"Francoism isn't over in Spain"

[xchrom]

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/english/Francoism/isn/t/over/in/Spain/elpepueng/20110707elpeng_1/Ten

He is 91 years old and just endured a 13-hour flight, but you wouldn't know it by looking at him, as he stands stoically in a suit and tie in the crushing heat of Madrid's Puerta del Sol. Darío Rivas is a Galician-born émigré to Argentina who filed a suit aimed at getting Franco's crimes tried in Buenos Aires, after the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón was controversially suspended from his duties at the High Court last year for attempting to do just that in Spain.

Now, Rivas has crossed the Atlantic Ocean to remind everyone that the government of Spain has yet to send a formal reply to the Argentinean judge who, eight months ago, sent a letter rogatory with an apparently simple question: "Have the crimes perpetrated during the Civil War and dictatorship been tried in Spain?"

"What's taking them so long? The answer is no! I want people to know what is going on, that's why I came. But what can you expect from a country that does not even dare say that Franco was a dictator?" he asks, in reference to the recent controversy over a biographical dictionary published by the Royal Academy of History that coyly referred to Franco as "head of state."

"Francoism is not over, and the best proof of it is the maneuvering against Garzón," says Rivas about the way the judge was deemed to have deliberately overstepped his jurisdiction in attempting to try Francoist crimes. Rivas was born in 1920 in the village of Castro de Rei, in Lugo province. He lost his mother at the age of five ("I always knew she died from overwork"), at age nine he emigrated to Argentina, and at 16 he received the worst news in his life: "The Falangists have killed Papa."

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. At the very least there is the issue of standing

There is no requirement that Spain answer an Argentinean judge. Much of this would be bound up in protocol and sovereignty issues, historical crimes not withstanding.