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CHAPTER 1

History, Politics, and Forgetting in Spain

Spain’s Pact of Forgetting conforms to the definition of a “political pact” offered by the democratization literature as “an explicit, but not always explicated or justified, agreement among a select set of actors which seeks to define (or better redefine) rules governing the exercise of power on the basis of mutual guarantees for the vital interest of those entering into it” (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 37). As such, political pacts bring together a small number of elite actors for the purpose of settling issues that bring them into conflict with one another. Traditionally, the making of political pacts in the context of democratization has been done behind closed doors, with nary an opportunity for the general public to weigh in on the decisions being negotiated on their behalf by the political elite (see Encarnación 2005). This unappealing aspect of political pact-making can lead to important decisions about the emerging democratic regime being made before a single free vote has been cast. Not surprisingly, political pacts have been linked to a host of negative and unintended consequences for democratization, from marginalizing civil society groups, such as the labor movement (Karl 1987), to allowing for the transfer of authoritarian vices into the new democratic regime (Hagopian 1992), to promoting corporatist, exclusionary and even undemocratic modes of policy-making (Przeworski 1991).

Yet Spain’s Pact of Forgetting is unique. Unlike most political pacts negotiated during a democratic transition—including Spain’s own Moncloa pacts, the landmark set of accords that committed the government, the national parties, and elements in civil society such as the labor movement and employers’ groups, to collaborate in the making of economic policy—the Pact of Forgetting was never formalized and publicly discussed. No text was ever drafted by those entering into the pact, and no mechanisms were ever stipulated to facilitate its enforcement, including penalties for those choosing not to obey the pact or to walk away from it. Therefore, notwithstanding some legal underpinnings such as the 1977 amnesty law, the Pact of Forgetting is best regarded as an “informal institution,” understood as norms that regulate political conduct (Helmke and Letvisky 2006). More tenuous than formal institutions, informal institutions nonetheless create considerable predictability in the behavior of political actors.

At the heart of the Pact of Forgetting was not forgetting per se (such a goal would have been unattainable under almost any circumstances), but rather a desire by the political class to prevent the memory of certain historical events from encumbering the transition to a new democratic regime. In the wake of Franco’s death in 1975, this objective was to be achieved, first, by not holding anyone accountable for any political crime committed prior to the transition to democracy. This is the most formal (and controversial) part of the pact since it was backed by a comprehensive amnesty process that offered immunity from prosecution to anyone associated with the authoritarian regime and elements within civil society that opposed the authoritarian regime. Another component of the pact committed the government and its opposition to refrain from pursuing public policies that would awaken longstanding historical controversies, such as who bore ultimate responsibility for the Civil War: the Nationalists or the Republicans.

Another component of the pact was not to use the past as a weapon in political deliberations by committing political actors to treading carefully in situations that could be politically divisive, such as the observation of an important historical anniversary like the start of the Civil War. Making an issue of anyone’s past political affiliations (such as attempting to disqualify someone from participating in the politics of the new democracy because of having belonged to a political organization deemed offensive to democratic sensibilities) was also implicit. Former members of the old regime have benefited the most from this provision, since they have been allowed to participate in democratic politics without having their Francoist past thrown back at them. But the provision has also been useful to the left by obscuring the radical background of many leftwing leaders.

More generally, the Pact of Forgetting aimed at arriving at something of a consensus about Spanish history, especially the Civil War. Although the memory of the Civil War remained polarized, for the main actors of the democratic transition the conflict came to be understood as a guerra de locos (war of collective madness) that produced no winners and losers, only victims. In this problematic formulation, both sides bore equal responsibility for the Civil War, which made it redundant to ascribe blame to any particular group in society. The important thing was to ensure that a similar conflict would never happen again, and the best way to achieve that result was to forget and to look to the future. Building a consensus about the past also entailed recognizing that partisan bickering rested deeply in Spain’s past democratic failures and that keeping disagreement to a minimum was the best way to ensure a stable democratic regime. In the democratic period, this consensus about the Civil War was embraced by the entire political class save for extremist elements, such as ETA, for whom the memory of the Civil War became a tool to rationalize its continuing use of political violence against the Spanish state. ETA’s “war memory,” according to Muro (2009: 667), was anchored upon the brutality of the Franco regime against the Basques but also on notable historical distortions, such as the view that “the Basques had suffered a bloody war that did not concern them.”

