Ghosts of Spain (22 page)

Garzón drew a diagram of who was who in GAL, and the
connections
between them. At the top of the structure he wrote an ‘X’. It was clear that someone high up was in charge. Mr X remains a mystery today. González’s enemies, and some of the victim’s
relatives, pointed their fingers at him. The courts dismissed their allegations. ‘It is an accusation that I have never made, because I am unaware of his participation,’ says Garzón.

The official response to Garzón’s investigation was to bang doors closed in his face. ‘We should … destroy all reports that make a direct or indirect reference to GAL,’ read one military order.

When that failed to work, González tried another tactic. He appealed to Garzón’s vanity. It worked. In 1993 he was invited by Felipe González to stand as an ‘independent’ Socialist candidate in the general election – as number two on the party’s Madrid list behind González himself. Garzón accepted. Ambition, vanity and what the judge admits his main weakness –
soberbia
, or arrogance – led him to make a huge mistake. As one, otherwise fawning, biographer put it, explaining why this married but popular
magistrado
did not have any known lovers: ‘The only person he really loves is himself.’

It was a brilliant, if cynical, move by González. Garzón was a star. Corruption was the Socialists’ Achilles heel. By signing the campaigning magistrate up, he had shown he was serious about dealing with it. One Socialist leader claimed Garzón added so many points to the PSOE’s poll rating that it instantly drew level with their right-wing opponents in the People’s Party. González, against the odds, won a fourth term. Garzón expected a post as an anti-corruption supremo. He was made, instead, Spain’s
anti-drugs
czar. He was being sidelined. His new job did, however, make him part of the Interior Ministry. There he soon found how money was, literally, lying around the place. ‘There was a room full of watches, ties, scarves, pens … that were for giving away as presents; and there was another room full of paintings. The truly amazing thing, however, was that it all disappeared in
twenty-four
hours,’ he told one biographer. One day a cleaning lady brought him a million pesetas (six thousand euros) she had found lying in the drawer of an unoccupied desk.

Garzón eventually told González that Barrionuevo, still a deputy in parliament, should be sacked if the Socialists were serious about cleaning up their act. The answer, according to Garzón’s
biographer, was: ‘I can’t … I’ve told him to go and he said no, that if he went, I would go with him.’ Barrionuevo, in other words, thought he could bring down the government. Garzón resigned his seat a year later. Under the rules governing the Spanish justice system, he was allowed back to the Audiencia Nacional.

One of his first moves was to return to the GAL case. The dirty tricks department of the interior ministry now went into full swing. He was followed, his phone was tapped and his house broken into – twice. Once the visitors left a banana skin on a bed. It was a sinister calling card, a deliberate sign that they had been there. He went on a radio show to denounce what was going on. ‘If you don’t show cowardice, if you keep going … they end up assassinating you. That is what they did to judge Giovanni
Falcone
[the Italian anti-mafia magistrate who is one of Garzón’s heroes]. But they are not going to get rid of me with these tricks. The more pressure they put on … the more determined I get. They’ll have to kill me, because I am going to keep fighting until the end,’ he said.

In fact, it seems, the list of those with a motive for killing Garzón is so long that – had they carried out the threat – it would have been difficult to prove who had done it. This is the judge, after all, who tried to extradite General Pinochet from London. ETA, Galician drugs clans, Turkish heroin smugglers and a few Latin American generals would all like him dead. The first three, at least, are known to have expressed a desire to wipe him out.

The reaction from the government was to move a team of police officers from Barcelona to Madrid to dig up dirt on the judge. ‘It was Kafkaesque, they were seeking some sort of stain on my private behaviour. They investigated to see whether I snorted cocaine, if I had orgies with champagne and prostitutes, if I was in charge of a network of police corruption or money laundering, or if I was inclined towards paedophilia or homosexuality … More than anger, it made me sad to see how far our democracy had degenerated,’ he says. ‘A judge could have his phone bugged, his house broken into, be spied on by police and attempts made to dishonour or scare him … All because I had reopened a case
that pointed at people close to the government.’ It was a game, however, that Garzón would win.

