Abstract
A new Spanish movement is trying to find more than 100,000 missing victims of General Franco’s regime, writes
Forty years ago, Spain emerged from Franco’s regime, beginning reconciliation between the two sides from the civil war of the 1930s, the pro-Franco side and the Republicans. Reconciliation did not include coming to terms with the past, however, which was largely buried.
“The Spanish transition process was designed as a revolving door for the dictatorship,” said Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, which is spearheading a new social movement that seeks greater historical enquiry and justice. “Two big policies were put into motion by the state: erasing crimes and producing ignorance.”
Criminals were hidden, according to Silva, and documents were destroyed. “If it wasn’t for this new social movement, the war generation would have died in silence, and we would have been left without memory.”
Fedor Adsuar Casado, himself imprisoned during Franco’s time, said: “History is being told too late”.
“A lot of victims have died without telling their experiences to their children or grandchildren. I have even met people who learned in the ’90s that his or her father was imprisoned during the war, because no one had told them before. Not even their mothers.”
One key area for the new movement to address is the whereabouts of more than 114,000 missing people. This process has been stalled by convoluted legal proceedings.
In Cobertelada, in the province of Soria, for example, six teachers were killed by Franco’s troops in 1936. Their bodies were buried by local farmers. It was recently agreed that a local court would take charge of the exhumation works. But in June 2017, proceedings were dismissed and the families had to proceed through crowdfunding.
“I feel a huge anxiety… It’s been eight years now since we started with the investigation and the searching,” a relative of one of the victims said in the newspaper Público.
Some progress towards recognising the victims of the regime had already been made. In 2007, Spanish lawmakers approved the Historical Memory Law, intended to recognise – and broaden the rights of – those who suffered under Franco. Children and grandchildren of people who were forced to flee from Spain were given Spanish nationality, and Republican files and documents – even films – were recovered.
As for the missing dead, there are certainly signs of change, said Silva. “I am receiving requests from students who are researching mass graves. A few years ago, this was unthinkable.”
But progress is slow. “The saddest thing is that there are a lot of people that will not live to see an effective change happening,” Silva said.
Worse still, when Spain’s ruling People’s Party won its landslide majority in 2011, the allocation of funds for the implementation of the Historical Memory Law was cut by 60%. Then, in 2013, its funding was entirely cut from the national budget.
Enrique Díez, a professor at the University of León, has researched how the civil war and the dictatorship is presented in schools. The study analyses the latest editions of 21 textbooks commonly used. The results show dominance of a simplistic narrative, which makes both sides accountable. Maintaining this neutrality means silence on topics such as the repression of the Republicans, including the 104 concentration camps that were documented between 1936 and 1939.
Díez said that when filming the documentary The Silence Fields, looking at the experiences of Republican prisoners in concentration camps, he found many students from a school in the León region were not aware of these camps.
A woman protests lack of justice for her father and uncle (pictured), who were executed during Franco’s regime, Madrid 2013
CREDIT: Susana Vera/Reuters
“Some of their grandfathers had even been held prisoners in these camps and worked as slaves … in coal extraction. The students had not been told about their grandparents being victims of systematic repression, and did not know some of these camps were located in their own village,” recalled Díez. “When we visited the site and explained to them what happened there, they felt deeply moved because a huge part of their own story had been hidden from them.”
There’s also silence on the role of the Spanish Catholic church, which supported Franco’s uprising and took part in repression during the dictatorship by, for instance, reporting Republican families to the authorities. Díez argued that silence was partly because of the church’s many links to publishers, editors and the ministry of education.
According to Díez’s study, just 44.4% of textbooks used in high schools talk about the systematic repression under Franco.
This historical bias cuts both ways, said Juan Pelegrín, who has been teaching history for almost 40 years. “Teachers coming from a Republican family are very likely to focus on repression and victims, whereas teachers coming from pro-Franco families are not.”
Secondary school student Alba Cánovas learnt about the darker sides of Spain’s past only because “my grandfather and father lived through it and remember quite a lot of anecdotes”. She said her family education differs from education at school.
“People my age don’t show special interest in this part of Spain’s history and don’t talk about it outside the classroom, so it should be given more importance in schools.”
Cánovas counts herself lucky for getting this education at home. At a family level, Franco’s legacy has more typically left a mark of silence. “Fear is still alive in the oldest generations,” said Díez.