INTERPOL, SIXTY-TWO DAYS BEFORE THE TRIAL

On 30 November 2018, a fax from the National Central Bureau of INTERPOL entered the First Section of the Provincial Court of Bizkaia (DOC-0146, pp. 30-32). The international search was activated. Sixty-two days remained until the trial, set for 31 January 2019.

Let the reader compose the full picture, because every element is documented in this portal: a man with his address certified by the AEAT that same year (DOC-0226), who declared and paid taxes, whom a judge had freed within hours in 2017 precisely because he was locatable — turned into an INTERPOL notice weeks before sitting in a dock he had always intended to reach on his own two feet.

What is INTERPOL for against someone who is not hiding? The answer lies not in police efficiency — there was nothing to find that was not already in the registers —, but in the procedural staging: the accused who enters his own trial preceded by an international search is no longer a businessman disputing an administrative file. He is "the captured fugitive". The court, the witnesses and public opinion receive him with the role already assigned.

The presumption of innocence is not broken only in judgments. Sometimes it is broken earlier, in the staging. And this staging has dates, faxes and pages.