For the first time since Franco’s death in 1975, a victim of torture under the dictatorship will testify before a judge in Spain todaywhere an amnesty law has so far prevented prosecutions.

A member of an anti-French student organization, Julio Pacheco was 19 when he was arrested in Madrid in August 1975 by the secret police, three months before the death of “Caudillo”, who ruled the country with an iron fist after winning the Civil War War (1936-1939).

He was tortured for days at the General Directorate of Security in the notorious Puerta del Sol square, according to his testimony, and was then taken to prison, accused of terrorism.

Forty-eight years later, he the 67-year-old retiree filed a lawsuit against his four tormentors in Februaryincluding ex-policeman Jose Manuel Villarejo, infamous in Spain for having intercepted conversations of numerous political figures and economic agents.

The judge who has taken over the case, unlike many judges before her, accepted the lawsuit in May because it “potentially” involves “crimes against humanity and torture.”

She also expressed her intention to subpoena the accused and requested documents from the police and the National Archives to carry out her investigation, at the end of which she will decide whether to take the case to court or close it without further action. .

In front of the Madrid court, where Julio Pacheco has been summoned to appear today to testify before the judge, around thirty people held a banner that declared that “victims of Francoism demand justice” and a placard with the faces of victims of the dictatorship .

Pacheco told AFP he felt “a little nervous” before entering court.

Important station

Although this is only the first stage in a legal process, today’s hearing is a victory for victims’ associations, according to which around a hundred appeals had previously been rejected by the judiciary.

The fact that he can testify before a judge is “an important milestone,” Julio Pacheco told AFP from his apartment in a working-class district of Madrid.

This former printer mainly hopes that his testimony will open “a crack in the wall of impunity” and make the courts “more open to other lawsuits that will be filed.”

Until now, despite persistent requests from the United Nations, the Spanish judiciary has stopped all attempts by victims of the dictatorship citing the statute of limitations, but mainly the 1977 amnesty law.

This text – a pillar of the transition to democracy after Franco’s death on November 20, 1975 – prevents the prosecution of any political crime committed during the dictatorship by opponents, but also by “public officials and agents for the maintenance of public order”.

The famous judge Balthasar Garthon had himself been prosecuted, and eventually acquitted, for attempting to open an investigation into the crimes of Francoism covered by this law.

Much to the dismay of the victims, torturers have passed away and will never be prosecuted, such as a police officer nicknamed “Billy el Niño” (Billy the Kid) because of his habit of twirling his gun like a cowboy, who died in 2020.

Lawsuits in Argentina

One of the persons they had accused ‘Billy the Kid’ for torture is none other than Julio Pacheco’s wife, Rosa Maria Garcia, 66who had been arrested like him in August 1975, but whose lawsuit was dismissed.

However, she will also testify today, but as a witness, because one of the tortures her husband was subjected to was seeing her being tortured.

Faced with obstacles in Spain, victims’ associations turned to Argentina, where Judge Maria Cervini invoked the principle of universal jurisdiction to open in 2010 an investigation, which is still ongoing, into genocide and crimes against humanity during the Civil War and the dictatorship.

In the context of these investigations, issued twenty international arrest warrants against twenty representatives of the French regime in 2014 (ministers, judges, police), but Madrid deemed them unacceptable.