Resisting ruination: the termites of corruption in democratic Spain

ABSTRACT

This article examines the processes of ruination that are at work in democratic Spain through Xavier Artigas and Xapo Ortega’s 2014 documentary Termitas: El Observatorio DESC contra Bárcenas, which delves into the “Bárcenas case”, a political scandal involving the illegal financing of the (at the time) ruling conservative party, which showed the role that the judiciary plays in fostering corruption. The documentary argues that the ongoing ruination of democracy in Spain cannot be blamed on individual instances of corruption involving public officials and institutions, but rather that it is ingrained in the structures of the system. To give material shape to this elusive structural corruption, the documentary uses the metaphor of termite infestation, suggesting that fighting it requires more than merely scratching the surface. It demands a four-step process: detect the signs of its presence, locate the nest, be vigilant and, ultimately, exterminate it.

Through the work of Ann Laura Stoler and Rob Nixon, the goal of this article is to analyze how the termite metaphor invites us to rethink – figuratively, materially and affectively – systemic corruption as an ongoing process of ruination whose material effects do not unfold instantly, but slowly across space and time. By paying attention to the time gap between the cause of ruination and the eventual manifestation of its long-delayed effects, the documentary makes visible how systemic corruption slowly fades from public memory, resulting in political and legal inaction, and consequently, impunity. The article concludes by suggesting that while the termite metaphor gives systemic corruption a tangible materiality upon which viewers can act, the documentary’s call for the extermination of the termites as the ultimate form of resistance fails to capture its political message.

KEYWORDS:

• Systemic corruption
• judicial system
• ruination
• termites
• slow violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Gürtel”, meaning “belt” in English, after the German translation of the surname of Francisco Correa.

2 The acusación popular, a right contained in the Spanish Constitution, allows ordinary citizens to take a case to court in the public interest; the accuser has no immediate self-interest and is not specifically a victim.

3 At the 11th Barcelona Human Rights Film Festival, held in 2014, the documentary won the award for Best Feature Film.

4 According to Lessig, “Institutional corruption is manifest when there is a systemic and strategic influence which is legal, or even currently ethical, that undermines the institution’s effectiveness by diverting it from its purpose” (2013, 1).

5 As Vergara argues, in contrast to individualist approaches to corruption that “conveniently reduce it to its most visible and clear manifestations”, systemic corruption, which also includes structural forms of corruption such as legal and institutional corruption, “is a term that directly seems to address the nature of the superstructure itself, and not the manipulation of a structure that is seen as the normative ground of neutrality” (2020, 14–15).

6 I thank Luís M. González for drawing my attention to this article.

7 The article is only published, in translation from the original English, in Portuguese. The quote here comes from the author’s original, English-language version, which is available on academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/49248265/Neoliberal_Termites_and_Zombie_Human_Rights.

8 The interviews are intercut with iconic scenes from surrealist, horror and comedy films from the 1920s to the 1970s – films such as F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), and Luis García Berlanga’s El verdugo (1963) – to convey the documentary’s political message visually: the evils of capitalism (systemic corruption, impunity, social inequality) lurk in the shadows of democracy and political action is the only means to resist them.

9 In March 2010, many Spanish judges signed a manifesto denouncing the politicization of the judicial power and criticizing the process for the selection of judges. The manifesto followed on from the 8 October strikes organized by judges throughout Spain in 2009.

10 Viewers are told that in 2009, when Baltasar Garzón, examining judge of the Audiencia Nacional, opened the investigation of the Gürtel case and charged Bárcenas, the Partido Popular filed a complaint against him, the CGPJ removed Garzón from the Gürtel case and reassigned it to Madrid Regional High Court Judge Antonio Pedreira, who dismissed the charges against Bárcenas on the grounds of lack of evidence. In 2012, the Audiencia Nacional ordered the case against Bárcenas reopened, and Garzón’s original post was provisionally occupied by the Judge Pablo Ruz. Judge Ruz should have left his post in the Audiencia Nacional in December 2013, but instead his position was renewed every six months. On 19 April 2011, the Tribunal Supremo sentenced Garzón to an eleven-year professional suspension for ordering an illegal wiretap of conversations between the accused, who were being held in provisional detention, and their lawyers in the Gürtel case. On 26 August 2021, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that the trial of judge Garzón in the Gürtel case “did not comply with the principles of judicial independence and impartiality”, and that “his conviction for wilful abuse of power was ‘arbitrary and unforeseeable’, as it was not based on sufficiently explicit, clear and precise legal provisions” (UN Human Rights Committee 2021).

11 Article 2 (a) of the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime defines “organized crime” as “a structured group of three or more persons, existing for a period of time and acting in concert with the aim of committing one or more serious crimes or offences established in accordance with this Convention, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit” (United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols Thereto 2004, 5).

12 Other significant movements that questioned the Cultura de la Transición before the 15M movement included the V de Vivienda movement, which started in 2006, and the Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotecas, which originated in late 2009.

13 In El mono del desencanto, Vilarós refers to the Transición as “el espacio donde se procesa el olvido, el agujero negro que chupa, hace caer y encripta los desechos de nuestro pasado histórico” (1998, 11).

14 For Pettit, “The price of liberty in the republican tradition is represented as eternal vigilance” (1997, 263).

15 As Galtung puts it, structural violence “is silent, it does not show – it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters. In a static society, personal violence will be registered, whereas structural violence may be seen as about as natural as the air around us” (1969, 173; emphasis in original).

16 Other big bug films from the 1950s are Tarantula (Jack Arnold, 1955), The Deadly Mantis (Nathan Juran, 1957) and The Black Scorpion (Edward Ludwig, 1957).

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Notes on contributors

Mónica López Lerma

Mónica López Lerma is Associate Professor of Spanish and Humanities at Reed College. Mónica received a PhD in Comparative Literature and a Graduate Certificate in Film Studies from the University of Michigan. She also holds a Law degree from the University of València (Spain) and a LL.M. in Jurisprudence from the European Academy of Legal Theory (Belgium). At Reed, she teaches a variety of interdisciplinary courses in film theory, political documentaries, law and violence, justice and the senses, cinema and human rights and comparative literature. She has also taught at the Faculty of Law of the University of Helsinki, the Peter A. Allard School of Law of the University of British Columbia and the School of International Relations of the Kyrgyz State National University. She is the author of Sensing Justice through Contemporary Spanish Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics, Law (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), coeditor of Rancière and Law (Routledge, 2018) and editor of Cartografías in/justas: Representaciones culturales del espacio urbano y rural en la España contemporánea (Editorial Comares, forthcoming 2024). She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled Documentaries against the Law: Evidence, Affect, and Reflexivity. From 2012 to 2017 she was editor-in-chief of No-Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice. She serves as an editorial board member of the Journal of Media and Rights. Email: [email protected].