It was natural that, in his speech at the solemn opening ceremony of the judicial year, presided over by King Felipe VI, the state attorney generalAlvaro Garcia Ortiz, will quote Francisco Javier Elola. He was the first attorney general of the Second Republic, appointed in May 1931, but he resigned only a month later when he was appointed judge of the Supreme Court. And all this despite being considered by some as a protégé of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, in which he was president of the Mixed Commission of Banks and the Madrid Stock Exchange, the body that regulated labor relations between employers and employees.
The mention of García Ortiz, who was also a deputy for Lugo for Alejandro Lerroux’s Radical Party, was explained by the fact that the Public Ministry had dedicated the book to him in 2023. Memory of Francisco Javier Elolawith studies by various authors on his figure and his thoughts.
Appointed as an instructor in the trial against those involved in the military coup of July 1936, Elola discharged himself of this responsibility by admitting evidence in favor of some of the accused. Although he had assumed this function, Elola preferred not to go into exile when Franco’s troops entered Barcelona because he considered that he had committed no crime. Tried and sentenced to death by a court martial for the same crime, military rebellion, that he had ordered against the rebel military, he was shot in Barcelona on May 12, 1939, at the age of 61.
We must hope that, like the figure of Francisco Javier Elola, the next successors of García Ortiz will also recognize that of another attorney general of the Second RepublicMarcelino Valentin Gamazo. Appointed in November 1935, he inherited the trial against the socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero, against whom his predecessor, Lorenzo Gallardo, had formulated accusations of military rebellion and incitement to rebellion for his role in the revolutionary coup against the republican constitutional order led by the PSOE in October 1934.
Largo Caballero was finally acquitted, which led Valentín Gamazo to present his resignation with dignity in December of that same year, 1935. When the Civil War broke out, he was spending the summer with his family in Rubielos Altos (Cuenca). A group of militiamen arrested him there on August 5th with his three sons.
The fact that among the militiamen there were some from Madrid would indicate that they were acting under instructions to take revenge on the former attorney general for his actions against the PSOE leader. Valentín Gamazo, 56, had to see how his own executioners murdered in front of him, one by one, his sons José Antonio, Javier and Luis, aged 22, 20 and 17 respectively.
Having noted the timing of García Ortiz’s reference to the figure of Elola, the use he made of his thought to camouflage his attack on the judges remains surprising. This was immediately noted by Professor Antonio Castillo Algarra on the social network. cover to file a complaint against the autonomy of the judiciary.
García Ortiz’s references to Elola’s thought were easily recognizable, given that they were part of his interventions in the Constituent Cortes of 1931 during the debate on the title of the Administration of Justice of the future Republican Constitution.
It is true that Elola preferred not to use the term judicial power, as García Ortiz said, but that does not prevent it from acting as an independent power, as the attorney general implied. In fact, Elola preferred to call it “Jurisdictional power, because the role of Justice is in the realization of law”as he noted in his speech of November 12, 1931.
García Ortiz left little room for speculation about the true intention of his words in the midst of the government’s assault on justice, positioning himself as attorney general in the service of Pedro Sánchez’s harassment of his political opponents. But it is up to Elola himself to clearly express his position in favor of an independent judiciary or one freed from the other powers: “freed in the sense of submission, of course,” he said in the aforementioned speech. A whole boomerang before the current head of the prosecution service.
During the parliamentary session the following day, Elola was forced to clarify that his previous speech on the judicial system did not imply any attack on the independence of the judiciary nor did he advocate its submission to the government, but quite the opposite, because he wanted to prevent The judges have “come to form an oligarchic power capable of imposing itself on democracy.” A statement that could today become like any other boomerang against which he chose by majority, even against the criteria of the majority of the Tax Council, profiles linked to his association of prosecutors to occupy relevant positions in his institution.
The figure of Elola also rises today as a beacon before the maneuvers who transformed the Constitutional Court into a political body under the orders of the government and the PSOE, even to whitewash the biggest case of corruption in democracy, the multimillionaire ERE of Andalusian socialism.
During the debate of 26 November 1931 on the creation of the Court of Constitutional Guarantees, Elola brilliantly defended his personal opposition, which was not that of his party, to an amendment of the Republican Action, in line with another of the ERC, which proposed to create a Council of the Nation, elected by direct suffrage and composed of two representatives per province. This Council should resolve conflicts between the President of the Republic and Parliament, as well as between the central power and the autonomous regions.
“The unconstitutionality of laws is a purely jurisdictional and not a political issue,” Elola said during that debate, as I have already recalled in these pages. “In no country in the world has it been thought that a political body could rule on the unconstitutionality of laws,” he said.
It is becoming increasingly clear what to do “historical memory” of certain characters This means using only what is supposed to serve its presentist objectives, in this case attacking judges, as García Ortiz did with the figure of the first attorney general of the Second Republic.
“I am not opposed to judicial autonomy; on the contrary, I am flesh of your flesh,” Elola shouted before the Republican Cortes, as if predicting that someone would still twist her words today to benefit their power interests. He understood well.