To be sure, there was less of a historical consensus among those agreeing to the terms of the pact to forget about the Franco dictatorship. Unlike the Civil War, the dictatorship had a clear oppressor (the right) and a clear victim (the left). As observed by Humlebaek (2005: 78), “while the pact of silence with regard to the Civil War was based on equilibrium between the parties, since both sides had taken part in the atrocities of the war, the pact was not characterized by the same harmony insofar as it concerned the Franco regime.” This reality made the Pact of Forgetting inherently fragile and vulnerable to a defection from the left, as was eventually the case. It also explains how the pact itself would be characterized during the years of forgetting. While those on the left have been more prone to refer to the Pact of Forgetting as a “pact of silence,” a necessary evil induced by the traumas of the past and the exigencies of the transition, those on the right have been more inclined to refer to the pact as “a pact of reconciliation” intended to prevent repetition of past political mistakes.

None of what the Pact of Forgetting stood for, however, entailed official censorship or restrictions on intellectual inquiry into the Civil War or the Franco dictatorship by the general public, journalists, and academics; in fact, such inquiry has actually thrived in the post-transition years, a point readily conceded by academics, even those whose works have a liberal bent.¹ In stressing the point that the Pact of Forgetting has not entailed censorship, Juliá (1999a: 117) has observed that cultural policy in post-Franco Spain has been “unhampered by ideological compromise” and that historians have been able “to delve into the past as they saw fit.” Valls (2007: 156) writes that after the democratic transition “historians were able to investigate the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship freely, and publications on both periods grew in number and established numerous factual and interpretative approaches that are accepted today by the vast majority of the professional community of historians in Spain.” Boyd (2008: 135), noting the surge in interest in the Civil War since Franco’s passing, estimates that by 1986 the bibliography of the Civil War in Spanish included some 15,000 titles.

Forgotten: Democratic Collapse, Civil War, and Dictatorship

As far as the political class was concerned, the Pact of Forgetting relegated to the dustbin of history some of the most tumultuous happenings of twentieth-century Spanish history, beginning with the traumatic collapse of democracy during the interwar years. Franco’s Nationalist uprising of July 18, 1936, triggered the fall of the Second Republic, a legally constituted democratic government widely considered to be Spain’s first real experience with democracy. Unabashedly liberal policies—such as abolishment of the death penalty, civil marriage and divorce, suffrage for females, secularization of schools and cemeteries, and home rule for Spain’s national ethnic minority communities—explain the Second Republic’s reputation for political radicalism among its detractors and for political progressivism among its defenders. The liberalism for which the Second Republic is famous mirrored the political orientation of its founding fathers, which, according to Crow (1985: 292), were “as heterogeneous a mixture as has ever appeared in the pages of European history,” incorporating “intellectuals, liberals of various shades and colorings, some of whom were Catholics but most of them were not, Catalan and Basque separatists to whom the Republic meant local autonomy, and the Spanish left composed of the anarchists, the socialists, and the communists.”

A prolonged and bloody civil conflict rather than a successful takeover was the result of Franco’s attack on the Second Republic. On the Nationalist side were the constituencies most vigorously opposed to the policies of the Republican government: the military, rural oligarchs, industrialists, the Catholic Church, and an assortment of right-wing organizations, including the Falange (Phalanx), a fascist organization whose motto, “One, Great, and Free,” and “strong Catholic sentiment” suited Franco “admirably” (Crow 1985: 348), and the Carlists, defenders of the Spanish monarchy. Popular organizations, such as the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), the anarchist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), and the communist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) were the face of the Republican resistance. The left-wing orientation of these organizations permitted Franco to frame the Civil War as a Christian crusade to save Spain from the godless Republicans, a struggle not unlike the holy battle for the soul of Spain that medieval Christian monarchs waged against Muslim infidels. In this second crusade, “the enemy was not Islam but a hydra of social and political revolution that had flourished with the Republic” (Grugel and Rees 1997: 11).

