At almost 89 years old, Alfonso Pazos is the longest serving lawyer in Spain. “If I leave it, I will die,” he assures Efe after sixty years of work on the duty shift. He studied law to follow his father’s example. For now, he has no intention of retiring, nor does he intend to use a computer or mobile phone.
He went to the university in Santiago de Compostela and was enrolled in Ourense in 1959 to work on the duty shift. He defines himself as a criminal lawyer and remarks that there is no crime typified in the Penal Code that you have not dealt with, always with the utmost interest.
He gets up early, around seven in the morning, “be it summer or winter.” At nine o’clock he is in his office, where he works with his secretary, Sonia, who manages his e-mail and everything related to technology, which he has never approached. “I rebelled, I don’t need it,” he says, backed by his own experience. He believes that Justice “has not changed” because the crimes “are the same”, although he regrets that the current training is “very deficient”. Before, the magistrates were better, adds.
A passion transferred from father to son
His father was also a lawyer, as well as a deputy in the Cortes during the Second Republic. In 1936 he had to go into exile to Mexico. Behind he was leaving his son, who was four years old at the time. At more than 9,000 kilometers, Alfonso followed in his footsteps.
Some books on Law did not travel to Mexico, which, without his father’s knowledge, were going to train Alfonso. Before studying the career in Santiago de Compostela, he wrote a letter to his father: “I want to be a lawyer.”
Word by word it remembers the answer, also in letter form. “Learn the trade with someone who knows how to turn off the tap of selfishness,” wrote his father. In that letter Alfonso received the push he needed and understood that he was proud of him. Years later, he was able to travel to visit him because his father never returned to Spain.
The first steps of the oldest lawyer in Spain
He did an internship at a prestigious law firm and joined the duty shift when he began to practice in 1959. Since then he has specialized in Criminal Law because it allows him to “delve into people’s hearts and oneself.”
His first clients were friends of his father. His first case, that of a man accused of taking his girlfriend to abort an amateur. As his client was acquitted, he says that he began to receive many cases of abortions in the office. But not all have been successes in his career. In fact, he admits that “some cases go wrong”, but he does not feel failure because he always works on cases “with great interest”.
He inherited from his father a love for the law, but also his ideals. He proudly declares himself an “activist against the Franco dictatorship” and relates that he was detained for his disagreements with the Regime, but Fernando Seoane, one of his mentors, achieved his freedom. “In the dungeons they did not dare to touch me, but the intention was different,” he says.
For the oldest lawyer in Spain it is the same Justice
In sixty years, Alfonso has experienced firsthand the changes that Justice has undergone. The changes, and not the evolution, because for him little has changed and the crimes “are the same.” Yes he is concerned about the preparation in the classrooms, which is “very poor”, because, sentence, that the magistrates are “worse” than “twenty or thirty years” ago.
You have never consulted a summary or a car on a screen. He prefers everything in hand, on paper. His work makes it “much easier” for him, Sonia, his secretary, who also puts him on the phone with clients, colleagues and journalists who are interested in his story. Together with his wife, four children and two grandchildren, he lives a “full” life in which he does not contemplate leaving the law profession. When asked when he will stop going to his office, he repeats the same answer: “Someday I will have to die.”
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