A Step Forward or Backward?

A Lieutenant in the Spanish Army is going on a hunger strike because the military has sentenced him to two months in prison for writing a novel entitled "A Step Forward" which describes the corruption and impunity prevalent in the Spanish military under the guise of fiction.

Lieutenant Luis Gonzalo Segura, born in 1977, has spent the past 12 years in the Spanish military and claims that anyone who denounces anything is expelled.  He began to file complaints in 2008-09 when he was incorporated into a unit dealing with Army computers and accounts and began to notice that for a banquet that fed 50 people a bill was processed for having fed 500.  His complaints were ignored and some of his fellow officers labeled him a traitor and sought his "rehabilitation." His novel has stirred quite a controversy in Spain.  He accuses the military of being a parallel state in which the "minority caste" is the dominant and controlling caste.  He claims that the 130,000 members of the Spanish Armed Forces have only 41,000 soldiers, although they have 270 Generals (250 too many), 1,050 Colonels (1,000 too many) and 3,500 officers (3,200 too many).  He compares this to China which he says has 190 Generals for a population of 2.3 billion people.  He considers that his fundamental rights as a person and as a citizen have been violated, but he does not consider that the European Court of Human Rights can help him because the Spanish Government reserved to Articles 5 and 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights to permit summary punishment ("The Spanish Code of Military Justice provides that the punishment of minor offenses may be ordered directly by an offender's official superior, after having elucidated the facts.").