The Socialists’ final downfall did not happen until González, struggling to keep a minority government afloat in a storm of scandals, was forced to call early elections in 1996. It is said that a democracy is never properly installed until there have been two peaceful changes of government. This, at last, was it.

In most other countries the Socialists would have gone long before. But an atavistic, Franco-inspired fear of the right – and González’s undoubted charisma – kept them hanging on. The Socialists had, in fact, done much to bury the Franco inheritance. They had also – despite the corruption, the death squads, the meddling in the judiciary, the blatant party control of state media and the arrogance of those who believed they were there for life – driven the country forward. González steered them into the
centre
ground, doing a U-turn on pulling out of NATO and calling a referendum to ratify membership. He pursued the sort of mild, market-driven, privatising, deficit-cutting economics that were a precursor to the ‘third way’ of later European socialists. That approach even saw the Socialist-supporting Unión General de Trabajadores (one of Spain’s big two trade unions, led by Nicolás Redondo, who had helped him to the party leadership) call a
general
strike against him. For the part of Spain that felt an
instinctive
fear of the left, it was a relief. Not only was no one going to be forced to pay for Francoism but big money could still be made. Only a right-wing democratic government – something Spain had not had for sixty years – could confirm, however, that the country really had become a ‘normal’ democracy.

Although it was both the well-overdue end of a cycle and the inevitable fall of a rotten apple from the tree, some Socialists refused to see their defeat like that. They blamed, instead, judges like Garzón, newspaper editors like Ramírez and a number of prominent journalists and others whom they called ‘the syndicate of crime’. The latter had orchestrated their downfall. The plot, they claimed, had been not just to oust the government but to shake the very foundations of the state.

There were two major pieces of fallout from the Socialists’
corruption
scandals. One was the Socialists’ absolute refusal to admit they had done anything wrong. They defended Barrionuevo to the hilt, claiming he was innocent until proven guilty. When he was finally proven guilty, however, they claimed it was all a plot. It had been cooked up by journalists, judges and the People’s Party. ‘How is it possible that some judges dare to find the innocent guilty?’ was González’s reaction to the sentence.

It had all been an attempt to rubbish ‘the Socialist Party and Felipe González, with the aim of achieving his political
annihilation
,’ new party leader Joaquín Almunia declared. ‘This trial was instigated in the context of a political operation to oust the Socialist Party from power after the 1993 elections. Its preparation [
carried out by Garzón
] was plagued by irregularities that robbed the accused of their legal rights and it ends as it started.’ The Socialists preferred political suicide to an admittance of guilt.

Observers speculated that Barrionuevo knew too much for the party to cast him off. The former minister, GAL and corruption were to be the party’s curse for the following years. Barrionuevo, meanwhile, continued protesting his innocence. He eventually wrote a book comparing himself to great Spaniards who had been cruelly persecuted – from the sixteenth-century
conquistador
Hernán Cortés to Falange founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Rosa Montero, writing in
El País
, gave a succinct explanation of how far Barrionuevo and others had dirtied the Socialist stable. ‘Don’t tell my mother I’m the interior minister: she thinks I work as a piano player at a brothel,’ she said.

The importance of this case – and the other Socialist
corruption
scandals – was that even those in the highest positions of the state could be forced to pay for their crimes. Justice, in this instance, was done and seen to be done. Spaniards knew that those in power under Franco were pretty much exempt from the law. They were not sure, however, how much the same rule applied in a democracy. It was a crucial moment. The courts, people discovered, could protect them from the government when it broke the law.

It was by no means perfect, however. As often happens, good intentions were later dissipated. Barrionuevo spent exactly 105 nights in jail. First he was given a partial pardon by the Aznar
government
which saw his ten-year sentence reduced by two-thirds. Then he was accorded the right ‘on security grounds’ to sleep at home, reporting twice a week to the prison until his time was served. It was as if, having proved that the rules worked, there was no need to stick by them any more. ‘Murder is seen as a lesser evil,’ commented one Communist politician.

