Yesterday, during a magnificent interview by Mònica Terribas, former minister Rodolfo Martín Villa --now facing criminal charges-- regaled our ears with this: "I'm going to defend the Transition, whose most important chapter is the reconciliation among the Spanish people; its value is far greater than that of political democracy itself. It was the 1977 Amnesty Law that made it possible (...)".
Terribas wisely pointed out to him that "the Transition cannot justify the death of five people (...)". This observation went right over his head. He kept insisting that he wishes to appear before Argentinian judge María Servini, who has brought the charges against him, as well is in the Spanish parliament in order to give his version of the Vitoria Incident of 3 March 1976, when five people were shot dead and fifty more were wounded following police intervention during a strike.
At the time Rodolfo Martín Villa was Minister for Trade Union Relations and he was about to be appointed Minister of the Interior, still during General Franco's regime. Later he would become Minister of Territorial Administration and Vice President, first under Adolfo Suárez and later under Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo. It's quite a CV.
At this point in the story I should point out this: anyone who held political office in a Franco government has their hands covered in blood. The Amnesty Law that Rodolfo Martín Villa likes so much was so bl***y brilliant that nobody's been held accountable for the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed or exiled by General Franco's dictatorship. On the contrary: they wiped the slate clean and they pretended that nothing had ever happened. But actually, appalling atrocities were committed.
A chap like Martín Villa cynically volunteers to make a statement in parliament and before the judge because, as he himself has pointed out, he is eighty years old and he knows that he will never be sent to prison. So he doesn't care about making a couple of formal statements, mainly with a view to blaming certain individuals who can't give their side of the story because they're pushing up daisies --although they were as indecent as he is, if not worse.
Spain has always regarded its Transition as exemplary because the final body count was not too unreasonable. But the truth is that people were killed. And it's even more true that the politicians in office at the time just washed their hands of it. They had an amnesty law tailor-made to suit them just fine and left a whole country (Spain, with Catalonia inside) bewildered and gripped by pain. The fact that now they are eighty does not exonerate them at all. The fact that the accountability is being requested from Argentina says it all about Spain's judiciary. The fact that ex-minister Martín Villa is trying to pass for a peaceful old man --considering he used to sign the execution warrants together with the rest of his cabinet peers-- says it all about the so-called Spanish democracy. They have no shame and never will.
