A MERE five weeks before the most crucial Spanish elections since 1982, the major parties find themselves staring into an abyss which is arguably of their own making.
The Socialists (Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol, or PSOE), facing likely defeat after 13 years in power, saw their longest serving Interior Minister indicted for setting up death squads.
Their centre right rivals, the Partido Popular (PP), watched, the lid come loose on serious evidence that several of their own leaders had been involved in an earlier "dirty war" scandal. The appalling vista of blood on the hands of both the big Spanish democratic parties loomed.
This prospect raises a curious moral dilemma is the revelation of the whole truth about the post Franco Spanish security forces healthy for a democracy which is still fragile? There is no doubt however, that the zeal of each party in pursuit of the truth in this area has been directly proportional to the damage they believe the facts will do to their opponents.
As a result, most Spanish citizens now believe that both these parties have been guilty, at the very least, of turning a blind eye to the use of illegal means, including murder, in the battle against terrorism.
For more than a year, the PP has aggressively supported judicial investigations into the responsibility of the PSOE for organising and financing the GAL (Grupos Anti Teroristas de Liberacion). GAL was responsible for 27 murders between 1983 and 1987. Most of the victims were members of ETA (the Basque revolutionary group which has itself killed hundreds of people in pursuit of full Basque independence). Some victims, however, were innocent bystanders.
Last Wednesday, these investigations reached the latest in a series of sensational climaxes. Mr Jose Barrionuevo, the PSOE Interior Minister from 1982-1988, was charged in the Supreme Court with kidnapping, abuse of public funds, and "leading an armed gang". Mr Barrionuevo, who remains an MP and a senior candidate in the forthcoming elections, denies all charges.
His candidature, confirmed yesterday, incenses the PP "They are asking the voters to politically pardon GAL. This seems to me a monstrosity," a PP spokesman said.
The embarrassment for the PSOE leader, the Spanish Prime Minister, Mr Felipe Gonzalez, could hardly be greater. Following a devastating series of confessions from senior socialists involved in GAL, it is now widely suspected that Mr Gonzalez himself might be the mysterious "Senor X", the real boss of the death squads, though no hard evidence of this has been produced.
Last Thursday, the Socialists seemed to hit back in kind. Mr Jose Bono, a powerful party baron, recalled that PP leaders had themselves aborted a senate investigation into GAL. They did this, he claimed, because the commission threatened to reveal the PP men's own complicity in death squads which operated while they were ministers in Adolfo Suarez's post Franco governments between 1976 and 1982.
According to Mr Bono Gen Saenz de Santa Maria, who served in top anti terrorist positions under both administrations, told him that he had warned the PP that, if he were called as a commission witness, he would spill the beans about their own activities. Gen Santa Maria, a tough, bluff career soldier who supports the PSOE, has made clear his contempt for what he calls PP hypocrisy about GAL.
"Against ETA, both parties used exactly the same methods," he said in an interview last year, without specifying those methods. It is common knowledge that so called uncontrollable groups which operated under colourful cover names like the Apostolic Anti Communist Alliance, the Warriors of Christ The King, and the Hitler Commando were actually controlled by the police in the late 1970s.
Many observers wondered at the audacity of the PP in pursuing the GAL allegations, given their own history. The one certainty is that whatever party forms a government in March, it will have to think twice about future methods of pursuing terrorists.
