Crusading Spanish Judge Is Indicted for Franco Probe

(April 8) -- Spain's most famous judge, who ordered the arrest and extradition of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for crimes against humanity, may go on trial himself because of an investigation he began into a dictator closer to home: Francisco Franco.

Baltasar Garzon, 54, faces the end of his judicial career after a Spanish magistrate this week indicted him for overstepping his legal bounds when he launched a probe into some of the atrocities committed under the 36-year reign of Generalissimo Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1973.

If convicted, Garzon could be barred from the bench for 20 years. He is expected to be suspended while under indictment.

Garzon's legal difficulties suggest that Spain still has not managed to put its troubled past under Franco behind it -- and underscore the sensitivity and divisiveness surrounding that violent era of death squads and disappearing dissidents.

The indictment marks a new chapter in Garzon's rollicking, high-profile judicial career, which divided spirits especially in Spain, where some saw him as an inveterate showboater while others, especially on the left, saw him as a crusading hero.

Using Spain's doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which allows judges to adjudicate major crimes regardless of where they occurred, Garzon issued an international warrant against Pinochet for crimes against humanity allegedly committed after his 1973 coup in Chile. Pinochet was arrested and detained in London in 1998, but the ex-dictator avoided extradition to Spain for trial after Britain's home secretary sent him home to Chile on health grounds.

Garzon was more successful against Argentinian naval officer Adolfo Scilingo, convicted in 2005 of crimes against humanity for throwing 30 political prisoners out of airplanes over the Atlantic. Scilingo is serving a 30-year sentence in a Spanish jail.

Garzon also indicted Osama bin Laden for his role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was the point man in Spain's largely successful fight against ETA, the terrorist Basque separatist group.

But his investigation into Franco-era atrocities has proved far more problematic. In 2008 Garzon began looking into the estimated 114,000 people who died or disappeared during the Spanish Civil War and the early years of the Franco regime that followed.

He launched his investigation after families of the victims began exhuming the mass graves left by the death squads in the Spanish countryside. But in attempting to rip open a period of Spain's past that was not just figuratively but legally cloaked in silence, Garzon ran afoul of the late Franco's long arm.

In order to legally justify his probe, Garzon characterized Franco and more than 30 other officials as having committed crimes against humanity.

But a far-right group called Manos Limpias, or Clean Hands, which included many supporters of the late dictator, said Garzon was overstepping his bounds by ignoring a law already on the books: a 1977 amnesty law protecting people from prosecution for crimes during the Franco era.

"No one can knowingly jump over the laws of a country," group spokesman Miguel Bernad said.

Some human rights crusaders are championing Garzon's cause, just as he once did theirs.

Emilio Silva, head of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, which represents the families of Franco's victims, was quoted in the Spanish press as saying it was ironic that some of the people who committed atrocities during the Franco regime are still alive but safe from prosecution, while Garzon is the one facing trial.