Spanish judge shelves landmark case of Franco-era torture victim

Hopes of securing justice for people tortured under the four-decade Franco dictatorship in Spain have suffered a major setback after a judge in Madrid shelved a landmark investigation into a teenager tortured by police three months before the dictator’s death.

Julio Pacheco was a 19-year-old student and anti-Franco activist when he was arrested in August 1975 on suspicion of involvement in the murder of a police officer. He was taken to the infamous headquarters of the Directorate-General for Security in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, where secret police officers tortured him for seven days before he was imprisoned for “terrorism”.

Pacheco, who is now 68, brought a lawsuit against his alleged torturers last year, hoping the socialist government’s recently introduced democratic memory law might help him find justice despite a 1977 amnesty law that granted impunity to those who committed crimes during the civil war and the subsequent dictatorship.

The democratic memory law, passed in October 2022, is intended to bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to the victims of the civil war and the dictatorship, and contains dozens of measures intended to help “settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past”.

Among them are the creation of a census and a national DNA bank to help locate and identify the remains of the tens of thousands of people who still lie in unmarked graves, a ban on groups that glorify the Franco regime and a “redefinition” of the Valley of the Fallen, the giant basilica and memorial where Franco lay for 44 years until his exhumation in 2019.

Pacheco became the first person to testify before a Spanish judge investigating allegations of torture during the dictatorship in September 2023. All previous cases had been rejected because of the amnesty law or because the statute of limitations covering such crimes had run out.

But it emerged on Tuesday that the judge in charge of the case had shelved the investigation on the grounds that the time limit for filing criminal charges had expired and because the constitutional court had ruled that some of the offences fell beyond the scope of the democratic memory law.

Pacheco said he had appealed against the “devastating” decision and was determined to take the case to the constitutional court and if necessary the European courts.

“There has been a lot of movement, we have gone to testify,” he told Agence France-Presse. “So there was a certain expectation that we could get somewhere. What we achieved was to be heard in a court of law. It was the first time it happened, wasn’t it?”

Amnesty International and other human rights groups condemned the court’s decision, saying it served “to consolidate a model of impunity that is unacceptable under the rule of law and which undermines and infringes, yet again, the most basic rights of those people who were the victims of Francoist crimes”.

Amnesty and the CEAQUA platform, which has spent almost 15 years attempting to secure justice for Franco’s victims in Argentina under the principle of universal jurisdiction, also repeated their calls for the amnesty law to be repealed.

Hundreds of thousands of people died or disappeared during the civil war and subsequent dictatorship, but such crimes are still covered by the law.

The UN working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances urged Spain in 2013 to revoke the amnesty law and to do more to ensure justice for relatives of the disappeared.

“There is no ongoing effective criminal investigation nor any person convicted,” the experts said. “The state should assume its responsibility to ensure that these initiatives are part of a comprehensive, consistent and permanent state policy.”