Universal justice and the judgment of history

Argentine justice investigates Spain's transition to democracy. A country thousands of kilometres away from what happened 45 years ago is judging the way in which another country has managed to overcome the long night of the times of a military dictatorship, not unlike the one suffered by Argentinians themselves in the 1970s and 1980s. There is a complete contradiction in the fact that an Argentine judge questions the Amnesty Law in force in Spain and abides by her country's Full Stop Law, which made the criminal responsibilities (torture, murders, disappearances) of the heads of the board of directors expire. But Spanish revanchist revisionism is a few bodies ahead of Argentina's. In Spain our grandparents killed each other in a bloody and absurd civil war, our parents reconciled to achieve a better future for all, and some grandchildren and great-grandchildren are reopening the wounds of the conflict to rewrite the end it had and impose the one they want, and in this process the Argentine judicial investigation that has led to the appearance before the judge of the former head of the Interior of those years is one more element.  

Argentina has accepted to open a political trial to feed this interested revision process. And it is doing so despite the admiration that that country has always felt for what happened in Spain during the years that allowed it to leave the dictatorship behind. The University of Buenos Aires gives the Spanish transition after the death of the dictator as a model example of the democratisation of a country, a path that they themselves had to travel years later and in which they looked at themselves in the Spanish mirror. In this questionable and imaginary move towards universal justice, which always rows in the same direction, there are major players who have taken the lead without fear of being tainted by their activism. Attorney General Dolores Delgado is one of those actors. The Public Prosecutor's Office, twisted in its powers by the former Minister of Justice of the Kingdom of Spain, has changed the criteria of this body with respect to the one marked by her predecessor Consuelo Madrigal on the jurisdiction of the Argentine courts in this matter. Delgado is dispatching the new position of the Public Prosecutor's Office in the middle of the August judicial holidays and through an informative note, which appeals to the "new memorial paradigms" that have reached the international arena. The career prosecutors, those who have been in the institution all their lives, do not hide their embarrassment with the role of universal justice of the head of the Public Prosecutor's Office "which depends on the government" according to its own president. 

Baltasar Garzón is another of the protagonists with a leading role. His crusade against Francoism was corrected and curbed in the Spanish Supreme Court, but he would consider any conviction abroad of those people who are still alive to have played a significant role in the transition a victory. This process has been viscerally rejected by the third of the main players since it entered national politics, the second vice-president of the government, Pablo Iglesias. His messages of encouragement to the Argentine process would be irrelevant in an extremist leader with a seat in Parliament, but his institutional position should make him reflect on the opinions he gives in public regarding pending legal proceedings. The Venezuelan political prisoners who have taken to the streets this week, freed by the same dictatorial regime that imprisoned them, are of no more interest to the vice-president than the events of half a century ago. 

The approach of the global left to universal justice is partial and self-serving. The International Criminal Court in The Hague is the judicial body in which crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity are judged, with legal personality recognised by the nations. The justice of one country cannot replace that of another, however much we may wear the suit of vigilantes and the partial glasses of revanchists. Rodolfo Martín Villa told the Argentine judge that the Spanish transition was the opposite of genocide. But the climate that the left and the ultra-left have created in Spain for many years is intended to make people believe otherwise, by portraying the architects of that memorable chapter as collaborators with the Franco regime. A trend that can be seen in many apparently trivial aspects of Spanish public life, but which is gradually taking hold. The obsession of the new Spanish political leaders is to review what they do not like about our past. They want to judge Francoism in court when history has already done so.