Spanish judge Garzon tries to list Civil War disappeared

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Garzon tries to list disappeared, Basque writer Lauaxeta among them. Photo: EiTB

After years pursuing Latin American dictators, Spain's best-known judge has turned his attention to atrocities committed in his own country with an investigation into people who disappeared during the Civil War.

Judge Baltasar Garzon, who once came close to extraditing Chile's former dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998, has asked the Spanish government, town halls and the Catholic Church for a complete list of people killed and buried in mass graves during the war from 1936-39 and the subsequent Franco's dictatorship.

While only an initial step before a possible formal investigation, campaigners who have worked to trace the disappeared hailed the move as long overdue in a country that tried intensely to forget the traumas of its recent past. "It's unbelievable that this country did so much to arrest Pinochet and they've never done anything here," said Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory.

"Now's the time to fix that." Estimates for those executed by the forces of Gen. Francisco Franco run into the hundreds of thousands in the struggle which raised passions all over Europe and preceded the struggle played out on a larger scale soon afterwards in World War Two. If Garzon decides he has jurisdiction and has enough evidence to open a criminal investigation to determine the circumstances of the deaths, it could eventually lead to compensation for victims' families. For years following Franco's death in 1975, Spanish governments preferred to let the issue lie as they concentrated on transforming a deeply conservative backwater into a socially liberal nation with a prosperous modern economy.

Families want truth

So Garzon, who pursued former members of military regimes from Chile and Argentina on human rights charges throughout the 1990s, had to wait before getting a chance to set his sights on the atrocities of his own country's Civil War.

Then Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was executed by Franco's forces, sponsored a law, passed last year, to officially recognize victims of the dictatorship and promise official aid for finding remains in mass graves. This led to campaigners presenting the call for a legal investigation that eventually landed in the office of Judge Garzon, prompting his move this week. "Fundamentally what people want is the truth, and for the remains to be exhumed and handed over to the families," Silva said.

But there were doubts about whether Garzon would be able to proceed with the investigation at all. The state prosecution service has said the crimes he wants to investigate were covered by an Amnesty law passed in 1977, which rules out charges against former members of Franco's forces.

Zapatero declined to comment on Garzon's move, which is unlikely to push Spain's fast-deteriorating economy from the top of Spaniards' concerns, according to Carlos Barrera, a politics professor at the University of Navarra. "Tomorrow the headlines are going to be about the 100,000 newly unemployed people," Barrera said.