Spain’s ‘memory’ bill: digging up the agonies of the past

It’s 83 years since the end of the Spanish civil war, and 47 years since the dictator General Franco, who rose to power in 1936 and governed with an iron fist until 1975, breathed his last. Yet that bloody period in our history continues to haunt our nation, said Isaac Rosa on El Diario (Madrid).

Descendants of Franco’s victims still struggle to piece together the fate that befell their ancestors, and politicians are still at loggerheads over how to tackle the dictator’s legacy.

Now a highly contentious new law aims to settle these vexed questions once and for all.

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Justice at last?

The Democratic Memory bill, which has been passed by Spain’s Socialist-led coalition, contains a range of measures intended to address grievances of families of Franco’s victims.

Overruling an amnesty agreed in 1977 that protected the perpetrators of Franco-era atrocities, it will advance the search for mass graves, create a DNA bank to help identify victims of the regime, and set up a prosecutor’s office to probe crimes against humanity committed during that era.

The big question is whether this will finally bring closure to those seeking justice for the atrocities inflicted on their relatives, or prove another false dawn.

‘Long overdue’

This reckoning is long overdue, said Emilio Silva in El Salto (Madrid). Under Franco’s regime, at least 114,000 civilians were “disappeared”; hundreds of concentration camps were established; thousands of babies were stolen from republican prisoners.

Yet for 25 years after the dictator’s death, Spain’s parliament scarcely even discussed “the crimes of Francoism”. Perpetrators were protected by the 1977 amnesty law, meaning none have ever been prosecuted; schoolbooks “hid the history of the harsh repression of the dictatorship”.

Only in the year 2000, when victims’ families and archaeologists began to exhume the bodies of murdered republicans, did cracks begin to show in this once impenetrable “wall of impunity”.

A social movement emerged to search for the disappeared; “images of mass graves began to circulate in the media”. Yet to this day, some 100,000 victims of the Franco regime lie in unmarked graves.

Now, those who have had to live in the shadow of Franco’s legacy for so long may finally see those responsible held to account.

‘Deliberate amnesia’

But at what cost, asked Jorge González-Gallarza on UnHerd. After Franco’s death in 1975, “all political parties” agreed to consign the crimes of the civil war to “the dustbin of history”. The only way to move on, it was agreed, was to pardon the “seditious acts committed against Franco’s regime while expunging that regime’s crimes against opponents”.

But all that changed when Spain’s left-wing prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, rose to power in 2018. He and his allies have a distorted view of the civil war as a conflict between the “morally unimpeachable” republicans concerned only to “safeguard freedom and democracy”, and the evil nationalists, “Hitler’s Spanish allies”.

His new bill duly reflects that simplistic Manichean view, said Iñaki Iriarte López in Diario de Navarra (Pamplona). It is silent on the atrocities committed by republicans: it counts anti-Francoist guerrillas who engaged in extreme violence, as victims.

In light of such “deliberate amnesia”, is it any wonder most parties refused to back the bill – forcing Sánchez to court the political heirs of the Basque terror group Eta in order to get it through parliament.

‘Little done to honour victims’

The Spanish state has already paid out €21.6m to 608,000 people affected by Franco’s legacy (including compensation for former political prisoners and homosexuals), said Luz Sela in Okdiario (Madrid). Aside from Germany’s payments to Holocaust victims, that’s the largest reparations bill on record.

Maybe so, said Julián Casanova in El País (Madrid), yet until now little has been done to “honour the victims” of Franco’s regime.

Managing the memory of those sad years is certainly fraught with difficulty: our country is beset by “political, ideological, religious and regional disagreements”, and there are many who seek to “use and abuse” history for their own ends.

But painful and contentious as re-evaluating our history may be, it is vital to do so if we’re to move forward as a nation.