Rajoy, Juan Carlos I and Martín Villa: unpunished in Spain and investigated abroad
It could be said that the homeland impunity, understood as the unsuccessful attempts to investigate the crimes allegedly committed by relevant figures by the Justice of their countries, reaches the category of autochthonous phenomenon in Spain. Several examples demonstrate it. The last one, the one related to former president Mariano Rajoy.
who was president of the popular matches (October 2004-July 2018) and of the Spanish government (December 2011-June 2018) has managed to get his party’s conviction for the case Gurtel and its derivatives will not splash you. Rajoy has not been investigated for corruption despite the fact that the name M. Rajoy embodied in Bárcenas’s papers constituted a clear indication of illegitimate profit.
The milestone had already been obtained previously by another president, Felipe González, who, although he has gone down in history as the X of the GAL, was never prosecuted for State terrorism. A Minister of the Interior (José Barrionuevo) and a Secretary of State for Security (Rafael Vera) ended up convicted for it.
But now Judge Stéphanie Garcia Garcia, head of the Court of Instruction 2 of the Principality, asks Mariano Rajoy to reveal one of the corrupt plots deployed during his mandate: the Operation Cataloniathat is to say, a vigilante campaign to attack and discredit the Catalan pro-independence leaders with false evidence and stop the process.
Rajoy, against the ropes
Since October 2016, the Andorran court has been investigating the alleged pressure received by Spanish police officers on behalf of the Rajoy Government so that those responsible for the Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA) provide, in 2014, data on accounts of Catalan politicians Jordi Pujol , Artur Mas and Oriol Junqueras –the latter two do not have an account there– in the context of a extortion operation to stop the independence movement by illegal means.
The judge has decided this week to expand the list of investigated and include Rajoy; his former Minister of Finance, Cristóbal Montoro; and the Interior Minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, for the alleged crimes of coercion against constitutional bodies, punished in Andorran law with between three and ten years in prison; and the creation, use and sale of a false document, punishable by up to three years in prison.
These two crimes presumably perpetrated by Rajoy when he was Prime Minister are situated in the context of the indoor sewers deployed by his Ministry of the Interior to harm political opponents and hide cases of corruption by the PP.
In Spain the Operation Catalonia has not been investigated despite clear indications of its existence, such as those published in numerous articles by public in recent years. On the contrary, the evidence has been hidden. The Judge of the National High Court Manuel García Castellón he removed Bárcenas from the investigation for police espionage with public means to make evidence of corruption against the PP disappear (Operation Kitchen) several audios and other files found in the records of Commissioner Villarejo and related to the Operation Catalonia Y he handed them over to the CNIqualifying them as state secrets.
But in Andorra the matter may have a very different destiny. One of its main banks, the BPA, was blown up by the Operation Catalonia, intervened unfairly based on false information supposedly provided by the Rajoy Government, and now the Justice of the Principality wants to demonstrate. According to the complaint that gave rise to the judicial proceedings, signed by the entities Juristes Drets and the Institute of Human Rights of Andorra (IDHA), Mariano Rajoy, Cristóbal Montoro and Jorge Fernández Díaz would be “authors and personal executors and directors” of the crimes. They attribute to them “having intimidated the Andorran head of government and his ministers” during the official visit that took place on January 8, 2015, to intervene in the Banca Privada d’Andorra.
Juan Carlos I, free of accusations in Spain
Juan Carlos I has been spared from judicial investigations in Spain for his opaque heritage nurtured with donations and commissions not declared to the treasury. In fact, the Supreme Court filed a few months ago the three damaging investigations against him for lack of evidence or prescription of the facts and also for the immunity he enjoyed as head of state. But in the United Kingdom the emeritus has not managed to stop the investigation into the alleged harassment denounced by his ex-lover Corina Larsen.
He tried it by invoking a supposed immunity, but the English judge Matthew Nicklin opposed the Spanish king emeritus maintaining that privilege after his abdication in 2014. And furthermore, the alleged harassment of a woman would not be covered by any immunity.
That alleged harassment to which Corinna Larsen was subjected by the Spanish CNI to return the 65 million euros that he received from the Saudi royal family to the king emeritus, including, according to her, death threats. The complaint is for alleged harassment, illegal monitoring and defamation; a campaign that Larsen says began in 2012, when their relationship, which began in 2004, broke up.
The crimes of Francoism, in Argentina
According to the journalist and writer Mariano Sanchez Solerduring the transition there are 188 crimes included in political violence of institutional origin. That is, the murders “deployed to maintain the established order, those organized, encouraged or instrumentalized by State institutions,” according to Sánchez Soler.
Well, one of the heads of the repressive apparatus of Francoism, Rodolfo Martín Villa, Minister of the Interior (or Interior) between 1976 and 1979, continues to receive tributes in Spain as the architect of an ‘exemplary’ political transition while he is charged by the Justice Argentina for crimes against humanity.
Like the monarchy, in Spain the Francoism enjoys the most absolute impunity.
The Argentine Justice continues its investigation into the crimes of Francoism. Specifically, to Martín Villa, 87 years old, Judge María Servini charges twelve homicides, although she opened indictment only for four: three fatalities of the events of ‘March 3’ in Vitoria and the death of Germán Rodríguez. However, the Argentine Court of Appeals revoked the aforementioned indictment in December 2021 and ordered the judge to continue investigating.
In Spain it has been impossible to open a case against the crimes of Francoism. Justice closed the way when it accused the ex-judge of prevarication for investigating those crimes knowing that he could not do so because they were protected by the Amnesty Law. Finally the Supreme acquitted him.
It has also been impossible, until now, for the petitions for parliamentary investigation commissions to succeed in the crimes involving Martín Villa, such as the events of March 3 in Vitoria, 1976, when the security forces violently evicted a church where workers were meeting and five of them and another hundred suffered injuries of varying degrees. Both the PSOE and the PP and Vox oppose these commissions.