Spanish court hears of Franco-era crimes for first time

A Spanish court heard testimony about Franco-era atrocities for the first time in history Tuesday – but the man in the dock was a judge who investigated the crimes, not an alleged culprit.
The 56-year-old Baltasar Garzon, who earned global fame with an attempt to extradite Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from London, is accused of abuse of power for looking into the dark period of Spain’s past.
Garzon is charged with having overreached his powers by trying to prosecute the atrocities despite an amnesty.
He cannot be jailed but risks a 20-year ban from the legal profession that would effectively end his career.
The first witness to take the stand, 81-year-old Maria Martins, recalled how in 1936 when she was just six years old her mother had been first jailed and then shot dead, her body dumped into a mass grave on the side of a road.
“They released her to testify in court but then on the way they killed her, they killed 27 men and three women,” Martins, who relies on a walker to get around, said in a broken voice.
The defence has called 22 witnesses to testify for the families of victims, many of them buried in unmarked mass graves dotted across the country, some forgotten for decades.
“For the first time, these people will be able to tell a court what the dictatorship inflicted on them,” said Emilio Silva, head of a group that tries to help people find the remains of the missing.
Garzon is being prosecuted for having ordered the investigation in 2008 into the disappearance of 114,000 people during Spain’s 1936-39 civil war and General Francisco Franco’s subsequent dictatorship.
He is charged with having exceeded his powers because the crimes were covered by an amnesty agreed in 1977 as Spain moved towards democracy two years after Franco’s death.
Garzon opened the inquiry in response to a complaint filed by victims’ families in 2006, which described disappearances, illegal detentions and killings during the Franco era.
During testimony on Tuesday, he told the court that the amnesty law “refers to crimes of a political nature; in no way can it be said that crimes against humanity of the kind that were alleged could have any political nature.”