Ley de fugas

The so-called application of the Law of fugitives (Spanish: Ley de fugas) is a type of extrajudicial or paralegal execution, which consists in simulating the escape of a detainee (especially when he is taken from one prison to another) in order to suppress the vigilance of the force guarding him and to cover up the murder of the prisoner, invoking the legal precept that allows firing on a fugitive who does not obey the guards' commanding "Halt!".

Application

One way of applying the escape law is for the custody guard to delay behind the prisoner until there is a relative distance to consider that the prisoner was "escaping": he is then shot in the back, thus giving credibility to the escape. Another modality consists of judging and sentencing the prisoner to death in an expeditious manner, taking him to the place of his execution, freeing him from his bonds and bandages, and giving him the opportunity to flee: if the bullets of the firing squad do not hit him during the escape, he is a free man, so the chances of getting out alive are almost nil. In addition to this, the body is given a coup de grâce shot, generally in the back of the head, to ensure his death.

Legal assessment

The fugitive law is a type of extrajudicial execution that violates the right of habeas corpus and other human rights, and is therefore considered a crime, specifically a crime against humanity.

History

Spain

In Spain, the method of disposal of the adversary, later known as ley de fugas, was implemented in Catalonia at first by Brigadier Antoine de Roten, governor of Barcelona, in the persecution against the royalist parties that rose up on behalf of the Regency of Urgel during the Liberal Triennium. According to the description of the method by Vicente de la Fuente:

Rotten organized in Barcelona against the good men, the system that today [1870] is followed against the bandits and kidnappers of Andalusia. He sent the prisoners to Tarragona or any other town, and in the middle of the road, the escort that was chosen for the purpose, killed them with bayonets, alleging that they had tried to escape. The prisoners left in a tartan that came to have a disastrous celebrity, being called Rotten's tartan, although it was not his but that of the fiercest communards of Barcelona. It was known that whoever entered it traveled for eternity. Thus the old Bishop of Vic was assassinated on April 16, 1823.

Its application would have made it possible to put an end to Andalusian banditry in the 19th century. Likewise, the governments of the Restoration (1874–1931) favored the official dirty war against the trade union movement and allowed the civil governor of Barcelona, General Severiano Martínez Anido, by means of the Civil Guard and gunmen of the Free Trade Unions, to order eight hundred attacks that produced more than five hundred deaths among various anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT (among them, such outstanding figures as Salvador Seguí or Evelio Boal), according to figures from Martínez Anido himself; the real figures must have been, therefore, probably higher.

In fact, the future dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera justified this form of state terrorism in a 1920 letter to the then president of the Spanish government Eduardo Dato: "I understand that the instinct of defense seeks extra-legal means... A raid, a transfer, an attempt to escape and a few shots will begin to solve the problem."

Many intellectuals and writers attacked this imoral arrangement, such as Ramón María del Valle-Inclán in a couple of scenes added to the second edition (1924) of his esperpento play Bohemian Lights, through the character of the Catalan anarchist Mateo, a prisoner executed in this way.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), this procedure was also euphemistically called "taking a ride", since it was indicated to the prisoner that he was allowed to stroll before being shot, so the prisoners, who began to know this trick, refused to walk and from then on they were shot in the back. To give the political assassination a legal appearance, the usual procedure was the falsification of a denunciation of disaffection to any side, which was often achieved by force, through torture or blackmail to another detainee; under this pretext, the victim was imprisoned and executed by the "ride". The procedure is mentioned in some works, for example, in the historical novel Inés y la alegría, by Almudena Grandes (2010), or in the film Gun City, by Dani de la Torre (2018).

The fugitive law continued to be used during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, particularly during the repression of the Republican guerrilla of the Maquis.

Mexico

Specifically, during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), the law published on January 25, 1867 by the government of Benito Juárez (also known as the "Ley fuga") was used as a repressive method to eliminate a person or group of people who rebelled against the president. Most of the victims were common criminals (estimated at more than 10,000) who lived in the countryside, where the Rural Police Corps operated. During a riot in Veracruz, Porfirio Díaz sent a telegram to Luis Mier y Terán, governor of the state, ordering him: "Kill them in the heat of the moment", in the sense that the prisoners would be given a favorable chance to escape and use the escape attempt as a pretext to shoot them. The custom, inherited from colonial times, continued in use during and after the 1910 Revolution and was also used in the Cristero War (1926–1929).

Germany

The Gestapo, the secret police of the German Reich, also used this procedure in World War II to execute Allied army prisoners who had attempted to escape from concentration camps and had subsequently been captured. A historical illustration of this fact appears in the film The Great Escape (1963), by John Sturges, inspired by real events: the escape of fifty Allied soldiers from the German POW camp Stalag Luft III.