While at war in 1936–1939, Nationalists and Republicans fought with complete conviction in the righteousness of their respective causes, which explains the Civil War’s reputation as the quintessential conflict between freedom and fascism. By the time of Franco’s coup, the political center had disappeared, and politics had been reduced to a zero-sum game dominated by political groups at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.² Under the last government of the Second Republic, the Popular Front (elected into office in 1936 and headed by labor leader Largo Caballero), Spain took a decisive turn toward the extreme left, backed by a “workers’ alliance” embracing socialist, communist, and anarchist unions. The opposition, the National Front, a coalition of right-wing parties led by the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), a fascist-leaning party, represented its own kind of political extremism. Unsurprisingly, an intense ideological battle fueled the violence of the Civil War. As Crozier (1967: 216) put it, “The revolutionaries massacred the bourgeoisie because this, as they saw it, was their mystical and exalted class duty. The counter-revolutionaries killed because the ‘Marxists’ whose death they ordained represented the ‘anti-Spain’.”

Franco declared victory over the Republican army on April 1, 1939, and soon thereafter all hostilities came to a halt. Aiding in the Nationalist victory was a significant military advantage: the most experienced troops in the Spanish army were those under Franco’s command. These troops, made up of many lower-echelon and young military officers, began to defect en masse to the Nationalist side as soon as the war started. The Republicans also made many tactical errors, and none more prominent than the decision to concentrate on a socio-economic revolution rather than on developing a strategy to defeat Franco and his army of rebels. At the inception of the Civil War, the CNT and UGT devoted much of their energies to collectivizing industry and farmland while ignoring the military conflict. Despite dealing a big blow to urban capitalists and the oligarchs, the socioeconomic revolution left the Republican side ill-prepared to defend itself against Franco.³ As noted by Payne (1985: 15): “What was left of the Spanish army in the Republican zone was largely disbanded in favor of leftist militia battalions that were full of revolutionary zeal and reasonably well-equipped but lack discipline, leadership, and military skill.”

The Civil War’s international dimensions also favored a Nationalist victory. Sympathetic foreign leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini supported Franco’s uprising from the start of the Civil War by providing the military weapons (aircraft in particular) and expertise that proved critical to crushing the Republicans. Britain, France, and the United States, despite “the intense degree of psycho-emotional solidarity with the struggle of the Spanish left” on the part of hundreds of thousands of French, British and American citizens, decided to sit out the war in Spain fearing that their involvement would trigger a European-wide conflict (Payne 1970: 275).⁴ Such fears left the International Brigades, the foreign, volunteer army that gathered in Spain to fight Franco, which organized some 40,000 soldiers, including 2,800 members of the American Lincoln Brigade, as the main source of foreign support for the Republicans (Richardson 1976: 11). Abandoned by its fellow democracies, the Second Republic turned to the Soviet Union for help in the form of aircraft, tanks, and political and military advice.⁵ But this assistance in the end proved incapable of overcoming Franco’s rebellion.

The Human Toll of the War

How many people perished during the Civil War remains highly debated among historians, and it may well be the case, as noted by Richards (1996: 157), that “we will never know the true figure.” One million is the popularly accepted figure in Spain since it was adopted, for very different reasons, by both the Franco regime and its opposition. For Franco, the figure of one million dead underscored his claim of having saved Spain from bloodshed, chaos, and destruction. For the opposition, it highlighted the grotesquely violent nature of the Franco dictatorship. Historians of the Civil War, however, have questioned the veracity of the figure. Arguably, the most respected accounting comes from Jackson (1965: 539), in no small part because it comes from a foreigner. This study puts the total number of the Civil War dead at 580,000. But even this greatly reduced figure, as seen in Table 1, makes the Spanish Civil War the deadliest by far of all European civil conflicts of the interwar era. Jackson (1965: 539) estimates that between 1939 and 1943 100,000 Spaniards were killed in direct combat, 10,000 in air raids, 50,000 from disease and malnutrition, 20,000 from Republican “reprisals,” 200,000 from Nationalist “reprisals,” and 200,000 “red” prisoner deaths resulting from execution and disease.

Table 1. The Spanish Civil War in Comparative Perspective

Source: Kissane and Sitter (2005: 186–88, 196).

