“Always Franco” sculpture (Demotix)

“Always Franco” raised a few eyebrows when it was exhibited in Madrid last February. The sculpture of the Spanish dictator jammed inside a Coca Cola fridge, in his characteristic green military uniform and dark sunglasses, was apparently too much for some nostalgic souls.

The artist, Eugenio Merino, is being taken to court by Francisco Franco National Foundation (FNFF) — an organisation dedicated to “disseminating the memory and work” of Franco.

Last February, FNFF vice-president Jaime Alonso visited ARCO — the modern art fair in Madrid where the work was being exhibited — escorted by a notary, to take pictures of the work. The sculpture was “grotesque”, he declared, and an attempt against “someone’s dignity”, someone who “couldn’t defend himself because he is dead”.

“This work generates hatred and confrontation” said Alsonso, quoted by El Mundo. “You can think what you want of Franco, but taunting people is simply not acceptable.”

“ARCO took place in February. In July, I received the lawsuit, and on February 21 2013, I will go to court,” says Merino in an email interview.

FNFF  is suing him for damaging their honour, identity or image indirectly through harmful conduct. They want Merino to pay 18,000 euro in compensation.

It appears that Merino is not going to get a lot of institutional backing, “the director of the art fair (Carlos Urroz) has not even sent me an email to offer his help against this attack to the freedom of speech (sic),” says Merino.

Index tried to get Urroz’s version of events, but our email went unanswered.

Apparently in response to the FNFF’s complaints, José María Álvarez del Manzano, President of the IFEMA — which is the institution where the fair takes place — sent them a soothing letter.

In the letter sent while the exhibition was still in situ, he said that “personally… I find this an indignity, because representing any human being like that, independently of the personality of General Franco (sic), is absolutely inadmissible. Above all, I think the author only pretended, in principle, to draw people’s attention.” He went on to say that as much as he liked to remove the work from the fair, it would grant “unmerited” attention to Merino’s work.

After staging a coup against the Republican government, Franco was the authoritarian head of state of Spain from the end of the Civil War (1936-39)  until he died peacefully of old age in 1975.

Memories, only for some

Even though Spain passed laws in 2007 to remember and repay the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship that ensued — the Historical Memory Law — it looks like evoking Franco’s times is still not easy in Spain.

Trying to fill a legal vacuum left by the law, in 2008, “superjudge” Baltasar Garzon opened an inquiry into alleged crimes against humanity during the Spanish Civil War and after, and exhumed 19 victims’ remains.

However he found plenty of obstacles and enemies. A 1977 general amnesty had pardoned all criminal offenses with a political purpose previous to 1976 and these offenses were almost 70 years old, prior to the conception of “crimes against humanity”.  In 2009, an organisation called “Manos limpias” (Clean Hands) filed a lawsuit against him, and a few months later, Garzon was indicted by the Spanish Supreme Court for prevarication, or breaching his legal duty.

Weekly meeting to remember Franco’s victims in the Puerta del Sol, Madrid [NathaliePaco - Demotix]

At the end, Garzon dropped the investigation, was barred from judicial activity (with pay) and  stood trial. At the beginning of 2012, the Spanish Supreme Court found Garzon innocent on these charges.

Meanwhile, anthropologist Francisco Etxeberria and a team of forensic experts had continued digging up mass graves from the Civil War period. As Etxeberria said in an interview with this writer in 2010, most of the victims’ remains that have been unearthed so far were from the Republican side.

“We have also been asked to investigate right-wing people killed by the Republicans” he said. But there are few such cases left to investigate, since the Franco regime did so itself after the war ended. Furthermore, there is no comparison between the victims on the two sides, in either quantitative or qualitative terms.”

About the case against Garzon, Etxeberria commented: “It looks like we’re sliding backwards. In Spain there is no risk of a return to dictatorship, but this is a sad development that brings to mind pre-constitutional times. Actually, the victims’ families had sought judicial support and safeguards to provide legal guarantees for the investigation that was launched.”

According to Etxeberria, the Historical Memory Law was an attempt to “move from truth to reparations, but no one wants to get involved in the justice aspect.” No one, that is, except for Judge Garzon  who launched the unprecedented and short-lived legal inquiry of 2008.

“The three rights of victims are truth, justice and reparations, and these have not been forthcoming” in the case of the roughly 200,000 victims of murder and forced disappearance during the war, he concluded. Historians have put together lists of up to 130,000 people killed in areas not near the front lines. These crimes involved forced disappearance, to which no statute of limitations applies.

“In the past two weeks, we have opened new graves and recovered more remains —  says Etxeberria now in an email interview with INDEX. There is no institutional support whatsoever, but we will continue doing what we can with the resources of the (Basque Country) University and the investigative teams we have. Currently, we have already discovered 300 mass graves and recovered more than 5,000 bodies. There are (private) commemoration ceremonies every week… This means that we go on and that there is still public interest.”

