Facing Justice in the Court of Memory
By ADAM HOCHSCHILD, NYT, APRIL 15, 2014
In most countries, there is no statute of limitations for murder. Should there be one for torture? In Spain, neither charge can be brought against anyone who worked for the harsh, long-lasting regime of Francisco Franco, because of an amnesty law that eased the country’s transition to democracy after the dictator’s death in 1975.
But the case of Antonio González Pacheco, a notorious torturer from the last years of Franco’s military rule, is raising thorny questions. A former prisoner named José María Galante was startled last year to discover that Mr. Pacheco, alive and spry enough at 67 to be a long-distance runner, was living not far from him in Madrid.
Mr. Galante wants justice: He says Mr. Pacheco beat him on the genitals, waterboarded him and punched him while he was suspended from the ceiling in handcuffs. But the amnesty law means that Spanish courts will not try the case, so Mr. Galante and others have taken their cause to Argentina, where a sympathetic judge is trying to have Mr. Pacheco extradited.
While the chances of extradition are slim, anything that threatens consequences for those who were formerly complicit in a brutal tyranny lessens the chances for such a regime in the future. Franco controlled all of Spain for three and a half decades and a portion of the country for several years before that. Particularly in the early years of his dictatorship, during and after the Spanish Civil War, he ruled by deliberate terror. Officials boasted of mass rape as a weapon, for instance, and branded the breasts of female opponents with the yoke-and-arrows symbol of Franco’s political movement. Although the government eventually became less bloodthirsty, the medieval garrote, an iron collar that an executioner tightened around the victim’s neck, remained in use until a year before Franco’s death.
(More here.)
In most countries, there is no statute of limitations for murder. Should there be one for torture? In Spain, neither charge can be brought against anyone who worked for the harsh, long-lasting regime of Francisco Franco, because of an amnesty law that eased the country’s transition to democracy after the dictator’s death in 1975.
But the case of Antonio González Pacheco, a notorious torturer from the last years of Franco’s military rule, is raising thorny questions. A former prisoner named José María Galante was startled last year to discover that Mr. Pacheco, alive and spry enough at 67 to be a long-distance runner, was living not far from him in Madrid.
Mr. Galante wants justice: He says Mr. Pacheco beat him on the genitals, waterboarded him and punched him while he was suspended from the ceiling in handcuffs. But the amnesty law means that Spanish courts will not try the case, so Mr. Galante and others have taken their cause to Argentina, where a sympathetic judge is trying to have Mr. Pacheco extradited.
While the chances of extradition are slim, anything that threatens consequences for those who were formerly complicit in a brutal tyranny lessens the chances for such a regime in the future. Franco controlled all of Spain for three and a half decades and a portion of the country for several years before that. Particularly in the early years of his dictatorship, during and after the Spanish Civil War, he ruled by deliberate terror. Officials boasted of mass rape as a weapon, for instance, and branded the breasts of female opponents with the yoke-and-arrows symbol of Franco’s political movement. Although the government eventually became less bloodthirsty, the medieval garrote, an iron collar that an executioner tightened around the victim’s neck, remained in use until a year before Franco’s death.
(More here.)
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