Republican violence targeted the sectors of society that sided with the coup’s plotters: the business community, landed oligarchs, and clergy. Of these targets, the clergy are probably most closely associated with Republican violence, given the deep-seated anti-Catholicism of the Republican leadership. “Spain is no longer a Catholic country, even though there are many millions of Spanish Catholics,” declared Manuel Azaña, the Second Republic’s first prime minister, as he launched an unprecedented attack on the church that ended state financial support for the clergy and nationalized the church’s vast property holdings (Amodia 1976: 11). The estimated number of clergy murdered by the Republicans, however, remains in dispute. After the end of the Civil War, the Nationalist side claimed that 7,937 religious persons were killed out of a total community of around 115,000, but this figure is probably inflated.⁶ That noted, there is little doubt that “wanton cruelty” was imposed on the clergy, with some reports stating that some priests were “burned to death in their churches” while others were “buried alive after being made to dig their own graves” (Beevor 1982: 70).

Nationalist violence is considered to have been more indiscriminate than the “red terror” imposed by the Republicans (Balcells 2007: 5). Obtaining control of Republican strongholds or areas of the country thought to have been infiltrated by “reds” often involved air raids intended to eradicate entire villages and towns as a prelude to a Nationalist occupation. Territories “conquered” by the Nationalists were also often subjected to limpiezas (cleansings) designed to “flush out internal enemies,” and frighten the civilian population from aiding the Republican resistance (Vincent 2007: 151). The “cleansings” often degenerated into orgies of killing and abuse, involving raping women. General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, Franco’s main propagandist during the Civil War, famously urged his troops to rape Republican women, a fact that helps explain a common piece of graffiti that appeared in towns and villages conquered by the Nationalist rebels: “Your women will give birth to fascists” (Treglown 2009: 21). Ironically, the eradication of “reds” was often most brutal in areas where there was no large-scale resistance to the Nationalist rebellion, such as Castile, where known left-wing sympathizers were easily picked up and treated to enforced “purging and purification” by Franco’s army (Vincent 2007: 151).

Given the differences in the nature of the violence generated by the Nationalists and Republicans, it is not surprising that the Nationalist side perpetrated the majority of the killings the Civil War. Jackson made this point explicitly in his 1965 study and it has been sustained by more recent research conducted during the democratic period. A widely publicized study organized by Juliá (1999b: 407–12) concludes that during the years of civil conflict the Republican side committed 37,843 killings and the Nationalist side 72,527. This is a partial account with 25 of the 50 Spanish provinces studied. An earlier study (Casanova 1992: 8–9), with 90 percent of all provinces studied, reached a somewhat similar conclusion with respect to the imbalance of the Civil War killings: 45,000 by the Republicans and 98,000 by the Nationalists. Most of the dead, regardless of side, were hurriedly buried in makeshift graves in remote parts of the country, and their fates after the end of the war pointedly reflect the terms of the Nationalist victory.

As the absolute winner of the Civil War, Franco proceeded to exhume and give proper burials to the remains of those who died defending the Nationalist side. The remains of those resting in Republican graves were forgotten as punishment for betrayal of their country. For the duration of the dictatorship, and at least several decades into the democratic period, thanks to the silence over the past provided by the Pact of Forgetting, the remains of those killed on the Republican side would rest undisturbed in so-called fosas comunes (mass graves).⁷ This unequal treatment of the war dead left a daunting and gruesome future legacy. Once the excavation of the mass graves began in the mid-2000s, as part of the movement to “recover” the historical memory, one observer noted that “The dotted map of likely sites between the Basque Country and Andalusía, Castilla-León and Valencia makes the peninsula look like a child with chickenpox” (Treglown 2009: 18).

The number of people forced to leave Spain suggests further evidence of the brutality of the Civil War. Approximately 500,000 people fled the country between 1936 and 1939, the bulk of them repatriated to France and North Africa, in “the largest forced migration of people from Spain since the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula in the beginning of the 17th century” (Alted 2005: 52). How many of them never returned to Spain after the Civil War, making their permanent home abroad and comprising what is commonly referred to as the “Republican exile,” remains in dispute. Estimates range from a third to a fourth (Rubio 1977: 207). What is clear is that the Republican exile triggered a tremendous brain drain that dealt a grave blow to the nation by depriving it of considerable professional and intellectual capital, including the leaders of the Republic, who set up a government in exile in France, and some of the most prominent Spanish thinkers of the day, including an estimated 12 percent of all university professors (223).

