Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  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 – o
nce 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.

  Some blame the Socialists themselves for, at first, encouraging financial corruption as a way of allowing the economy to slip past the bureaucratic obstacles left over from Franco’s day. ‘Corruption is the oil of the system. It lubricates the wheels so that they turn smoothly and do not screech. It is only necessary to make sure that it does not go beyond a certain level,’ was the theory that novelist Juan Benet later said he had heard in Felipe González’s Moncloa offices.

  It was a time when money, politics and, perhaps inevitably, football became a battlefield of court cases and private detectives. Brown envelopes full of allegations against politicians and business rivals were deposited regularly in the mail boxes of journalists. This was also the era of the pelotazo – the get-rich-quick schemes that saw millionaires appear out of nowhere, often for doing nothing more than being the middle men in dubious commercial transactions. It was also the time of ‘los beautiful’. These were the champagne socialists who swapped their ideals for cash and celebrated in an ostentatious fashion. Their leader, still an adored role-model for millions of gossip-magazine readers, was Isabel Preysler. Her main feat was to marry both singer Julio Iglesias and González’s finance minister, Miguel Boyer.

  The scandals they produced were complex, murky affairs. They featured some of the noisiest men in Spain – men such as Jesús Gil, mayor of Marbella and owner of Atlético de Madrid football club, or José María Ruiz-Mateos, owner of a giant industrial and financial conglomerate that emerged from the sherry town of Jerez. Ruiz-Mateos famously dressed up in a Superman costume. He also once tried to land blows on Boyer, after the latter had intervened in his Rumasa empire, to the cry of ‘I’ll punch you, leche!’ (The last word in this phrase means, literally, milk, though it also refers to semen.) Gil was also keen on fisticuffs. ‘You are a pile of shit!’, the president of Compostela football club, José María Caneda, shouted when they exchanged punches in front of the television cameras.

  Both Gil and Ruiz-Mateos sought political power as they tried to avoid court cases and attempted to exact revenge on ‘the politicians’ who were their enemies. Natural populists, they had their small successes. These were men who, in the language of the football terrace or the bull ring, believed that what really mattered was to have un buen par de cojones – a real pair of balls. They were examples of what the comic film-maker Santiago Segura – in two hilarious films based around a character called Torrente – termed casposa (dandruff-ridden) Spain.

  As the owner of first division Atlético de Madrid football club for his last twelve years, Gil was disciplined several times for insulting referees, including accusing a French referee of homosexuality, and inciting the club’s followers to violence. One black player, the Colombian Adolfo ‘El Tren’ Valencia, was a particular obsession. ‘I’ll kill that black man!’ he once spluttered. His contributions to racial harmony included ‘Spain stinks from so many blacks’. Even the paid-up socios, or season-ticket holders, of Atlético were not safe from his bilious comments. ‘The socios,’ he declared, were from ‘a low social stratus’. But that was not all. ‘Whoever doesn’t have a drug addict in the family, quite possibly has a prostitute.’ Gil was the archetype casposo.

  Both he and Ruiz-Mateos survived their multiple confrontations with mainstream politicians, though not without spending time in jail or losing their bigger battles. Gil died in 2004. Ruiz-Mateos’s family, meanwhile, has built a new empire – including the Rayo Vallecano football club that is presided over by his septuagenarian wife – but is keeping quiet. ‘Por la boca muere el pez,’ – ‘the fish dies through its mouth’ – is the new family slogan, according to one of his daughters. They are only missed, I suspect, by foreign newspaper correspondents. They were fantastic copy.

  While Gil and Ruiz-Mateos made the noise, the real danger lay in some more silent, subtle and powerful players. The corruption battle reached a peak when two of Spain’s biggest deal-makers, the oil-haired banker Mario Conde and Catalan businessman Javier De la Rosa fell into disgrace. For they were not content to go down alone.

  De la Rosa was the son of an infamous fraudster who disappeared in the 1970s with the police on his heels. The son presided over Spain’s biggest-ever bankruptcy as head of the Spanish portfolio of the Kuwait Investment Office (KIO), grouped together in a company called Grupo Torras. Amongst those to go to jail as a result were De la Rosa himself and Manuel de Prado y Colón de Carvajal, one of King Juan Carlos’s closest friends and his personal ambassador.

  Mario Conde, meanwhile, was a clever Galician who planned to be Spain’s Silvio Berlusconi. He got worryingly close. A brilliant lawyer turned banker, he planned to form his own party. Then, however, the Banesto bank was taken out of his hands following the appearance of a 3.6 billion euro (605,000 million pesetas) hole in its accounts. He had pocketed at least 50 million euros for himself – and ended up in jail.

  What seemed like straightforw
ard cases of bent businessmen, however, soon became more complex. For De la Rosa and Conde both used their cash for more than just financial corruption. One of Conde’s allies, for example, turned out to be Colonel Juan Alberto Perote. He was the former military intelligence officer who had stolen 1,240 microfiches containing thousands of top-secret documents.

  The most obscure moment of all came when Conde’s name was attached to a series of attempts, led by Javier De la Rosa, to blackmail King Juan Carlos. The two men threatened ‘to use part of their immense fortunes to oblige the monarch to abdicate under the pressure of the numerous scandals related to the people surrounding Juan Carlos’, according to the authors of a book that exposed the blackmail attempt. The two multi-millionaires were going around claiming that ‘the Head of State had allowed himself to be corrupted and they had given him billions of pesetas’, according to the same book. The blackmail did not work. Both men went to jail. The ‘material’ never appeared. Considerable doubt was cast, however, on the king’s ability to choose his friends.

  This became even more apparent when Prado y Colón de Carvajal also ended up in jail. He had also taken a large slice out of the money that Kuwait put into, and lost in, Spain. The king’s ambassador, who referred to Juan Carlos as his ‘patrón’ and claimed to be his main financial advisor, had pocketed 11 million euros. De la Rosa claimed Prado y Colón de Carvajal had been given the money ‘at the request of a high institution of the state’. In fact, one observer said, Colón de Carvajal had hidden behind ‘a cloak of disloyalty, which covered him, but had left the king naked’. A royal spokesman declared that: ‘From now on there will have to be more care about who uses the king’s name.’

  Even in jail Conde continues to leave behind him a trail of corruption. In 2003 a judge was suspended for six months after trying to pressure colleagues into allowing the banker out on day release. His prison governor, meanwhile, was sacked after the millionaire ex-banker was found to be enjoying family visits every five days instead of the regular monthly visits given to his fellow inmates. It will be interesting to see what Conde – still rich, still clever and possibly keen to get even – does when he gets out.