New York Times Article on Baltasar Garzón

Highlighted quote: "He has argued that the amnesty does not cover crimes against humanity."

Published in: The New York Times
Date: March 25, 2010

Spain Allows Case Against Noted Judge

By ANDRÉS CALA

MADRID — Spain’s Supreme Court announced Thursday that an investigating magistrate could proceed with a case against a crusading judge known internationally for indicting Osama bin Laden and the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, according to court papers.

The judge, Baltasar Garzón, is facing possible charges of abuse of power over his decision to investigate crimes committed during the dictatorship of Franco. If Judge Garzón is indicted he will be automatically suspended.

In its decision, the five-judge panel ruled against Judge Garzón’s motion for dismissal, saying it saw no legal or procedural reasons to drop the proceedings. The case was filed by several conservative organizations that contend that he abused the powers of his office by investigating Franco-era crimes that were covered by a blanket amnesty issued by Parliament in 1977, two years after the strongman’s death.

In 2008, Judge Garzón started investigating the forced disappearances of a few of the more than 100,000 people who were detained by government forces and remain unaccounted for. He has argued that the amnesty does not cover crimes against humanity.

José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that “Spanish courts have routinely failed to investigate allegations of horrendous crimes of the past, but are being surprisingly active in prosecuting a judge who tried to push for accountability.”

Judge Garzón has long been a polarizing figure in Spain, and this case is no exception. Conservatives see him as a tireless self-promoter, while more liberal voices, like the left-leaning daily newspaper El País, call the legal proceedings against Judge Garzón “harassment” aimed at punishing him for reopening the wounds of the Franco era.

Judge Garzón has spearheaded much of the judicial pressure against the separatist Basque group ETA. He is also a hero among human rights groups that would like to see broader powers to prosecute international crimes against humanity.

Included in several high-profile cases he is currently investigating are the torture claims of former Guantánamo Bay detainees, criminal activity by Colombia’s FARC rebel group and corruption cases in Spain.

Judge Garzón is also facing court proceedings in two separate cases. In one he is suspected of receiving payments from Banco Santander for a series of lectures he gave at New York University while he was involved in a case against the bank’s chairman.

The other case is related to some phone taps Judge Garzón ordered of conversations between lawyers and defendants in prison in a broadly publicized corruption case incriminating top politicians of the opposition Popular Party.

Next on My Reading List: new book on Digital Media and Forgetting

The memory seminar I was teaching ended last week. First, to be clear, I am a Spanish professor, and I love teaching Spanish language, literature and culture. And, I love doing so in the language! But when the opportunity to teach the honors seminar in English presented itself, I took it on as a challenge. At first, teaching in English was a bit like returning home after a long time abroad. I found it kind of surreal to use my English voice, especially with students I had last semester in Spanish class. I think some of it had to do with the fact that teaching in English (or in one's native language, and to speakers of that language) removes some of the communication "scaffolding" that is always present in introductory and intermediate language courses. That is, because you spend less time working on conveying the message (Am I conjugating my verbs right? How's my pronunciation? Is someone going to make fun of me? Will my interlocutor understand what I'm trying to say?), you spend more time zeroing in on the message itself. In both cases, professor and student brains are just as lit up and engaged, but the focus can be different. In any case, teaching the memory seminar was an invigorating experience, and I learned a lot from my students. I will comment in greater depth on the course at some other time, but for today, I'd like to address forgetting, a topic I feel has really been....well, forgotten, by memory scholars.

Yesterday, while on a vacation-time excursion to my local research library and independent bookstore, I happened upon a book called Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton UP, 2009). The title struck me immediately, for a variety of reasons. First, because the memory seminar ended with several readings that addressed forgetting; second, because I am working on a conference paper dealing with amnesia; and last, because as a blogger who posts primarily on historical and political matters, I cannot help but be hyper aware of the need to catalog everything.

Blogging is about stopping time and recording everything, or establishing a record. It is a bit like trying to press pause on the flood of continual information coming at us from all sides. But blogging also seems fearful of the past, because what counts is what is going on now, which will be old as soon as I get to the end of this sentence. What happens to the information being "logged"? As Andrew Sullivan writes in The Atlantic, blogging "is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in." And, I would add, the consequences for our memory as well.
In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger examines a fresh idea -- the need to forget in a time in which the abundance of information threatens to drown us. I think of one of my students, who remarked on the challenges of sifting through data for class research projects; or myself, as I drafted my dissertation -- was more information always better, when more information was "never enough"?

I am thinking more and more about where forgetting comes into all the discourse on memory. I would like to believe we are beyond the stale dichotomy of "memory, good, forgetting, bad," but that seems doubtful. How do we talk about forgetting in the context of historical trauma? How does forgetting enable new memories to develop and transform existing narratives? And, where does new media come into the discussion? I read Marc Augé's Oblivion in January, and recently re-read Paul Connerton's "Seven Types of Forgetting" (along with several of the articles written in response to the latter in Memory Studies, such as "Should We Forget Forgetting?"). I did not buy Delete, but I hope to check it out very soon and report back here after I've had a chance to evaluate it properly. For now, I leave you with this informative lecture by Mayer-Schönberger, and a few other helpful related links on his book:



Interview with the author on NPR

Princeton University Press Technology & Media blog (with links to additional interviews with the author)

Review of the book by Peter Cliff, Software Engineer at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Documenting Ruin

I saw this in a University of Chicago Press email and thought it related well to this blog. We spend so much time thinking about memorials, but it's true that ruins tend to get overlooked. I can't help but think of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations when pondering the title of Yablon's book. The pertinent info. follows:



Untimely Ruins
An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919
400 pages, © 2009
Cloth $70.00
ISBN: 9780226946634 Published February 2010
Paper $25.00
ISBN: 9780226946641 Published February 2010

American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America.