Exile for many Republicans turned out to be more horrendous than what they had escaped from in Spain, giving rise to the popular view of the exile experience created by the Civil War as a “second” civil war.⁸ In this second war, the Civil War is extended beyond Spanish soil into Europe and transatlantic locations across the Americas, such as Mexico, Argentina, and Puerto Rico, where those detached from the homeland were engaged in a perpetual struggle with the memory of the conflict they left behind. Dehumanization, despair, and even death characterize the lives of Republican exiles (Stein 1979; Kamen 2007). An unknown number of Spaniards were interned in hastily created concentration camps along the Spanish-French border toward the end of the Civil War. Also unknown is the number of Republican “war children” evacuated from Spain by their parents once a Nationalist victory seemed imminent and sent to Russia, where they faced the hardships of World War II, including having to defend Russia against Hitler’s invasion. Approximately 8,000 Republican exiles were imprisoned at Mauthausen, a Nazi concentration camp in upper Austria, and only about a quarter survived this harrowing experience.⁹

A second wave of Spanish exiles, estimated at more than 300,000, was triggered by the economic misery of the postwar years (Foweraker 1989: 64). During the so-called años de hambre (the years of hunger), 1939 through the late 1940s, near abject poverty befell many parts of the Spanish territory, the result of the convergence of a multiplicity of factors, including agricultural stagnation (the consequence of a terrible drought, one of the worst in Spanish history), widespread unemployment and underemployment, the western economic boycott of the Franco regime intended to accelerate its demise (which kept food and medicine away from Spain), and an ill-advised policy of economic autarky designed by the government (led mainly by military officers) to free Spain of foreign economic influence and dependency.

The signs of misery were everywhere. Describing life in postwar Spain, British journalist John Hopper wrote (1986: 64): “Poor peasants lived off the grass and weeds, cigarettes were sold one at a time, the electricity in Barcelona was switched on for only three or four hours a day, and trolleybuses in Madrid stopped for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon to conserve energy.” Health indicators suggest that in the immediate postwar period (1940–1945) malnutrition, low infant birth weights, and disease led to at least 200,000 excess deaths over the 1935 mortality rate (Boyd (1999: 96). The overall standard of living was cut by half between 1936 and 1956, and not until the early 1960s were prewar levels of economic growth were restored (Foweraker 1989: 64). Broke and impoverished, Spain was forced to depend on foreign aid in the form of loans and foodstuffs (beef and grain) from Argentina’s Peronist regime, which was sympathetic toward Franco, to deal with a desperate economic environment approaching mass starvation.

A Violent and Vengeful Regime

After the Civil War ended in 1939, Franco inaugurated a political regime that was diametrically opposed to the Second Republic. Reflecting the influence of the Falange, the nascent authoritarian regime defined itself as “a nationalist-syndicalist, totalitarian, one-party state” (Boyd 1999: 92). Accordingly, civil and political rights were circumscribed, including limits on expression and association; regional autonomy was abolished; and secularism, arguably the main trait of the Republican era, was all but destroyed with the restoration of Catholicism as the state’s official religion. This new political order, christened with the fascist moniker Estado Nuevo (New State), was imposed without regard for its human cost. Its establishment meant that the bloodshed and suffering of the Civil War extended well past the end of the war. In fact, Spain was more deadly after the end of the Civil War than during the war itself. The estimated 200,000 “red” prisoners who died of execution, hunger, and disease in the concentration camps established by Franco in 1939–1943 far exceeds the number who died on the battlefield (Jackson 1965: 539; Preston 1995: 230).¹⁰

The violence of the postwar years was in keeping with the Franco regime’s intentions of eradicating any vestige of Republican opposition and gaining the acquiescence of the population as a whole. As observed by Vincent (2007: 157), “The Francoist regime was born in violence and depended on violence. Killing was essential to its initial display of power.” Violence was also central to the regime’s sense of identity, which celebrated Franco’s absolute military victory over the Republicans during the Civil War. Franco would remind the Spanish people: “We did not win the regime we have today hypocritically with some votes. We won it at the point of the bayonet and with the blood of our best people” (Rigby 2000: 73). Violence was also part of the Franco regime’s early ideological framework of National Catholicism, which included a brew of traditional Spanish fare such as Catholicism, the view of the peasantry as the embodiment of national virtues, unification of Spanish territory under one homogeneous culture and a single hegemonic language (Castilian), and the use of violence as a “creative and purifying” force (Richards 1996: 152).