Spain’s main parties have, so far, proved bad losers when ousted from power. The second piece of fall-out from this particular loss was a shambolic and crude dirty-tricks campaign. This time the target was Ramírez.
El Mundo
’s increasingly powerful editor was caught up in a sordid tale of sex games, hidden cameras and
videotapes
. Copies of a short video starring married Ramírez and an amply proportioned woman called Exuperancia from the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea turned up in the post-boxes of Madrid journalists. It was, by all accounts, strong stuff, though drama was lost by the fact that the cameraman’s hand shook as he filmed through a roughly drilled hole in a cupboard door.

Ramírez, to his credit, fought back. ‘What could be seen there, starting with her huge rear-end and followed by mine, was, thanks to some rudimentary sex-shop games, not going to improve my social prestige,’ he says in his own account of the episode. Prison sentences would eventually be handed down to, amongst others, a former Socialist provincial civil governor who had taken part in the plot. It showed how low the party of González – once the bright torchbearer of Spanish hopes – had sunk. It also proved, once again, that sex scandals just do not wash in Spain. Ramírez won. He still edits
El Mundo
. It is now the second newspaper in the land, after the mildly socialist
El País
.

Seeing the words that Spaniards have used to describe
themselves
in the past, it is surprising that corruption is not more widespread. They have a self-proclaimed reputation, after all, for being natural anarchists. ‘Every Spaniard’s ideal is to carry a
statutory
letter with a single provision, brief but imperious: “This
Spaniard is entitled to do whatever he feels like doing,” wrote Ángel Ganivet. In the mid-nineteenth century, the catholic,
conservative
thinker Juan Donoso Cortés had claimed that ‘the
dominating
fact of Spanish society is this corruption that is in the marrow of our bones … in the atmosphere that surrounds us and in the air we breathe’. Ortega y Gasset said that ‘
el
encanallamiento
, the debasement, of the average man in our country makes Spain a nation which has lived for centuries with a dirty
conscience
’.

There is, however, an equal but opposite force in Spain. This comes from a deep vein of austerity. Its spirit might be associated with the arid plains of Old Castile or the strict silence of the increasingly under-populated, enclosed convents and
monasteries
. Historically, it can be seen in Philip II’s sixteenth-century obsession with kingly duty. He failed to visit his imprisoned, though beloved, son Don Carlos on his deathbed only by, in the words of one historian, ‘ruthlessly suppressing personal joys and sorrows’ when royal duty called. It can be seen in his solitary rule from the palace-monastery at El Escorial. ‘Simplicity in the
construction
, severity in the whole; nobility without arrogance, majesty without ostentation,’ he had ordered his architects. His father – the Emperor Charles V – was similarly obsessed by duty and also retired to a small palace adjoined to another one, at Yuste. It is a spirit that crops up in surprising places. It is there, for example, in the strict lay Catholic orders like Opus Dei. This
powerful
and growing movement has added Calvinist touches to Roman Catholicism, embracing both the work ethic and the use of
cilicios
(barbed metal chains that dig into your thigh). A
similar
interest in austerity and order can be seen, too, in the purer proponents of both the hard political left and the old Falange. In geographical terms, Basques and Catalans might claim a love of industry and order is theirs too. None of Spain’s democratic prime ministers has shown any wish to accumulate money while in their posts. The great obsession of José María Aznar, Spain’s last Conservative premier, was ‘
las reglas del juego
’ – ‘the rules of the game’ – as he called the Spanish constitution. It is this spirit of
legality and order, exemplified by Garzón, that has, so far, won out at the core of the Spanish state.

There was one more battle to be won during the socialist
period
, however, for it to stay that way. This time the Socialists were on the side of good, as the upholders of order. Their major target was financial corruption. On the other side, representing me-first anarchy, were certain wielders of big money who thought cash could buy them everything from immunity to prosecution to the loyalty of King Juan Carlos.