The Argentine lawsuit

In 2008, judge Baltazar Garzón abandoned his investigation of the Francoist regime for “presumed crimes of illegal detention within the franework of Crimes againnst Humanity” carried out between 1936 and 1951. Two years later, On April 14, 2010, families of the dead and disappeared living in Argentina filed an accusation of “genocide and/or crimes against humanity committed by the Francoist dictatorship” between 17 July 1936, the day the miitary rebellion began, and 15 June 1977, the date of the first democratic elections. Drawing on the legal doctrine of Universal Jurisdiction, which allows courts to investigate violations of human rights wherever they take place and whatever the nationality of the victim, the case was given to judge María Romilda Servini de Cubría of the First Federal Criminal Court in Buenos Aires. The accusation was presented by  Dario Rivas, son of the Republican mayor of Castro de Rei (Lugo) who was shot in October 1936, and Inés García Holgado, two of whose grandfathers and a great uncle were “disappeared”. They appear in the photograph with Nora Cortiñas, the co-founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

These residents of Argentina sought to accuse surviving senior Francoist officials of whom there were only thirteen civilian former ministers who had played an important eole in Spain’s transition to democracy. In 2011, the 92-year-old Rivas, who had been sent to live with relatives in Buenos Aires when he was a child so he could benefit from the public education and job opportunities that were not available in Spain, told the newspaper Página 12: “There are the bodies of 113,000 disappeared, 30,000 kidnapped children, and 2,500 mass graves full of bodies”.

Spain’s Supreme Court ruled on 27 February 2012 that the  Amnesty Law of 1977 prevented the crimes of Francoism from being judged in Spain. In this context, the case in Argentina represented a means of demanding justice, generating international publicity, and denouncing the “forgetting” of the victims of Francoism, but thedominant  response of Spanish institutions was to obstruct the investigation. Judge Servini has brought charges against some of the accused, requested extraditions, and inspired the exhumation of some mass graves. The first, in the cemetery of Guadalajara in February 2016, came out of the declaration by Ascensión Mendieta, whose father had been executed in 1939. Seeking to recover the remains of her father from the mass grave where they lay, the 88 year-old woman flew to Buenos Aires in 2013 to give evidence before judge Servini.