On the first day of the trial, I left the Supreme Court mid-morning thinking about everything, and a little dazed by the task, when I met Iñaki Gabilondo on Barquillo Street. Madrid is a crazy city. You are thinking about a journalistic matter, and suddenly Iñaki Gabilondo comes up to you, smiling. Like when you know what to buy at Zara, but it’s Zara for current political events. naturally. Sometimes I think the city council has prepared these things for us coming from outside. I’m hungry and Alberto Chicot gets out of the taxi. I told Gabilondo where I came from and what worried me. I told him about the institutional crisis, about the citizen’s lack of confidence in justice, about the cracks appearing in the pillars of democracy. Everything was bad. I almost grabbed his arm so he wouldn’t faint: “Sorry, it’s because of Spain.” “There are three exits,” he said. I took out my notebook feeling embarrassed, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. He said: “Land, sea and air.” “Okay, let’s see,” I thought, and I made the same noise that Rajoy had made when they asked him a question in English.
I may have underdiagnosed it. The truth is that I did not narrate it until this Thursday, while the final session of the trial continued and both parties, the prosecution and the defense, were establishing the facts, collecting the story, and presenting it. It’s great to be a judge. in TrainspottingIn Irvine Welsh’s book, a heroin addict, Spud, is on trial, and his friend Bigby, a violent psychopath who listens to the legal reasons with wide eyes and turns to Renton, the novel’s protagonist, attends the trial: “You’ve got to have a damn mind to be a judge.” I always remember this phrase, I read it at the end of the 90s and it is still there every time I see a judge. Not because of his language, but because of the final, most precise act: faith. When there is no indictment and no confession, and when both stories are heard and each combines his story with established facts, each leans to his side, who do you believe? Who convinces you? Have the investigation indicators been so loud that whether or not someone is going to go to prison is now being decided by some gentlemen who basically have to trust others? Yes, this is the ruling. That’s why you have to have brains.
In the morning, the prosecuting attorneys formulate their story. It is a moment of eloquence and persuasion. Lawyer Gabriel Rodriguez Ramos, who represents the complainant, Gonzalez Amador, when he has something powerful (cell phone deleted by FGE) points with admiration, as here we have the smoking gun. Then there are the valley moments, of course, the ones one of my aunts described with distaste: bishipacha. But it is fun, because the lawyer must maintain the accusatory tone, and raise his voice on matters that do not deserve such a tone. You see it a lot in movies: “And that day after… His blue coat“He went out into the street.” And everyone was looking at the blue coat, like, “What is this guy saying?” Gonzalez Amador’s lawyer is brilliant, or at least conscientious and diligent. It was not an easy task but he got valuable points, also from witnesses. Hands Kleins’s lawyer, who was the third or fourth to speak of the accusation, now had a piece of paper in front of him. Curious about the lawyers on the one hand: they compete with each other, like at McLaren. Let’s see who scores a goal, let’s see who finds a crack, let’s see who can find the key. The young lawyer from Manos Clines is intelligent: he sees the calico and generously assigns words to the other lawyers, looks at them with respect, is so enthusiastic that he almost demands acquittal, and is looked upon by his colleagues with disdain and horror.
In the afternoon, the FGE defense insists on well-known lines and defends a career in shooting, ironically, for two great exclusives. Journalists José Presido and Miguel Angel Campos announced that they obtained the leaked email, in effect, before the state attorney general did. Several veteran investigative journalists also had access to the content. I imagine them lying in the Supreme Court, jeopardizing their decades-long careers and exposing themselves to perjury, i.e. prison sentences, and it makes me laugh a little. But I am not a judge, I have no capacity to be a judge, and a judge cannot presuppose as I presuppose. If FGE is convicted, shouldn’t perjury be inferred from all of them when the court assumes they lied?
Three exits.
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