ‘institutional posts’. Most of these were elected officials, but the rest were simply political appointees. It is a system, still in existence today, that makes for uncomfortably intimate links between politics, careers and personal wealth. The election of a new regional government of Galicia in 2005 was expected, for example, to lead to 2,000 jobs changing hands.

  To add to the confusion, military intelligence was found to be listening in to the mobile phone calls of everyone from businessmen and journalists to King Juan Carlos himself. A rogue former intelligence officer, Juan Alberto Perote, meanwhile, threatened to release files he had taken home with him. There were even allegations that military intelligence had been kidnapping tramps off the streets of Madrid and experimenting on them with home-made knock-out drops. One tramp was said to have died.

  It was the GAL campaign, however, that broke all the boundaries. Amongst the most shocking cases was the kidnapping of a Spanish exile, Segundo Marey, who was mistaken for an ETA leader. Marey was kidnapped in 1983 as he prepared to watch a Benny Hill film at his home in the French border town of Hendaye. He was released ten days later. A note placed in his pocket claimed the previously unheard-of GAL was responsible. Interior Minister José Barrionuevo and ten other ministry and police officials were eventually jailed. ‘I don’t think I can forgive them. They destroyed my life,’ Marey said afterwards. The court was clear about what had happened. ‘It was precisely those given the task of watching over the freedom and peaceful exercise of people’s rights … who committed the crime of robbing him of his freedom, in subhuman conditions,’ the judgment said.

  Then there was the death of Juan Carlos García Goena in 1987. A bomb exploded under his car as he left his pregnant wife and two children to go to work in the border town of Hendaye. It was yet another case of mistaken identity. García Goena had moved to France years before to avoid doing military service. He had nothing to do with ETA. I have visited his wife, Laura Martín, several times. She has never given up trying to find out what really happened that fateful morning. ‘Is there no one, not one of them, who suffers remorse that does not let them live?’ she asked when interviewed by Paddy Woodworth for his book Dirty War, Clean Hands. ‘Someone should call me on the phone and say : “Look, Señora Martín, I can’t live. I am eaten up with remorse …” and I would forgive him.’

  Finally, there was the case of two young ETA members, José Antonio Lasa and José Ignacio Zabala – both aged twenty – who were kidnapped in France. They were held, and probably tortured, at a government house in the Basque city of San Sebastián. Then they were taken halfway across Spain to Alicante, forced to dig their own graves and shot. Their bodies were only found more than a year after their deaths. They were not identified until a decade later. They had been blindfolded with insulating tape, gagged, shot in the head and their bodies buried in fifty kilos of quicklime in a remote spot near the town of Busot, near Alicante. A man out shooting with his dogs found bits of one of their skeletons spread around by animals that had dug them up. Bandages covered what, presumably, were wounds received when they were kidnapped or, possibly, when tortured. An anonymous caller had, in fact, rung a local radio station in Alicante on the day they were killed. ‘They died crying like cowards. They asked for a priest but we refused because they did not deserve one.’

  GAL was, however, anything but efficient. In Guethary, south-west France, I visited a restaurant whose owners had seen their previous establishment wrecked by GAL members who tossed in home-made hand grenades. The brothers Ibarboure told the tale as a funny story. It was recounted with waving arms and full sound effects. ‘Boom!’ went the grenades, ‘Ping!’ went the shrapnel. A mysterious woman, known as La Dama Negra, the Black Lady, or La Rubia de los GAL, The Blonde from GAL, was suspected to have thrown the grenades in. The results were anything but funny, though they could have been worse. When the smoke cleared, one brother was deaf in one ear. Another member of the family had managed to save himself by diving behind a fridge. Were they involved in Basque separatism? ‘Non monsieur, we have nothing to do with that!’ It was another GAL mistake. This time, fortunately, it was not lethal.

  A Civil Guard general, a former Socialist civil governor and three Civil Guard officers would, eventually, go to jail for the Lasa and Zabala murders. The man who ordered their murders, Civil Guard general Enrique Rodríguez Galindo, served just five years of his twenty-seven-year sentence. He was allowed home after that for ‘reasons of health’.

  No one in Spain has gone to jail for García Goena’s death, however, or for most of the others. There simply was not enough evidence to prove who had been involved. At least one potential witness disappeared and then reappeared dead.

  A Civil Guard colonel, José Lull Català, explained to Garzón how ETA had been fought during the 1980s, when he was a senior officer in the Basque Country. ‘There were massive round-ups in which many abuses were committed, without restriction of violence. One of the practices was what was called sacar al monte – taking out to the mountain. It involved taking suspects to some wasteland or the countryside and giving them a thorough beating … If a Guardia went too far – some broken ribs, a leg or arm fractured – they would invent an accident.’ General Rodríguez Galindo, the senior Civil Guard officer in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, expressed his priorities like this: ‘Coger etarras como sea, aunque matándolos’, ‘Catch ETA members whatever way possible, even if it means killing them.’ Those who caught them would receive cash premiums out of the fondos reservados. ‘I do not regret anything that we did,’ a Civil Guard officer posted in San Sebastián at the time told me years later. Many Spaniards were not that bothered either. The only good etarra, they believed, was a dead one. In the news room of a Madrid newspaper I once saw the death of two ETA members in a police shoot-out greeted with a gleeful cry of: ‘Two-nil!’ The GAL campaign also achieved one of its aims – better co-operation from France in the fight against ETA.

  Garzón drew a diagram of who was who in GAL, and the connections between them. At the top of the structure he wrote an ‘X’. It was clear that someone high up was in charge. Mr X remains a mystery today. González’s enemies, and some of the victim’s relatives, pointed their fingers at him. The courts dismissed their allegations. ‘It is an accusation that I have never made, because I am unaware of his participation,’ says Garzón.

  The official response to Garzón’s investigation was to bang doors closed in his face. ‘We should … destroy all
reports that make a direct or indirect reference to GAL,’ read one military order.

  When that failed to work, González tried another tactic. He appealed to Garzón’s vanity. It worked. In 1993 he was invited by Felipe González to stand as an ‘independent’ Socialist candidate in the general election – as number two on the party’s Madrid list behind González himself. Garzón accepted. Ambition, vanity and what the judge admits his main weakness – soberbia, or arrogance – led him to make a huge mistake. As one, otherwise fawning, biographer put it, explaining why this married but popular magistrado did not have any known lovers: ‘The only person he really loves is himself.’

  It was a brilliant, if cynical, move by González. Garzón was a star. Corruption was the Socialists’ Achilles heel. By signing the campaigning magistrate up, he had shown he was serious about dealing with it. One Socialist leader claimed Garzón added so many points to the PSOE’s poll rating that it instantly drew level with their right-wing opponents in the People’s Party. González, against the odds, won a fourth term. Garzón expected a post as an anti-corruption supremo. He was made, instead, Spain’s anti-drugs czar. He was being sidelined. His new job did, however, make him part of the Interior Ministry. There he soon found how money was, literally, lying around the place. ‘There was a room full of watches, ties, scarves, pens … that were for giving away as presents; and there was another room full of paintings. The truly amazing thing, however, was that it all disappeared in twenty-four hours,’ he told one biographer. One day a cleaning lady brought him a million pesetas (six thousand euros) she had found lying in the drawer of an unoccupied desk.