The end of Garzon's career

So it's finally over for Garzon... Sure, technically he's only temporarily suspended, but with three cases against him, each of which are probably going to be delayed, each motion appealed into infinity, and then of course his eventual reinstatement will probably drag on for a couple years. He's only 9 years away from retirement, which is a relatively short time at the speed of Spanish justice.

That's the way it goes in Spain. If you were a judge thinking of investigating powerful interests in Spain, perhaps it would be smarter to spend your time sending some more manteros to prison.

Varela temporarily disqualifies himself

Varela is apparently at least somewhat embarrassed that Manos Limpias plagiarized most of his own ruling for the contents of their indictment against Garzon.

I think the original plan was that Manos Limpias was going to do a reasonable indictment, to which Varela would say "hmm... this sounds serious, I guess the only way to know for sure is to go to trial".

Unfortunately for Varela, the indictment that Manos Limpias actually submitted was full of crazy allegations and was completely unusable. So Varela told them to please take all the crazy shit out of the indictment, but only gave them 24 hours to do it. Continuing their obvious stupidity at blowing their first chance to indict Garzon, Manos Limpias then did a whole-scale plagiarization of Varela's findings and submitted that as the indictment. That put Varela into an impossible situation, since he couldn't really rule on the validity of his own rulings.

My guess is the Supreme Court will just dump the whole thing and charge Garzon on the basis of the Santander allegations instead. The main advantage of the Santander being that most people don't understand what the case is really about, and most likely the foreign press (whom the Supreme Court seems to really care about impressing) wouldn't be able to bring Franco into the picture.

Falange charges too crazy for Varela

I wonder if he is having second thoughts about working with a bunch of insane fascists.

In a letter to Falange and Manos Limpias, he tells them to tone it down and only include charges that they have any hope of actually proving.

The Falange's rambling charges accuse Garzon of a being a notorious leftist and injuring the honor of certain families by suggesting that crimes against humanity occurred.

Otherwise he says he will be forced deny their prosecution. Perhaps he is annoyed at the fact the he wrote a perfectly good indictment himself, and for some reason Falange was too stupid to just put their name on it and file it.

He gives them 24 hours to correct the charges.

Luciano Varela to get hoisted on own petard

Victims of Franco yesterday filed a criminal complaint for prevarication against Luciano Varela, the judge responsible for accepting the criminal complaint against Garzon. The document is based largely on the judge's own doctrine.

Should be interesting how this plays out.

In a further ironic development, relatives of victims of Franco have filed suit in Argentina against ex-Franco officials citing universal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes against humanity.

What's Luciano Varela problem?

The supreme court judge Luciano Varela who is responsible for accepting the case against Garzon seems to really have something against Garzon.

Varela is hardly a crusader against corrupt judges. Last year when fellow judge Francisco Javier de Urquía was convicted of bribery and prevarication, on appeal, Varela threw out the conviction of prevarication and reduced the sentence for bribery to the minimum allowed by law.

(Even more amusing is that earlier this year Urquía was convicted again, this time for accepting a 60,000 euros bribe in exchange for granting bail to a suspect.)

The amazing thing about the indictment of Garzon is that not only does Varela accuse Garzon of exceeding his powers for the investigation of crimes during the time of Franco, he actually accuses Garzon of knowingly and with prevarication exceeding his powers.

Even if you hate Garzon, it is clear that there is a fair amount of disagreement among experts about whether the amnesty law covers crimes against humanity (in fact, even the supreme court itself wasn't unanimous in quashing Garzon's investigation). To argue that everyone who disagrees is operating in bad faith is quite a stretch.

In addition, Varela was completely unwilling to listen to any of the testimony that Garzon was asking for, basically complaining "Why should I have to listen to the opinion of other jurists?"

The big question for me is why Varela is going absolutely ape-shit crazy in his accusations. It feels like Garzon ran over his dog or something.