Cleaning Hands: Garzón and the Duke

There are times when news reports make you sit up and pay particular attention. They do so because something crops up that you hadn't expected or makes you wonder what it has to do with otherwise repetitious news.

So it was with a news item related to the Duke of Palma affair. This is all terribly repetitious as it is a constant diet of evidence being made public that appears to drop the Duke ever deeper into it. But this particular news item referred to an organisation that I hadn't been aware of playing a part in the affair.

It was the headline that caught my eye. It referred to a "denuncia" against Iñaki Urdangarin (the Duke) by Manos Limpias. It was Manos Limpias that I had not expected. What did it have to do with the case against the Duke?

You might well ask what Manos Limpias is. Its full name is Colectivo de Funcionarios Públicos Manos Limpias, a union of public-sector workers that has only a few thousand members. Why should a union be involving itself with Urdangarin?

The denuncia was raised in Valencia and has to do with accusations of fraud against the Duke and his institute and accusations against representatives of the Valencia Generalitat. The court in Palma which is overseeing the case against the Duke has yet to be decide if the Manos Limpias denuncia will be incorporated into its own proceedings.

In the sense that the public authority in Valencia has been implicated, one can see why a public-sector union might become involved. But Manos Limpias is more than a union. Its name means "clean hands", and it works against corruption of different types, hence its name, and devotes a great deal of energy in pursuing cases of corruption and also in issuing denuncias.

On the face of it, this seems all perfectly laudable, but Manos Limpias operates with a very specific agenda, one that is well to the right of the political spectrum. Its founder was a leading light in the National Front, a party that was wound up in the first half of the 1990s and whose politics were as you might expect given its name. The founder, Miguel Bernard Remón, has been honoured by the Francisco Franco National Foundation; yes, that Franco.

Of other of its denuncias, perhaps the most celebrated is that against the judge Baltasar Garzón. The case against Garzón for exceeding his powers and going against the post-Franco amnesty in seeking to order exhumation of graves and to pursue crimes against humanity related to the Civil War and afterwards has largely been the doing of Manos Limpias and the current-day Falange.

Manos Limpias has not, though, issued just one denuncia against Garzón. There have been nineteen since the 1990s. The union says it doesn't have anything against Garzón, but the frequency with which it has denounced him does rather suggest otherwise.

The case against Garzón related to the Franco-era investigation, which is to come to court this month, is political, pure and simple. State prosecutors had rejected charges against Garzón, so the court case, as also with one to do with the so-called caso Gürtel, under which Garzón was pursuing Partido Popular politicians for corruption, is in effect a private prosecution.

The Garzón affair is frankly an embarrassment to Spain. He may have got carried away with his own celebrity and power, but the hounding of Garzón throws up unpleasant questions about the forces of the right and far right within the country and about the lingering legacy of Franco which Garzón sought the opportunity to investigate and which others denied him.

But what of the Duke of Palma? There is no direct link with Garzón, but there is now a common theme of Manos Limpias. The allegations against the Duke are another embarrassment - to the Royal Family - and his wife, Princess Cristina, is being dragged into the affair more and more, Manos Limpias having also called for a tax-office inspection into her links with the Duke's businesses.

There is a real fear that the Royal Family will be discredited as a consequence of what the Duke may or may not have done. And at the head of the Royal Family is King Juan Carlos, the man who rejected Francoism and the man who put a stop to the attempted coup in 1981.

In Spain there is a law of historic memory that is designed to remove the symbols of the Franco period. In Spain, however, there is also a long memory of Franco. Garzón didn't want to let it go, and nor do others want to let it go.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.