Word: n
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Milan's Piazzale Loreto. France prosecuted its Vichy collaborators in a series of contentious trials that stretched into the 1990s. On Oct. 16, it was finally Spain's turn. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died 33 years ago, but it was only this week that Judge Baltasar Garzón of the National Court declared him and his cronies guilty of crimes against humanity and authorized a long-awaited investigation into their misdeeds...
...civil war and the following dictatorship, and even granted amnesty to those who carried out the Francoist repression. With his ruling, which authorizes the National Court to investigate the disappearance and assassination of some 114,000 victims of the regime between the years 1936 and 1952, Garzón has brought that silence officially...
...based on his own finding that Franco and 34 of his generals and ministers were guilty of crimes against humanity both for initiating the 1936 military uprising against Spain's legally elected democratic government, and for subsequently attempting to systematically eliminate the regime's supposed political enemies. Garzón has also ordered the exhumation of 19 mass graves from the era, including, most notably, one that is supposedly the final resting place of poet Federico García Lorca...
...Julián Casanova, a historian at the University of Zaragoza, sees Garzón ruling as a historic turning point. "It's true that recently we've seen a move toward retributive justice [for Franco's victims]," he says. "But this opens the way for the punitive justice that I've long thought we needed...
...country where some members of Franco's regime continued to hold office long after the dictatorship ended, not everyone supports the decision - including the court's lead prosecutor, who is appealing the ruling. Senator Agustín Conde, spokesperson on judicial affairs for the opposition Popular Party, lamented that Garzón was "reopening wounds that were happily healed," and an editorial in the center-right paper El Mundo warned that "the politics of memory are nasty" and constitute a "bloodless form of vengeance...