Etxeberria mentions the book Jueces, pero parciales. La pervivencia del franquismo en el poder judicial (Judges, but partial. The endurance of  Franquismo in the judiciary), by Carlos Jimenez Villarejo (prosecutor) y Antonio Doñate (judge). “(The authors) demonstrate why the courts don’t have an interest in investigating these crimes. Judges have been involved in only 10 of all the exhumations so far,” he says.

Franquismo is a term used to refer to Franco’s regime and his government style, which combined right-wing thinking, traditional Catholicism and economic self-reliance.

The glorification of Franco continues today

Organised by FNFF, “120 years after, Francisco Franco, present!” is the slogan a tribute to the dictator to be celebrated on 2 December  in Madrid. Critics have pointed out that the event is to take place in public facilities and that FNFF receives public funding too, as does the dictator’s monumental burial vault.

It is ironic that while excavations of mass burials of Civil War victims proceed with virtually no financial support and rely on the work of dozens of volunteers from around the world, the victims of franquismo continue paying with their taxes for the maintenance of Franco’s grandiose mausoleum in the “Valley of the Fallen”, conceived by Franco himself to honour those who fell during the Civil War. About 10 per cent of the construction workforce were convicts, some of them political prisoners.

The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory has recently demanded the Spanish government to put a stop to it and invite Franco’s family to take charge of his remains, as it the case in Italy with Benito Mussolini’s.

“There is a contradiction in the political class, because they say these are times of remembrance and they talk about ‘the duty of memory’ for everything except for the ‘francoist’ crimes”, says Etxeberria. “For the right, saying this divides citizens’ suffices.”

It looks like in today’s Spain there is still little room for either free artistic exploration of the Civil War and the dictatorship that followed or full remembrance and reparation for its victims.

Miren Gutierrez is Editorial Director of Index

The post Spain: Historical amnesia on display appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Offshore alerts specialises in reporting about offshore financial centres (known as OFCs), with an emphasis on fraud investigations, and also holds an annual conference on OFCs focusing on financial products and services, tax, money laundering, fraud, asset recovery and investigations. It caters to financial services providers and other financial institutions.

Marchant talks to INDEX — ahead of the OffshoreAlert Conference Europe: Investigations & Intelligence, 26 – 27 November — about the importance of free expression and the peculiarities of his trade.

INDEX: As investors continue to pour millions of pounds each month into offshore bank accounts, the Western world is in economic disarray, demanding much more from law-abiding taxpayers to bailout banks. What is your view on the economic crisis, and has it had any effect on the type of investigative journalism you practice?

DAVID MARCHANT: It is unfair to blame the global economic crisis on offshore financial centres. It is, essentially, a people-problem, the majority of whom live in the world’s major countries.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the crisis is that it confirmed what I already knew, i.e. many of the world’s major banks and financial services firms are not well managed. A significant part of the problem is that offering huge short-term financial incentives invites your personnel to act in a manner that is not in the long-term interests of a company. It encourages risk-taking and the concealment of losses to create the appearance of success, as opposed to actual success. It seems that few, if any, material changes have been made to the system, that you can’t change human nature overnight and that history is destined to repeat itself in the future. Other than the crisis causing more schemes to collapse early and there being more to write about, it has had no effect on OffshoreAlert’s investigative reporting.

INDEX: Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis was arrested a few days ago in Athens for publishing the “Lagarde List” —containing the names of more than 2,000 people who hold accounts with HSBC in Switzerland (one imagines, hoping to escape the taxman). The list remained unused for two years after Christine Lagarde passed it onto then Finance Minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou. What do you think about it?

DM: It would not surprise me if the Greek authorities had indeed sat on this information. Governments and corruption or incompetence go hand in hand.

INDEX: Tax evasion is not considered money laundering in some jurisdictions, and it looks less frightening than laundering drug or criminal proceeds. Do you hold any views on this subject?

DM: Money laundering is a criminal offence in its own right. The predicate crimes vary country by country and, in some countries, tax evasion is not among them or was not among them now at one time. In the Cayman Islands, for example, fiscal offences were initially omitted from the jurisdiction’s money laundering laws but the jurisdiction was forced — screaming and kicking — into adding them at a later date. Tax evasion clearly should be a predicate crime. Paying taxes is a price we must pay to live in a civilised society. Who wants to live in an uncivilised society? Certainly not me.

INDEX: How do you balance the need for privacy with the need for transparency in the offshore world?

