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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
And I'm Audie Cornish.
To Madrid now, where Spain's most famous judge has found himself on trial. His name is Baltasar Garzon. Thousands of Spaniards marched yesterday to support him.
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CORNISH: He is best known as a human rights crusader who indicted the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. But as Lauren Frayer reports from Madrid, the judge found himself in the defendant's chair when he started looking into Spain's own Fascist past.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Dateline Spain, July 18, 1936.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: There are more than 100,000 unsolved cases of deaths or disappearances from Spain's 1930s civil war. Mass graves keep turning up across Spain, but no one has been prosecuted, except for the man who tried to investigate them.
Baltasar Garzon was allowed to indict Augusto Pinochet. He was even allowed to start investigating U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for allegedly authorizing torture.
BALTASAR GARZON JUDGE, SPAIN: (Foreign language spoken).
FRAYER: But when Spain tries to investigate its own actions, Garzon told Democracy Now last year, it denies access to the facts and puts the judge himself on trial. In 2008, Garzon ordered mass graves exhumed and charged the late dictator Francisco Franco with murder. Two far-right groups then sued, accusing Garzon of violating a 1977 amnesty. That law, passed two years after Franco died, makes it illegal to revisit political crimes from that era. But Garzon says some atrocities are just too horrible to have a statute of limitations.
Reed Brody from Human Rights Watch agrees and points out that Spain didn't object when Garzon ignored amnesty laws in other countries.
REED BRODY: There were amnesties in Chile, in Argentina, in Peru and Guatemala. And in all of those cases, international law required an investigation of these crimes. Judge Garzon attempted to do the same thing, and he's being prosecuted for it.
FRAYER: As an investigative judge, Garzon's job is like that of a U.S. district attorney. He's put drug barons, Basque terrorists and corrupt politicians behind bars. He leapfrogged his colleagues to stardom. Now they're the ones passing judgment on him.
José Ignacio Wert is a Cabinet minister in Spain's new conservative government. He acknowledges there's been some resentment of Garzon inside Spain's halls of power. He says his colleagues have coined a term: Garzonada.
JOSE IGNACIO: It's derogatory. Garzonada means taking decisions that are very - I mean have a great appeal to the media, great visibility but that are not compliant with laws. That's a Garzonada.
FRAYER: Garzon may be the darling of human rights groups abroad, but Spaniards are divided. Seventy-five years after its civil war, Spain still hasn't had a truth and reconciliation process. In 2007, the socialists passed a Historical Memory law recognizing victims on both sides.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
FRAYER: On the steps of a law school in Madrid, students smoke and argue over whether Garzon should be their role model.
FRANCISCO REYNA: He's taken so many steps forward. Too forward, I would say.
FRAYER: Student Francisco Reyna says the famous judge is wrong to reopen wounds from the past.
The Franco case is just one of three trials against Garzon. A verdict is pending on the legality of wiretaps he used to record inmates and their lawyers in 2008. It was part of a larger probe into alleged corruption involving Spain's now ruling conservative party.
If Garzon is convicted, a whole lot of evidence against the conservatives could be thrown out. A third case involves alleged payments to him from Spanish banks. The confluence of all these trials, just after conservatives took power here last month, raises eyebrows for Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch.
BRODY: Garzon's enemies are trying to cut him down to size. This is a reprisal against Judge Garzon for taking on controversial cases against vested interests.
FRAYER: If he's convicted on any of the charges, Garzon would be barred from the bench in Spain. But he could retain a high profile abroad with his consulting work at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Madrid.