The European Council on Foreign Relations

WikiLeaks: A Spanish political earthquake

Date: 1st December 2010  |  Author: Jose Ignacio Torreblanca,

Categories: Rule of law, democracy and human rights, Europe and the world,
Tags: guantanamo, obama, spain, us, wikileaks

Wikileaks is causing a political earthquake in Spain. In a country where Americans are already not very popular due to continued American support for Franco's dictatorship, seeing now (in writing) how American diplomats push and bully Spanish officials to follow up their “national interests” is raising a lot of eyebrows.

In particular, WikiLeaks's revelations are damaging the Spanish public prosecutor, which seems to have been consistently promising the US government that he would act to help Spanish judges get their hands off various cases which could potentially involve American officials. First, the shooting of a Spanish journalist, José Couso, by American troops in Baghdad during the Iraq war - who Spanish judges then wanted to prosecute. Second, the alleged torturing of a Spanish citizen of Moroccan origin in Guantánamo, which Spanish courts were also interested in. And finally, the attempt to investigate the usage by the CIA of Mallorca as an operations basis for the extraordinary renditions which the Bush government got involved in. In all these cases, Spanish judges tried to open cases based on Spanish universal jurisdiction laws. However, both the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the Public prosecutor took the outmost care to slow down the process or even have them filed.

As everyone knows, the Iraq war did not go well with Spanish public opinion, and in fact was a key element bringing the Socialists to power. Now it seems that the Socialists were in fact so worried about the negative impact of the unilateral withdrawal from Iraq that they did not further want to irritate the American government. So, the Iraq war is in fact also becoming a problem for the Socialists, when it had always been something helping them politically. The leaks are thus truly damaging the US, a point seen in the fact that American ambassador in Madrid recorded a public message expressing his hopes that the bilateral relationship with Spain would not suffer. Few people would trust again American diplomats.

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