The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America’s ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.

Cartoons and a Brief Editorial on the Garzón Case - Spanish Press

I did not originally intend to use this blog to post about historical memory and Spain, because I have my Spanish blog to do that. However, particularly of late, the Spanish press has been full of news on Judge Baltasar Garzón, and the developing stories (plural, for the web has grown even more complicated) are important enough that that they need to be shared in English.

Pending against the judge is the primary case against him, that he "prevaricated" when he presented a report that dared to investigate the crimes of Francoism as "crimes against humanity." In addition to this initial accusation, made by the ultra-right wing group FE de las JONS (Falange Española, or the Spanish Phalangist Party), a second charge was brought against the judge in relation to funds he received for several colloquia he organized at New York University in 2005 and 2006 (NYU has denied that the judge was sponsored - or bribed - by funds from Banco Santander, and asserted that his visit was paid for through the King Juan Carlos Center, which is part of NYU).

Incredibly, last week, the Tribunal Supremo (TS, or Supreme Court) agreed to hear a third charge -- again, claiming that Garzón overstepped jurisdiction when he investigated a corruption scandal among opposition-party leaders (the case is commonly referred to as "el caso Gürtel" - for information en español, click here - for English, click here). While such ideologically-motivated charges may seem ludicrous to some, the progressive Spanish press seems to be more and more gloomy about Garzón's prospects by the day, as illustrated in the following cartoons, which I have translated for our non Spanish-speaking readers:

1. Title: "Los problemas de Garzón" (Garzón's Problems); Artist: Manel Fontdevila
Source: Público.es

Translation/Explanation:

The title reads: "Loser." In the middle of the drawing, we see Judge Garzón with a shovel on his back. The sign to the left -- probably not coincidental where the signs are planted! - reads "Francoist Graves," while the sign to the right, "Gürtel," refers to the aforementioned case. Garzón states, from left to right, "The cases were different. But the dirt dug up was the same." Fontdevila seems to assert that each issue has dug up painful truths -- one, about the Francoist past, and another, about the corruption scandal in the ranks of the Partido Popular ("Popular Party" -- currently, the opposition). Perhaps I am imagining things, but the artist also seems to be drawing parallels between the PP and the Francoist past, which should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the "historical memory" phenomenon in Spain in recent years. As the blogger Ignacio Escolar writes in a March 5 post, "not only is the topic of Francoism taboo in Spain, so is the PP."

2. Title: "Y ahora, Correa" ("And now, Correa" - reference to judge implicated in the corruption scandal -- currently in prison! -- who has made the second charge against Garzón ); Artist: Vergara
Source: Público.es

Translation/Explanation:

In the right-hand side of the cartoon, we see someone in a judicial robe that has just hung a "call to action" poster, calling for the public to file further charges against Judge Garzón. The poster reads: "YOUR TIME HAS COME! Francoist, Corrupt Politician, Terrorist, Drug Trafficker, Tax-Evader, South American Dictator....NOW YOU TOO CAN BRING A CASE AGAINST GARZÓN!! Last days! Great buys (offers) until removal from office! In small print - Reason: You don't even need one!"

3. Title: Untitled; Artist: El Roto
Source: El País.com

Translation/Explanation:

At the top of this cartoon, we have the likeness of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Below, one of his victims. On the "pedestal," the words, "Don't Touch." I'm not quite as sure of this depiction, but the artist is obviously referencing the idea that the Francoist past is not meant to be investigated. Franco is, even in death, still in charge.

Clearly, I am biased toward Judge Garzón. But my feelings regarding this case have far less to do with the person of Baltasar Garzón, and more to do with what this magistrate has stood for in regard to human rights in Spain and beyond. To a certain degree, Garzón has already been put on trial. And when and if he does appear in court, put on trial along with him will be the victims of the Franco regime and their families. What is happening in Spain should be deeply troubling to anyone interested in human rights. A judge that has made his career fighting human rights violations now faces having that same career put in a drawer and locked away. For some in Spain, this is exactly the intent, as the three cartoons illustrate. We are witnessing an "in progress" attempt to promote and install historical and political amnesia. Stay tuned for more on this case.

Report on the Mass Grave of San Rafael Cemetery, Málaga, Spain

photo by Julián Rojas, in El País.com
San Rafael Cemetery, mass grave

View Larger Map

I have not yet located any information in English on this recent story, but I'm sure the English-speaking press in Spain will cover it sooner or later. Nonetheless, the story is this:

An official report has just been released on results of the three year-long (2006-2009) exhumation of the nine mass graves located at San Rafael Cemetery in Málaga, Spain. There are 4,471 officially registered as buried in this mass grave, from 1937-1957, nearly 20 years after the start of the Spanish Civil War. In what may be seen as an important reconciliatory gesture, the PP (Partido Popular, or "People's Party") and the PSOE (Socialist Party) presented the report together at the Picasso Museum in Málaga. Reportedly, this is the largest mass grave site in western Europe. To date, the remains of 2,840 persons have been exhumed, including those of 349 children who died of hunger, illness or injury. According to the Ministry of Justice, this number refers to children below age 10, the majority of whom died in 1937 and the following years. The exhumed also include 89 women.

To read more about the San Rafael Cemetery and its use as a mass grave site, please see this interview with Sebastián Fernández, a lecturer of History and Archaeology at University of Málaga (from 2008):"There was absolute genocide in Malaga after the Civil War."