Philippe Sands: "Spain's painful irony in the Pinochet case is its refusal to confront its own past and judge the crimes of Franco's regime."

"It wasn't just about Pinochet, it was about Franco. At least, that's how the Spanish side felt," is how Philippe Sands (London, 1960) summarizes one of the most important cases of his career, the attempted extradition of the Chilean dictator to Spain, on the orders of Judge Baltasar Garzón. "There was no precedent, not in the United Kingdom or anywhere else. A former head of state had never been arrested in another country for an international crime," he explained yesterday at the presentation of his new book, Calle Londres 38 (Anagrama), at the CCCB in Barcelona. It was an investigation that took him eight years of work and concludes his trilogy on the crimes of Nazism, which he began with the award-winning Calle Este-Oeste (East-West Street).

When Pinochet was arrested in London on October 16, 1998, after undergoing surgery, Sands was a 38-year-old lawyer just starting his university professorship. Pinochet's legal team contacted him to join his defense team, which had filed an appeal to stop his extradition to Spain. "I've only rejected two cases in my life: Pinochet's and Saddam Hussein's," he admits. In the end, he ended up joining the team of lawyers at Amnesty International, which joined the case.

"It was a landmark immunity case, with consequences to this day, whether it concerned the arrest warrants for Putin or Netanyahu ," Sands notes. Although she played "a supporting role" in the trial, almost 25 years later she met with all the key players: lawyers for both sides, judges, witnesses, even the Metropolitan Police interpreter who translated for Pinochet into Spanish ( Jean Pateras , one of the most outspoken voices in the book, thanks to her outsider's perspective, that of a citizen not an expert in the law).

"Of course, Garzón got all the media attention and credit, but if it weren't for Juan Garcés [a Spanish lawyer who in his youth had been an advisor to Salvador Allende ] and the prosecutor Carlos Castresana, both still active today, there wouldn't have been a case. They started it in 1996," notes Sands, who has written an addictive legal essay of almost 500 pages, almost a historical thriller that Chilean filmmaker Felipe Gálvez will bring to the big screen.

"It seemed to me that this was, above all, a Chilean story, and even more a Spanish story than a British one," notes the jurist, who in the book delves into the "painful irony of Spain's lack of political will and refusal to confront its own dictatorial past and prosecute the crimes of Francoism." Although legally Spain had the legitimacy to prosecute an international crime, politically the issue was controversial. " The Aznar government was against extradition ," Sands recalls.

One of the book's major revelations is "the deal struck by the United Kingdom, under Tony Blair, and Chile, under President Eduardo Frei, to avoid Pinochet's extradition to Spain: he would return to Chile, where he would be stripped of his immunity to stand trial for the Caravan of Death," the murder of 97 people following his 1973 coup d'état. "There is a document ordering the elimination of seven people, personally signed by Pinochet," Sands maintains. The legal subterfuge to avoid extradition was a dubious medical report concluding that the octogenarian Pinochet's health was deteriorating, supposedly incapable of standing trial. "I conclusively proved that the illness was fake," he notes.

But it was the same mechanism the lawyers used to delay the Caravan of Death trial. While legal appeals were delaying the proceedings, Pinochet suffered a heart attack in 2006. He died without ever setting foot in prison, without a legal conviction.

"Immunity and impunity often go hand in hand," Sands sighs. "But I don't think Pinochet enjoyed total impunity. He ended up under house arrest, unable to walk the streets of his own city, accused in many cases, and I think he ended up a broken human being... Legally, yes, he got off scot-free, which of course angered a lot of people and the victims."

The consequences of the Pinochet case were not very positive in Spain: the Aznar government restricted universal jurisdiction to prevent similar cases from occurring. "It had major political consequences. Today, Spain could not launch the same proceedings against Pinochet. And Garzón ended up being removed from the judiciary," Sands laments. In 2012, by decision of the Supreme Court, Garzón was dismissed and disqualified for the Gürtel case, in which he was found guilty of ordering illegal wiretaps. Although in 2021 the UN Human Rights Committee criticized the lack of impartiality and arbitrariness of the three trials to which the judge was subjected.

Sands intertwines the trial of Pinochet with the story of Walther Rauff, a former SS officer who fled to Chile, to remote Patagonia, to end his days running a spider crab cannery. Who was Rauff? The ideologist of the mobile gas vans, which he would perfect to murder up to 50 people at a time. Researching for East-West Street , Sands discovered that a cousin of his mother (Herta, a girl of barely 12) "was probably among the 97,000 people whose life ended in one of Walther Rauff's dark gray gas vans ." Vans that, to add to the horror, were often painted with a red cross as if they were ambulances. Although he was pursued for crimes against humanity, Rauff died in 1984 of a heart attack. "Justice is not only in the courts. Literature can also fill in the flaws and gaps in the legal system ," Sands consoles himself. And he gives an example: Roberto Bolaño, whose books accompanied him on his trips to Patagonia.