Sir: Your correspondent Richard. Crosfield is quite right to praise
the Spanish judge Garzon for his imprisonment of drug traf- fickers in Galicia, ETA terrorists in the Basque country and the former minister of the interior, Jose de Barrionuevo, in Madrid, but it is not acceptable to say that he is a 'hero today in Spain'.
I, like Mr Crosfield, am an Englishman living in Spain and I know, as he must do, that Baltasar Garzon excites much com- ment here, not necessarily approbation. Should a judge enter politics in the cause of his own ambition, and then leave abruptly because he is not given a ministry? Garzon did. In recent elections he was number two in Madrid, with Felipe Gonzalez, for the Spanish Socialist Workers' party. But he flounced off when not awarded the ministry of justice.
More recently, the case of a serious accu- sation of 'genocide' was placed before Garzon. In the 1930s, before and during the Spanish Civil War, a young Communist called Santiago Carrillo personally super- vised the 'execution' of thousands of nuns and monks. This is a historical fact recorded by historians, among them Hugh Thomas (now Lord Thomas). A private indictment to this effect has just been thrown out of his own court by Judge Garzon on the grounds that it cannot be 'serious'. Garzon has done the same thing with privately brought denouncements of Fidel Castro, rather simi- lar in content to those made against Pinochet. Carrillo escaped Franco and lived in exile in Moscow and Paris for 40 years. Finally, 'the executioner', as he was known as, was invited to return to his country where he rapidly became secretary general of the newly formed Spanish Communist party in the late 1970s.
Does the shelving of the Carrillo indict- ment by Garzon not indicate a certain political bias? Or are we to remain blind as bats in the hope that the present storms provoked by the subtle Left might blow away?
J.C. Taylor
Calle Grecia 5, Las Cuevas, Las Orotava, Tenerife
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