DM: As a journalist, the more transparency the better but information must be handled responsibly. The word “privacy” is a soft word for secrecy and people have secrets for a reason, i.e. they are typically trying to conceal something that is illegal, immoral or otherwise shameful.

INDEX: You receive sponsorship from security companies like Kroll Advisory Solutions. The global intelligence industry caters for crooks and corrupt, repressive governments alongside corporate clients. Twenty years ago, the value of this sector was negligible — today it is estimated to be worth around $3bn. Any thoughts on this?

DM: To be clear, OffshoreAlert is an independent organisation, not beholden to anyone or anything other than accuracy and fairness. We have limited advertising on our web-site but we do have sponsors for our financial due diligence conferences, which is a commercial necessity. The global intelligence industry is like any other. Companies aren’t particularly choosy about who they will accept as clients. It’s all about making money. I have no idea whether the global intelligence industry has become more prevalent or not over the last 20 years. If it has grown significantly, however, I would guess that much of such growth would be fuelled by banks and other financial firms having to comply with tougher anti-money laundering laws.

INDEX: How do you compare your work with that of, for example, Wikileaks?

DM: I have little or no respect for WikiLeaks. In my limited dealings with the organisation, I have found Wikileaks to be amateurish and fundamentally dishonest. In its very early days, it was clear to me that, in one action at federal court in the United States, Wikileaks clearly misled the court. It is not trustworthy. I consider Julian Assange to be an irresponsible, hypocritical, over-hyped poseur. His major talent seems to be self-publicity. I cringe when I see him described as a journalist. It denigrates the entire profession. Fortunately, there are few, if any, similarities between Wikileaks and OffshoreAlert. We’re not in the same business or market and there is a gulf of difference in the level of professionalism between the two.

INDEX: You actually own 100 per cent of OffshoreAlert and I understand that you are not insured against libel and other legal risks in order to avoid “lawyering” your exposes. Is this correct? Is it necessary in order to safeguard your journalistic independence?

Former accountant and self-styled “offshore asset protection guru”,Marc Harris was convicted of money laundering and tax evasion by the US in 2004

DM: I do indeed beneficially own OffshoreAlert in its entirety. Prior to launch in 1997, I looked into purchasing libel insurance. The premiums were reasonable but the problem was that every article would need to be pre-approved by a recognised libel attorney. That would have been costly and would have inevitably led to the attorney recommending that stories be watered down, which would have defeated the primary purpose of OffshoreAlert, which is to expose serious financial crime while it is in progress. I have an even better de facto insurance policy: If someone sues me for libel, I will take all of my incriminating evidence to law enforcement, and do everything in my power to ensure that the plaintiff is held criminally accountable for their actions. This is no idle promise. The first person to sue me for libel (self-proclaimed “King of the Offshore World” Marc Harris) thought he could put me out of business. Instead, he is currently serving 17 years in prison for fraud and money laundering.

INDEX: However, you have been taken to court for libel on many occasions and always won. So the objective behind these law suits seems to be to intimidate or drain you dry. How do you about surviving suing threats?

DM: OffshoreAlert has been sued for libel multiple times in different countries and jurisdictions. [He was sued in the USA (state and federal court), Cayman Islands, Canada (Toronto), Grenada (by then Prime Minister Keith Mitchell), and Panama]. We’ve never lost a libel action, never published a correction or apology to any plaintiffs and never paid — or been required to pay — them one cent in costs or damages. It is a record of which I am very proud. I know how the game is played, I am extremely resourceful, and I am not intimidated easily. This might come across as conceited, but my attitude towards plaintiffs is that I am brighter, tougher and more talented than you and your attorneys and that, if you want to sue me, I will do everything in my power to ensure that you pay the ultimate price of being criminally prosecuted for your actions.

INDEX: According to organisations such as ours, English libel law has been shown to have a chilling effect on free speech around the world. Especially worrying is “libel tourism”, where foreign claimants have brought libel actions to the English courts against defendants who are neither British nor resident in this country. What do you think about it?

DM: British libel law, generally, is among the most repulsive pieces of legislation that exists in the civilised world. It is a reprobate’s best friend and protects the reputations of people who don’t deserve to have their reputations protected. I couldn’t operate OffshoreAlert in the UK or in any country or jurisdiction that has adopted similar laws because OffshoreAlert would be sued out of existence. British libel law is considered to be so repugnant that, in 2010, the United States passed The SPEECH Act that renders British libel judgments unenforceable in the US there is no de facto free speech in Britain because of its libel laws. I find the entire British legal system to be terrible in dispensing justice. In that regard, it is light years behind the legal system that exists in the US, where OffshoreAlert is based.

Miren Gutierrez is Editorial Director of Index

The post INDEX INTERVIEW: ‘I’ve never published a correction or apology’ appeared first on Index on Censorship.