Narco, Terror, and Politics in Southwestern Europe (7/10). Baltasar Garzón.

Dramatis personae IV: Baltasar Garzón

Baltasar Garzón’s both professional and personal lives are very colourful, to say the least.

Baltasar Garzón Real (Torres, Jaén, Spain, 1955) is a Spanish former judge, who nowadays privately practices as an attorney.

To start with, Garzón was expelled from the judicial career.

Garzón used to serve as a Spanish National Court judge, a chamber in charge of the worst organized crime, terrorism, and money laundering offences, until 2011 when he was removed from the judicial career, to be expelled from it in 2012, after being convicted for prevarication by the Supreme Court.

The crime Garzón committed was to illegally listen to conversations between defence lawyers and their defendants in a corruption case that affected the Spanish Conservative Party and for which he was the responsible judge.

Garzón also had a try with politics, back in his younger years as a judge.

In 1993, the President of the Socialist Government, Felipe González, persuaded Garzón to join his party's electoral lists under the promise that he would be appointed Minister of both Justice and Interior if the results of the elections were favourable to the Socialists.

González was indeed re-elected as President of the Government; however, he forgot his promise to Baltasar Garzón, who was only appointed Secretary of State for Security reporting to an Interior Minister much preferred by González.

This decision caused great disappointment to Garzón, who soon left the Government and returned to his judicial career with an insatiable thirst for revenge on González, against whom Garzón used all the information to which he had privileged access during his time as Head of Spanish Security on the details of González Government’s involvement in the dirty war against the Spanish terrorist organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA).

Most importantly, Garzón is connected to some of the most dubious Venezuelan regime characters.

According to Madrid's ABC newspaper, in 2016, when Hugo ‘El Pollo’ Carvajal was already making plans to leave Venezuela, he met with private lawyer Baltasar Garzón on Margarita Island in Venezuela.

Recently, Baltasar Garzón had been retained as defence attorney for Alex Saab, Nicolás Maduro's most important frontman, with the mission to help Saab avoid his extradition to the US, as he was detained in Cabo Verde by surprise.

In June 2020, Alex Saab’s private jet had to make a technical stop in that African archipelago and island country in one of his countless business trips between Tehran and Caracas.

As it was rumoured, thanks to the combined intervention of Israeli Intelligence and the United States (US) Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Cabo Verde authorities retained Saab at that time to ascertain US Justice arguments for his outstanding requested extradition.

Baltazar Garzón was unable to prevent the extradition of Saab, who was finally handed over to the US in October 2021, where he remains until this day.

At the beginning of 2022, ABC newspaper also revealed that Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra (a.k.a. 'Nicolasito'), Nicolás Maduro’s son, who happens to live in Madrid, hired Baltasar Garzón’s law firm, Ilocad, to take legal action before Spanish courts against the Venezuelan-origin and Spanish national human rights lawyer, Tamara Sujú, who is the main driver of the International Criminal Court's investigation against Maduro and his regime for crimes against humanity.

‘Nicolasito’ filed a request for conciliation before a complaint for libel against Sujú for her publishing last year on Twitter a message in which she claimed that ‘Nicolasito’ had replaced Alex Saab as the leader of Maduro Sr.’s "mafia gang".

Garzón's relationships also jump over the fence of privacy.

Currently, Baltasar Garzón shares his life with Dolores Delgado, his sentimental partner, something that should be nobody’s business.

Or it should, given the minutiae that Dolores Delgado happened to be the Kingdom of Spain’s State Attorney-General, from February 2020 to July 2022, as she was appointed to that role by Pedro Sánchez immediately after serving as his Minister of Justice.

During those two years, Baltasar Garzón seemed to be unaware of the "conflict of interest" concept’s true meaning and so was Dolores Delgado of that of "independence".

Nevertheless, Ms. Delgado managed to be replaced by álvaro García Ortiz, her always faithful and loyal right-hand man, and a former Socialist Party active militant.

With such an appointment, Dolores Delgado's replacement guarantees the continuity of her work at the head of the Public Prosecutor's Office for García Ortiz’s remaining term in office.

Lastly, Garzón has been, for years, one of the regulars in Buenos Aires, where the local press gives an uncensored account of the intimate relationship, going back in time, that Baltazar Garzón maintains, or used to maintain with Argentina’s Vice President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (a.k.a. CFK), former wife of Argentina’s late former President Néstor Kirchner.

No one knows how much money Garzón is making as a private lawyer, since he was expelled from the judiciary, apart from the fact of his new €2 million villa acquisition that he made in one of the best areas of Madrid suburbia to move into with his partner, the then Spain’s Attorney General, Dolores Delgado*.

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* Jiménez Losantos, Federico: “Garzón, Zapatero y la Banda de Puebla hacen las Américas”, Libertad Digital, December 5, 2021; “El hijo de Maduro persigue en los tribunales espa?oles a la abogada que denuncia al chavismo ante La Haya”, ABC, January 13, 2022; “Tamara Sujú, la abogada que acorrala al chavismo en La Haya: ?Zapatero es cómplice de lo que está pasando en Venezuela?”, El Debate, January 15, 2022; and “Tamara Sujú: ?El chavismo me persiguió en Venezuela, República Checa, y ahora viene a por mí en Espa?a?”, ABC, January 17, 2022; “Federico Jiménez Losantos entrevista a Tamara Sujú”, esRadio, January 21, 2022; “Baltasar Garzón y Dolores Delgado estrenan mansión de dos millones en una zona exclusiva de Madrid”, El Debate, February 2, 2022; “álvaro Nieto: ?De Plus Ultra y del Delcygate solo hemos visto la punta del iceberg?”, The Objective, February 2, 2022; “Pedro Sánchez releva a Dolores Delgado al frente de la Fiscalía General del Estado”, OK Diario, July 19, 2022; “álvaro García Ortiz, no 2 de Delgado, sustituye a la ex ministra como fiscal general del Estado”, OK Diario, July 19, 2022; “La fiscal general Dolores Delgado dimite por razones de salud y deja a su mano derecha”, Vozpopuli, July 19, 2022; “Quién es álvaro García Ortiz, sucesor de Dolores Delgado como fiscal general”, Vozpopuli, July 19, 2022; “Dolores Delgado dimite como fiscal general del Estado”, Libertad Digital, July 19, 2022; “El pasado socialista de álvaro García Ortiz que compromete de nuevo la independencia de la FGE”, El Debate, July 19, 2022; “Dimite Dolores Delgado como fiscal general del Estado por razones de salud”, El Debate, July 19, 2022; “Dolores Delgado renuncia como fiscal general del Estado tras dos a?os en el cargo”, The Objective, July 19, 2022; “Dolores Delgado renuncia al cargo de fiscal general ?por motivos personales?”, ABC, July 19, 2022; “García Ortiz, lealtad a prueba de fuego”, ABC, July 19, 2022; and “Dolores Delgado renuncia como Fiscal General del Estado”, El Mundo, July 19, 2022.

NB: All information and data about the facts and people in this article were taken from open and public sources, which are cited here. Any errors they may have made are not attributable to the author of this article, but to those of the publications from which they were taken. This series of articles was completed on July 29, 2022.