Spain’s Bulldog on the Bench Is Loved, Hated

Once a year, Judge Baltasar Garzon comes out from behind the bodyguards and bulletproof cars of his vida blindada, the “armored life” endured by endangered crime fighters in the Spanish-speaking world.

Wearing cleats and goalie gear instead of a designer suit, Garzon takes the field at a pro soccer stadium for an annual celebrity game he organizes to benefit anti-drug charities.

It’s a risk. The list of potential assassins is long. Garzon has prosecuted Basque and Islamic terrorists, Spanish Cabinet ministers and police chiefs, South American tyrants, drug lords, weapons traffickers and thugs of assorted nationalities.

But the judge plays soccer the way he leads police raids, climbs mountains, dances flamenco at parties, dabbles at bullfighting and travels the world: with abandon.

It takes a certain personality to throw yourself around in front of a goal. You have to be tough and quick. It doesn’t hurt to be cocky, a bit reckless. You are the difference between triumph and disaster, a leader who is profoundly alone at the moment of truth.

At 46, Garzon is one of the most admired and criticized law enforcement officials in Europe and Latin America. And a born goalie.

“He accepts risk, he understands that risk is something circumstantial that you accept like rainy or sunny weather,” said Judge Tomas Sanz, a close friend. “If he has to submerge 10 or 15 meters scuba diving in Acapulco, he submerges. Participating to the utmost. . . . He tries to enjoy everything, to get to know everything.”

In 1998, Garzon ensured his place in history with a stroke of a pen. He issued a warrant for former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, whose 16-month house arrest in London amounted to a revolution for international law. The attempted trans-border prosecution of Pinochet--British officials eventually ordered his release--was a warning shot that echoes in the nightmares of despots.

An investigative magistrate who joined the elite Audiencia Nacional court in 1988, Garzon has been a decisive, divisive force during Spain’s boom years. Economically and culturally, the country has caught up with longtime European powers by balancing rich tradition and rapid change. Garzon embodies modern Spain: brash, stylish, fun-loving, frenetic.

Law-and-Order Leftist Has Admirers, Enemies

Garzon, who made a brief foray into politics in 1993, represents a breed that may seem odd to a U.S. perspective: a law-and-order leftist.

“I think a world can be created that differs from a strict and voracious globalization that crushes the weakest sectors and creates poverty and misery,” he said recently in a rare interview. “If it’s a choice between economic power and solidarity, I’m inclined toward solidarity. If being leftist is fighting against corruption, for better income distribution, responsive public services and an economic power that doesn’t dominate us to the point of losing our identity, then I’m leftist. If it’s rightist, then I’m rightist.”

The judge has become a kind of national symbol, evoking paladins such as the fictional Don Quixote and the real-life El Cid, a medieval warrior who fought the Moors. Garzon has the courage of El Cid and the idealism of Don Quixote, his admirers say.

His enemies retort that, like Don Quixote, he is deluded; and that El Cid, upon closer inspection, was less a gallant knight than a ruthless zealot.

“He’d like to be everything: president of the world,” scoffed Socialist Sen. Juan Alberto Belloch, a former Cabinet minister and longtime nemesis. “No post is enough for him. His ambition is unlimited. . . . His style clashes with what a judge should be. He doesn’t do the job well. There are errors, gaps in his work. He has a comic-book view of the world.”

Although Garzon rarely speaks in public--he granted the interview with The Times on the condition that he would not discuss open cases--his critics call him a publicity hound. European investigative magistrates have high profiles, combining attributes of U.S. prosecutors, judges and police chiefs.

Garzon’s investigations have caught big fish, notably a former interior minister and security chiefs who were convicted in the mid-’90s of running anti-terrorist death squads. But he is also accused of filing spectacular indictments that are whittled down by other courts, with suspects released or acquitted.

His defenders argue that police bring him hot leads because he is a pioneer, building innovative cases that test the limits of a changing justice system--and international jurisprudence.

Most Spaniards praise his fight against the initials of fear: ETA. The Basque terrorist group has killed more than 800 people since 1968. ETA, short for Basque Homeland and Freedom, survives in this otherwise peaceful society because some Spanish leaders believe that it’s politically incorrect to confront nationalist fanaticism, and others are tacit accomplices of the terrorists.

Not only has Garzon gone after the killers, he broke ground by targeting ETA’s once-untouchable support network: financiers, political activists, and journalists accused of acting as a sinister intelligence service.

When it comes to making enemies, the judge is evenhanded. He inspires hatred among terrorists but also the former anti-terrorist officials he prosecuted. He irritated the center-right government with a crusade against repressers in South America, where Spanish firms have billion-dollar investments. He charged a Syrian arms trafficker in the killing of wheelchair-bound U.S. tourist Leon Klinghoffer during a 1985 hijacking of a cruise ship by Palestinians, whose cause is dear to European leftists. The arms merchant was acquitted in 1995.