For Franco, an absolute military victory over the Republicans during the Civil War was not sufficient; it was imperative to cleanse the country of the foreign virus of liberalism that had infected the nation. This reflected Franco’s regard for socialism as “a hereditary form of biological degeneracy,” a claim that many on the Republican side regard as evidence that Franco’s aim to eradicate the enemy was “tantamount to genocide” (Treglown 2009: 21).¹¹ Indeed, Franco was in the habit of using the metaphor of Spain as a sick patient in need of radical treatment, which he employed early during the regime in a speech to the nation on December 31, 1939, when he announced his intention to purify Spain of “wicked, deviant, politically and morally poisoned elements … those without possible redemption within the human order” (Richards 1996: 158). The prescription for such a condition, according to Franco, required nothing short of the creation of a quarantined society, one undergoing treatment in isolation and divorced from corruptive behaviors and practices such as those that had afflicted Spain under the Republican period and brought about the Civil War.

Among the most obvious targets of Franco’s post-Civil War policy of purification were the huídos (fugitives), the Republicans who took to the hills rather than surrender to Franco, and subsequently the maquis, the Spanish exiles who joined the French resistance and began to reenter Spain after the end of World War II with the hope of toppling the Franco regime. After Franco’s Nationalist army succeeded in eliminating not only the surviving cadres of the Republican political parties but also “the leaders, middle-rank functionaries, and rank-and-file members of the socialist and anarcho-syndicalist unions as well as members of the liberal intelligentsia,” the huídos were the only source of internal resistance against the authoritarian state (Preston 1995: 230). The maquis began to appear in 1944, when signs of the collapse of the Nazi regime in Germany were becoming apparent, and at least until 1948 remained a considerable irritant to the Franco regime by staging attacks throughout the country, often taking over small localities. Neither group, however, in the end was a match for Franco’s army, which succeeded in eradicating all guerrilla activity by the late 1940s.

The Francoist repression, however, was hardly limited to the huídos, maquis, Republican leaders, and members of the radical left such as the labor movement; the subjugation reached deep into the social fabric of Spanish society. Franco’s ability to suppress the populace was greatly aided by the Western powers’ preoccupation with the advent of World War II, and later with the geopolitical divisions created by the Cold War, which forced Britain, France, and the United States to turn a blind eye toward Spain. It was not until the mid-1950s with the signing of the Pact of Madrid (1953), which channeled American military and economic assistance to Franco in exchange for the right to establish American naval and air bases on Spanish soil, that the West began to reconnect with Spain in an effort to deter the global spread of communism. Such disregard for the fate of Spain and its people under Franco allowed the authoritarian regime to impose harsh policies of political purification without a care for its international reputation.

As with the number of Civil War casualties, the number of Spaniards imprisoned by the Franco regime for political reasons remains intensely debated, with some estimates as high as 400,000 (Preston 1995: 230). The regime’s official numbers are dramatic enough: 270,000 in 1940 and 45,000 more by 1945 (Richards 1996: 158). This vast repression was facilitated by the 1939 Law of Political Responsibilities, a law that was applied retroactively and demanded “economic compensation not only from those who had actually opposed the regime in the Civil War, but also from anyone who had made the so-called ‘National Movement’—or the military rising—necessary” (Ruiz 2005: 5). Such a sweeping legal mandate made virtually everyone who had sympathized with the Republican government—including liberals, teachers, masons, intellectuals, regionalists, labor leaders, and urban workers—a target for prosecution by the Franco regime.

