Spain has added  its share of criminal activity in countries all around the world, from the time its sailors learned to sail the ocean blue.  Closer to our time the military-church uprising against the elected government in 1936 was filled with atrocities – which continued even after the victors declared peace.

In recent years, since Democracy was fully restored in the elections of 1982,  the Spanish state has been a model citizen in the world.  It’s judiciary has led the way in defining what a new world might look like where terrorists, of the state or non-state kind, can’t just go into retirement and never be called to account for old crimes.  The latest blow on the drums of justice came last week as Judge Eloy Velasco Nuñez of Spain’s National Court, issued arrest warrants for 20 El Salvadorans, of very high rank during the infamous US promoted “civil war” in the 1980s, for the murders of 5 Spanish born Jesuits along with another Jesuit and two housekeepers.

…the 20 men named in the warrants never had doubts about “carrying out the most execrable crimes against people merely to impose their strategies and ideas, ” said the Judge in his arrest document.

The attack on the priests — who were killed along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter — was considered brutal even in a civil war known for its violence against civilians.

Five of the six Jesuits were born in Spain, where judges have used the doctrine of universal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed outside of the country, as they did against the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

NY Times

We only hope Henry Kissinger lives long enough to be put on notice for his bloody work in the same decade.  And surely some Spaniards were killed mercilessly in Iraq, victims of a war begun without reason by men willing  ”to impose their strategies and ideas…”

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