Garzon’s latest exploit: In November, he became the first justice official outside the United States to lock up Islamic extremists and accuse them in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Dismantling an Al Qaeda terrorist cell in Madrid, Garzon found links to the World Trade Center hijackers. The phone number of Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, the cell’s alleged boss, surfaced in the apartment of suspected hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta in Hamburg, Germany. Barakat allegedly discussed the attacks in code during wiretapped conversations before Sept. 11, and allegedly traveled the world meeting with Al Qaeda leaders.

During a marathon weekend, Garzon interrogated 11 suspects starting at 11 a.m. on a Saturday. About 2 a.m. Sunday, he summoned the final prisoner, Ahmad Raghad Mardini, and greeted him with a handshake, according to defense attorney Jacinto Gil.

Despite the late hour, Garzon wore a suit and looked crisp and alert, said Gil, who was present. The judge asked quiet, precise questions of Mardini, a Syrian-born shopkeeper with apparently tangential ties to the case. Garzon was unfailingly polite toward the distraught prisoner, according to the lawyer.

“There is no pressure on the suspect,” Gil said. “In fact, he helps the suspect express himself. I remember Mardini, with his serious health problems, had a moment when he could not even talk, so they brought him a glass of water. [Garzon said] ‘Calm down, sir, be calm.’ ”

Garzon finished with Mardini, who was released without charge, about 2:30 a.m., Gil said. Then the judge lived up to the title of a recent biography: “Garzon: The Man Who Saw Sunrise.” By 8:15 a.m., he had written the indictment and posted it on the Internet, according to Gil.

Now the judge must prove that his suspects were accomplices of the hijackers. So far, defense attorneys, say the case seems politically driven by Spanish hopes of reciprocal U.S. assistance. “What you can see is really weak,” Gil said. “We are paying a price for U.S. help in the fight against ETA.”

U.S. officials see Spain as a model anti-terrorist partner. Garzon has worked closely with U.S. counterparts and admires former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh.

But Garzon does not applaud the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan. A worldwide crackdown by police and intelligence agencies, he said, would have been better than using troops who so far have not captured Osama bin Laden.

“What has been achieved?” he asked. “I focus more on the displaced people, the people who lost their lives, the possible victims of human rights violations. There are many dictatorial regimes in the world, but they have not all received the same treatment.”

Like many Europeans, Garzon criticized the detention without access to lawyers of suspected Al Qaeda members at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“What does this mean?” he said. “Is this vengeance? Either you are a terrorist or you are a prisoner of war. Which is it? What will happen when the evidence from Guantanamo has to be evaluated?”

Judge Once Worked as a Gas Station Attendant

Garzon once studied to be a priest. He rarely goes to Mass, but he retains an air of the seminary. His glasses frame a stare that is solemn but not pompous. A slicked-back crest of silver hair rises from the middle of his forehead. He works to keep his thick-set frame in shape, doing hundreds of sit-ups each morning.

Ideological differences don’t stop Garzon from calling the United States “one of the most attractive countries there is.” He lectures at U.S. universities. His daughter, one of three children, studied in Ohio. He likes Bruce Springsteen.

Discussing music, Garzon grins and seems suddenly younger. “I really like Dire Straits too. Mark Knopfler, what a guitarist. It’s a shame that band broke up.”

The decor of Garzon’s office reflects his eclectic tastes and roots in the Andalusia region of southern Spain, the home of bullfights and flamenco. There are paintings of matadors, figurines of jazz musicians, African and Latin American art, and photographs of Garzon with his children, with Spanish King Juan Carlos I and with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Beneath a glass coffee table reclines a papier-mache statue of a clown.

He comes from peasant stock, the son of a gas station attendant. Garzon paid for his studies with jobs at the gas station and as a waiter. He married his college girlfriend and became a judge at 25.

By 1993, Garzon had made a name for himself, and the politicians came calling. Then-Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, the charming and crafty patriarch of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, invited Garzon to join and help revive a government that was embroiled in corruption after advancing an exemplary democratic transition.

Garzon joined the Socialist legislative ticket in a coveted No. 2 spot behind Gonzalez. After helping the prime minister win reelection, he became a congressman and deputy interior minister.

The judge says he became disenchanted when Gonzalez failed to clean house. Critics say Garzon craved a Cabinet post but was blocked by Sen. Belloch, who took charge of both the justice and interior ministries in 1994.

Garzon resigned, returned to his chambers and resumed a longtime investigation of government figures involved in death squads, a scandal that helped topple the Socialists in 1996 after 14 years in power.

Belloch accuses Garzon of pursuing the case as revenge.

“It’s preposterous. He shouldn’t have been the judge in this matter,” Belloch said. “The investigation was necessary. . . . But the methodology was perverse.”

Garzon says the experience left him with no political appetite.

“I’m fine where I am,” he said.

Speculation persists about his next move. A proponent of the globalization of justice, he could be a contender one day for an international justice post, perhaps with a war crimes court or a proposed international criminal tribunal.

For the moment, friends say, Garzon thrives on cheers he gets from people on the street, especially in Latin America, which is starved for heroes.

“I have traveled with him to Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and in those countries I have seen the great affection and respect and hope that people feel toward Judge Garzon,” Sanz said. “In terms of admiration, he’s a millionaire.”