Old wounds open as judge who hunts fascists faces trial

The crowd gathered outside Madrid's national court was loud and angry. "The world has been turned upside down," they cried. "The fascists are judging the judge!"

Some carried photographs of long-dead relatives, killed by right-wing death squads in Spain's brutal civil war in the 1930s. Others bore placards bearing the name of the hero they wanted to save, the controversial "superjudge" Baltasar Garzon.

Pedro Romero de Castilla carried a picture of his grandfather, Wenceslao - a former stationmaster taken away from his home in the city of Merida and shot by a death squad at the service of Generalisimo Francisco Franco's right-wing military rebels 74 years ago. The family have never found his body.

Garzon, he explained, had dared to investigate the atrocities of 36 years of Franco's dictatorship and now, as a result, he faces trial for allegedly abusing his powers.

"My grandfather's case is one that Garzon wanted to investigate. He's a brave and intelligent judge, but now the right are out to get him."

Police tried to herd Romero and his fellow protesters away, but 400 of them marched to nearby Calle de Genova and brought traffic to a standstill. It was a taste of the anger being expressed daily across Spain, with tens of thousands of people marching in the country.

Garzon still works at the national court, stepping out of his bomb-proof car every morning and climbing the courthouse steps to deal with cases involving terrorism, political corruption, international drug-trafficking and human rights cases.

But soon the hyperactive investigating magistrate who shot to global fame by ordering the 1998 arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London will have his cases taken away from him.

Just 100 metres across a square, stern-faced judges at the Supreme Court plan to suspend Garzon next month. The temporary suspension will last while they decide whether he deliberately ran roughshod over Spain's laws by opening an investigation into the deaths of 113,000 Spaniards executed by Franco's men during and after the civil war. If they find him guilty his career will be over.

The irony of that will be lost on few. The only man to have been punished because of Franco's crimes will be Garzon himself.

"If that happens, the reaction will be furious," warns one of the demonstrators outside the National Court, who meet there every day at 8pm. "The assassins will have won."

Spain's most charismatic judge leaves few people cold. Many colleagues loathe him and envy his status. They see him as a capricious abuser of the law.

"Judge Garzon has come to see himself as exceptional, losing sight of himself as just one more judge in the Spanish judicial system, bound by the laws," said Jesus Zarzalejos, a law professor at Madrid's Complutense University. Others see the bespectacled judge as a tireless and imaginative defender of justice.

"The other judges are critical of him because they would never dare do the things he has done," said Carlos Jimenez Villarejo, formerly Spain's chief anti-corruption prosecutor.

"The reaction is corporativist and unacceptable," complains another former public prosecutor, Jose Maria Mena. "If he was a tame, lazy judge, he wouldn't have these sorts of problems."

Garzon has wielded the mighty powers of a Spanish investigating magistrate in flamboyant fashion. He has brought down governments, closed newspapers, banned political parties, arrested dictators, laid low drugs cartels, issued instructions to detain Osama bin Laden and been the driving force behind a new global interpretation of human rights law.

Thanks in good part to Garzon, countries such as Chile and Argentina have overthrown amnesty laws and locked up the violent thugs of their own dictatorial pasts.

"The Pinochet case gave out a message that all that was possible," said Joan Garces, the lawyer who oversaw the prosecution case.

Supreme Court magistrate Luciano Varela, the man who has ruled that Garzon must be tried, is openly left-wing but belongs to a generation that believes a post-Franco pledge not to delve into the past must be adhered to.

"This artificially built case [against Franco] shows a basic lack of knowledge of the principles of law and of democratically approved laws such as the amnesty law of 1977," he said.

Many Spaniards are amazed by the protagonists who have suddenly reappeared into mainstream debate.

The Supreme Court is acting at the behest of the Falange - the minuscule descendant of the party that provided eager gunmen for Franco's death squads - and of a shadowy far-right pressure group called Manos Limpias (Clean Hands).

On Saturday, the Falange was barred from the next stage of the case, but between them the two groups - which public prosecutors refuse to back - represent only a few thousand people.

"We are talking about a sectarian and partial judge who had intentionally, given his own political ideology, set himself up as the universal judge of right-wing dictatorships," Clean Hands, which is officially a trade union, said last week.

The Supreme Court president, Judge Juan Saavedra, is on the record as saying he is totally against judges like Garzon. "Star judges are opportunists," he said.

Saavedra is one of the five judges who will now decide Garzon's future.

- OBSERVER