A year and a half of prison for neo-nazis Pedro Varela for incitement to hatred. The Barcelona court sentenced the owner of the European bookstoreAlthough with a sentence much lower than the 12 years requested by the charges, both the prosecution and Movement against intolerance and the Federation of Jewish Communities of SpainIn a 481-page judgment, the Article 6 court emphasizes that Varela, previously convicted of disseminating ideas justifying genocide, “indiscriminately disseminated,” both through the publication and distribution of books through Ediciones Ojeda, as well as through conferences at its premises, “a line of thought based on the culture of supremacist hatred and animosity and racial segregation against what he considers inferior races, especially those of Jewish origin, among other minorities, by praising the purity of the white race and the need to perpetuate this lineage, by defending its homogeneity and the need for its survival as a racial and cultural entity. Among other things, “claiming that racial integration is genocide against the white race through miscegenation“.
The magistrates thus consider that the texts and expressions that he disseminated Varela “they used language of a discriminatory nature and in particular humiliating on grounds of skin colour (“race”), national origin, religion, ideology or sexual orientation to support their discriminatory, in particular racist and anti-Semitic, theses.” The judgment also underlines that the owner of the Europa Bookstore, with its books and publications, “exalted, justified and praised the extermination actions carried out by the Third Reichcreated and led by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, defending not only his figure and his regime of terror but justifying, denying, ridiculing, trivializing and trivializing the atrocious crimes planned and executed by said regime for the collective extermination of ethnic minorities, racial minorities, sexual minorities, people with disabilities or for religious reasons, with particular emphasis on the Jewish people.
At the trial last May, Varela accused the prosecution of persecuting him and presented himself as a simple bookseller and publisher. Today, the judgment maintains that “although they sold books that apparently dealt with various topics such as politics, history, philosophy or economics, they were mostly unidirectional in their content, with an absolute lack of plurality and in which, as a whole, sometimes held the Jewish people responsible for the evils of the world, or said that blacks were inferior, that the best way to respect race is segregationthat miscegenation will lead to the disappearance of civilization, or that what they describe as a tide of immigration is an invasion of immigrants, a massive phenomenon that replaces the native population with halogens that are impossible to integrate. Among other things, even that “Women should not have the same civil rights as menor that homosexuality is a form of sexual depravity.
Also remember the failure of the fact that Varela is the ideologue of the Ojeda association and the person in charge of the entire commercial structure. Also that he directed Ceded -Spanish Circle of Friends of Europe- between 1978 and 1993, organization founded in Barcelona, which constituted the beginning of the neo-Nazi movement in Spain, with an “intense activity of publishing and dissemination of neo-Nazi propaganda both at the Spanish State and international level.
In addition to a year and a half in prison, Court disqualifies Varela to exercise educational professions or trades, in the field of teaching, sports and leisure for three years, once the custodial sentence has been served. Also exercise any profession, trade, industry or business related to the publishing, distribution and sale of books or publications both at the physical and virtual headquarters for the duration of the sentence, against which an appeal is possible.
The Barcelona Court acquitted the other four accused. Two employees of the bookstore, who did not consider it proven that they had acted for discriminatory reasons in the exercise of their activity, and two individuals who had notarial powers granted by Varela to manage the business while he was imprisoned between 2010 and 2012, a period during which the Europa Bookstore continued “at full capacity”.
