It is clear that the first to respect justice are, in all cases, the judiciary, which must be avoided by all means at their disposal because their decisions are driven by corporate interests. Trust in justice, writes Judge Miguel Pasco in his book Decision office (Debate, 2025), we cannot base this on the infallibility of young people, as some of them are known for their tendency to join their colleagues and adhere to the political or ideological factors specific to each situation. Trust depends on the reliability of the system. The power of the system is not in the governance, but in the decision-making procedures, it is in the decision, in the governance. This is what must be protected, and what was unfortunately extraordinarily at risk in the case against the country’s financial general, Álvaro García Ortiz.
The first anomaly is that the conviction was made publicly without including the sentence, along with the arguments that led to this conclusion. This is not the first time this has happened, but in most cases, these rulings are unanimous, and all members of the court contradict them. If we assume that in a case related to a case involving maximum state power, judgments should proceed through long and deep deliberation, but following up on what happened suggests quite the opposite. Five Supreme Court justices thought one thing when they entered the room (they were to convict) and thought the opposite. After a week, I was left with the impression that at no time had there been any necessary discussion or exchange of ideas.
The only change that occurred was the testimony of several journalists who confirmed that the State Inspector General was in no way sufficient to indicate that Alberto González Amador had admitted to the existence of a farm fraud. Since journalists are constitutionally obligated to keep their sources confidential, but under no circumstances have the right to lie to the courts, it was up to them only to accept their declaration or open a procedure to lie to the court. Awaiting the verdict, the five judges who decided to convict the Malian general seem to have chosen the option of facing journalists and, at the request of Judge Marchena, decided to return to the official financial memorandum, initially ignored as a test, which had suddenly returned to the fore as an indisputable test.
Jueses, the judicial system in a democratic country, are based on the understanding that the best way to resolve a dispute “is limited to a process full of guarantees, at the end of which a third party (the Supreme Court), whose members alone know, and assume a lot, will decide who is right. It is possible that some of these Jueses will be convinced of the urgent need to change the government, but such change is only possible in the Spanish democratic system through a parliamentary majority. The legal standard, misappropriation of the judicial function ordered.”
Delaying the sentence and the arguments will likely cause the García Ortiz case to be overshadowed by other news, which is easily distributed endlessly through the algorithms created by the former professor across social networks. Therefore, it will be important that responsible experts and journalists who have known this for a long time do not get distracted and stay focused. It is important, because what we are dealing with in this case is a political question of the first degree: Did the Malian general commit the crime of disclosing confidential data? That the sections of the Supreme Court, their opinions in their classification of the case, were unable to discuss according to their knowledge of the law and their decision was characterized by conviction from the first minute? Because if that were the case, we would be facing a serious situation of potential malfeasance. You will have to wait for the sentence, securing one and the other, but it is precisely when it is late and the arguments will not be understood at the same time that this raises the most concerns.
Sociologist Juan Linz, an expert on the struggle of democracies, has pointed out that we have often tended to ignore the actions of groups that were initially interested in the survival of the democratic system, but eventually withdrew their support, for institutional or ideological reasons, to institutions that would have been favorable or at least neutral. Here democracies suffer greater harm.
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