The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [122]
“The prisons are worse now than under Franco,” said Eva Forest, human rights advocate and former prisoner. “Torture is more directed, more institutionalized. The Franquistas [Francoists] were not only not purged from the system, they have been promoted.”
The Spanish government counters by repeatedly claiming that ETA has killed more than 800 people since Txabi killed the first Guardia Civil. But in that period of time, the Guardia Civil and others answering to the Spanish government have killed hundreds of Basques. Some have been presumed guilty and shot down in the streets, often in an alleged act of self-defense that none of the witnesses could verify. Some have died of “accidents” while in custody.
The persistent reports on Spanish abuse by human rights groups have little impact because European governments do not respond to them. What the Spanish government fears is condemnation from Western democracies, especially those of Europe. Their nightmare is condemnation from the broadest European forum, the Council of Europe. Founded in 1949, this was the first pan-European political organization.
Outside Spain, despite years of continuing human rights reports, it is widely believed that arbitrary arrest and torture in Spain are things of the past No one noted the paradox when in October 1998 a Spanish judge, Baltazar Garzón, requested the extradition of Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet for the torture and killing of Spanish citizens during his rule. The irony was even underlined when aged Franquistas, unpunished and unrepentant, showed their support for Pinochet by a rally in which they gave the Fascist salute. Garzón indicated that his quest for justice to be served to torturers might not even be limited to Chile. He was considering Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Garzón was unmoved by the argument from these South American countries that they could not bring the crimes of the past to justice without provoking a military rebellion that would end their struggling new democracies. Nor did he appear deterred by the fact that regimes had often attempted to justify these crimes by saying they were fighting dangerous terrorists. Both arguments have been standard fare for Spanish governments.
El Mundo, a conservative Madrid daily, was among the many enthusiastic voices of support for Garzón’s new approach. El Mundo and Judge Garzón were both key players in uncovering the GAL. El Mundo broke the story, and Garzón built an impressive case alleging that Felipe González was the director of GAL, which the Supreme Court refused to hear, citing a lack of evidence.
El Mundo excitedly termed Garzón’s new policy of pursuing human rights cases in Latin America as “justice without borders.” But an older concept that might be termed “justice within borders” seemed forgotten. Neither El Mundo nor Garzón had showed much concern for human rights abuse by Spanish officials unless they were Socialists. Even as the Spanish judge moved to try a Chilean leader for his regime’s abuses, the fact that Spain had not brought to trial a single perpetrator of the many crimes committed in the thirty-six-year dictatorship was never raised in Spain. Neither the politically motivated arrest of at least 8,000 Basques, nor the fact that the majority of these victims were tortured while under arrest, that hundreds were killed by law enforcement, and that political leaders and journalists were jailed, has provoked the kind of legal scrutiny of the GAL scandal.
Garzón was concerned with torture in South America, not in Spain. Basque victims have tried taking their complaints to Garzón with little success. Enkarni Martínez, who was arrested in 1994 because her husband was not home when the police came to arrest him, went to Garzón with more than thirty bruises still evident on her body. “I was tortured from June 5 to June 8, 1994. When they set me free, I went to the doctor to be examined. As soon