Justicia universal

Justicia universal is the novel’s contested ideal of holding perpetrators accountable across national borders, an ideal repeatedly obstructed by governments that choose expediency over prosecution. Its most tangible expression is Manuel Arroyo Benítez’s dossier documenting Nazi fugitives; its deepest complication is the recognition that preserving evidence and naming crimes cannot, by themselves, compel justice. The concept links the political protection of wanted men in postwar Spain and Argentina to the personal cost of resistance, and ends in a bitter argument over whether justice still deserves anyone’s faith.

An ideal tested by political power

The novel places legal accountability against a succession of political calculations. Jean-Jules Lecomte, a Nazi and member of both the Rex Party and the SS, had pursued Jewish families in Chimay, forced his way into convents where nuns hid Jewish children under false identities, shot at the nuns, detained their superiors, and identified the children. They were deported; few reached the extermination camp alive, and none returned. After the war, Lecomte was tried in Charleroi and sentenced to death in absentia, but he was never captured. His case gives the principle of prosecution a concrete form, while the outcome exposes its limit: a judgment without custody cannot bring the accused to justice.

That gap between legal condemnation and effective accountability becomes a larger political pattern. Allied governments compiled a list of 104 people, the so-called Black List, whose members were considered directly responsible for advancing Hitler’s project and had outstanding cases before German courts. Yet the Franco regime treated many of them as indispensable to its relations with the victorious powers. When Allied representatives pressed for their surrender, Spanish officials invoked Spanish nationality, military service, business interests, religious protection, or the claim that a person could not be found. These were not simply administrative delays: they were mechanisms by which state power made international claims ineffective.

Clarita Stauffer was the only woman on the list. The Allies supplied her correct Madrid address, 14 Calle Galileo, and described her as a leading organizer of a secret relief association who helped Germans obtain false documents and employment. They also stated that, at the end of the war, she had received special permission from the German embassy to acquire Spanish nationality expressly so she could continue her activities after defeat. Her case makes the conflict especially plain: the information identifying a fugitive and describing her role was available, but the state that could surrender her instead protected her.

Evidence, flight, and sanctuary

The novel traces the institutional setting of these failures back to the movement of people across borders. In 1941, the banker Jaime Saporta hurriedly secured Spanish nationality for his family through the Spanish consulate in Paris. His sons, Marcelo and Raimundo, were born in Istanbul, but their father’s Sephardic ancestry from Salonika made them eligible for Spanish passports under General Primo de Rivera’s 1924 decree. The documents allowed the family to escape Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws and Nazi persecution and settle in Madrid. The episode shows nationality operating as a means of rescue; elsewhere, the same capacity to confer or recognize nationality becomes a means of shielding fugitives from extradition.

The escape networks are described as real, practical systems rather than the all-powerful organization of popular legend. The novel says scholars dismiss the existence of ODESSA as a formal organization, while tracing Otto Skorzeny’s involvement in evasion networks from 1947. Imprisoned at Dachau, he organized prisoners’ escapes with help from Polish guards; soon afterward, he founded Die Spinne, which helped fugitives reach Italy and then South America with assistance from two Vatican prelates. The Madrid network run by Clara Stauffer regularly cooperated with this network and shared in the welcome Argentina offered its protected fugitives. Their effectiveness rested not on an omnipotent secret society but on collaboration, routes, documents, and sympathetic authorities. The account says their impunity was interrupted only in 1955, when a military coup overthrew General Perón.

Against that machinery of escape, Manuel’s intelligence work represents the labor of making accountability possible. While working in Geneva for the exiled Republican government, he met representatives of neutral and Allied countries under the assumed name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez and sent reports to Taplow when an available British military plane could carry them. His assignment required him to continue despite his distrust of the people whose cooperation he sought and his exhaustion with the repeated professions of solidarity that had failed the Republic. In June 1945, Spain under Franco was excluded from the San Francisco conference that founded the United Nations, while Republican politicians were invited as observers. The diplomatic result mattered, but it did not restore Manuel’s confidence: to him, international politics increasingly looked like a performance in which his defeated country had been reduced to a marginal role.

The Pacheco Report

Manuel’s fullest attempt to turn knowledge into possible prosecution is the Pacheco Report, the copy of which he eventually gives to Guillermo García Medina. It runs to more than four hundred typed pages and includes nearly a hundred photographs: building fronts and interiors, documents, and above all people. Manuel says it contains authentic and false names, private and professional addresses, dates, places, sea and air routes, and even the number of the flight on which he himself arrived. In his assessment, the information was sufficient for authorities to arrest a hundred war criminals in Madrid and Buenos Aires in a single night. The report was not an abstract denunciation; it was an operational record designed to make people locatable.

The dossier’s detail does not overcome the refusal to act. Manuel says his work was praised, but the people who received it did not make the arrests. The CIA even tried to recruit him; he refused, then feared for a time that keeping a copy had placed him in danger. He could not bring himself to destroy it, because he imagined that the original might otherwise end in a Washington office shredder. After he married Simona, he built a safe into a wall and kept the copy there for years. The 1955 overthrow of Perón changed how he viewed that decision: when Nazis in Argentina were no longer as protected, he was glad he had preserved it.

Preservation nevertheless carried its own danger. Manuel later considered sending the report to Simon Wiesenthal or another Nazi hunter, but he had a wife and young children, and the fugitives in Buenos Aires knew him. Publishing the material could have exposed his family as well as himself. He also doubted that arrests would make a difference in Spain, where Franco would remain in power. His refusal to publish was therefore neither simple indifference nor a claim that the evidence was unimportant. It arose from the experience of having risked his life for a cause abandoned by the governments whose support had once seemed possible, and from the calculation that publicizing the dossier might endanger his family without producing consequences for the regime protecting the criminals.

The personal cost of failed justice

The report preserves crimes on a scale that unsettles any neat separation between public investigation and personal memory. As Guillermo turns its pages, he encounters names, dates, underlined passages, and accounts of millions murdered, deported, or disappeared, alongside the crime of Adrián Gallardo. Guillermo had killed Adrián to save his own life and Manuel’s; in the report, that man appears among a multitude of dead perpetrators and victims. For Guillermo, however, Adrián is not an interchangeable entry. His name brings back a personal act and a recurring nightmare. The dossier’s records make the history legible, but they cannot make its moral weight impersonal.

The final dispute between the two friends gives universal justice its most painful formulation. Manuel says that, after years of fear and disillusionment, he sometimes thought that if the report had not helped his own people, others could fend for themselves. He recognizes that this thought reflects badly on him, but says universal justice no longer means anything to him. Guillermo does not answer by defending a legal theory: he tells Manuel that he still suffers, and that he turns off Hollywood films about murderous Nazis before he even sees the title. Manuel agrees that they risked their lives for nothing. They had believed they might finally be counted among the good, but that recognition never came; in films, he observes, they would have been heroes.

On the day Manuel and his family prepare to leave, he takes the dossier from the safe and asks Simona to pack it. She objects: the family is already giving up essentials, clothes, memories, and valuables, and the papers would fill half a suitcase. Manuel offers to have his own clothes removed instead. He has lost a war before, he says, and knows what matters. The argument does not resolve whether the report should travel with them, but it gathers the novel’s central conflict into one practical choice: evidence is both a record that might still matter and a dangerous burden carried by people who have already paid for believing that someone would act on it.