Life as Franco’s prisoner reveals the sinister nature of the Francoist repression. Many Republican prisoners were tortured by military psychiatrists determined to eradicate “the germ of anti-nation, a form of degeneracy that if not cleansed to the last trace would contaminate the healthy body of Spain” (Graham 2004a: 2). Other notable torturers were the nuns running the women’s prisons, the reported site of “episodes of extreme atrocity, of mental and physical abuse” (Faber 2007: 142). Homosexuals became a target of the state after 1954 with the enactment of the Vagrancy and Villainy Act, a law replaced in 1970 by the more repressive Social and Menace Rehabilitation Act, “a fiercely anti-homosexual text that reified the conceptualisation of homosexuality as an anti-social, dangerous activity” (Calvo 2005: 96–98). An untold number of homosexuals (mostly male), or invertidos (inverted) were imprisoned, tortured, and locked in mental institutions as a consequence of these laws.

For many of Franco’s prisoners, captivity turned into outright slavery. “Spain became an immense jail, in which the vanquished were put at the service of the victors,” observes historian José Luis Gutiérrez.¹² Approximately 280,000 individuals convicted under the 1939 law were forced to work in the construction of their own jails (such as Carabanchel on the outskirts of Madrid) and concentration camps (such as Merinales in Andalusia) and massive public infrastructure projects (such as the Guadalquivir Canal, at the time the largest Spain had undertaken, built to provide irrigation to the region of Andalusia). Prisoners were also conscripted to work in the iron foundries of Bilbao and the mines of Asturias, and to erect monuments glorifying the authoritarian regime. According to historian Antonio Miguel Bernal, by 1941, approximately 10 percent of Spain’s male labor force were in jail.¹³ Many prisoners, grouped into twenty-four industries and 602 trades and professions, were parceled out to the private sector, especially to construction companies. Legitimizing this system of forced labor, from which the cash-strapped state benefited generously, was the Catholic notion of “expiation through suffering,” which allowed prisoners to redeem their political sins by offering their labor to the nation for free. “Redemption, when it was offered, could only come through labor,” remarked Franco in a December 31, 1938, speech (Richards 1996: 158).

Separating prisoners from their children was another common form of Francoist punishment. Auxilio Social (Social Aid), the largest social welfare agency in Franco’s Spain, is directly responsible for taking many prisoners’ children and placing them in state orphanages, where they were mistreated physically and mentally. According to one account (Faber 2007: 142), Auxilio Social officials separated some 30,000 children belonging to the “reds” based on the theory by military psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nájera that “these children should be saved from the degenerative environment of their leftist parents.”¹⁴ This “totalitarian scheme,” according to one study (Cenarro 2008: 41–50), employed welfare programs to incorporate individuals into the state “not as social subjects entitled to social rights” but as “members of a hierarchically ordered state-controlled national community,” and was grounded in a “mix of eugenicist theories and Catholic ideologies whereby pro-republican attitudes were seen as the result of the lower classes’ polluted social and ideological background.”

The Basque Repression

Also targeted by the Francoist repression were those opposed to Franco’s myth of a culturally homogeneous Spain—key among them Basque nationalists. Until its very end, the Franco regime treated the Basque Country as occupied foreign territory or a colonial outpost. Underscoring this “occupation” were laws that applied exclusively to the Basque territory in an attempt to stamp out separatist sentiments. A case in point was the banning of the public use of Euskera, the Basque Country’s ancient language. The regime also banned public display of the Basque flag and the very intrusive, seemingly incomprehensible policy of forbidding parents to give their children Basque names. These policies resulted in thousands of Basques being arrested, tortured, or forced into exile during the years leading to the democratic transition. In doing so, the Franco dictatorship succeeded in creating an environment of societal resistance and resentment toward the old regime across the Basque territory unique in Spain.

By far the most important manifestation of Basque resistance to the regime was the emergence of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA).¹⁵ Middle-class university students founded ETA in 1959, frustrated with the perceived passivity of mainstream Basque nationalists toward the Franco regime—such as those heading the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), the historic advocate of Basque nationalism. For ETA’s founders, the PNV was nothing short of “a collaborationist organization of Francoism” (Muro 2005: 579). ETA’s political orientations have varied over the years, but they have consistently adhered to the thinking of Sabino Arana, founder of Basque nationalism, who espoused the superiority of the Basque race and the need to prevent cultural contamination from Spain. Since embracing armed struggle in 1968, ETA has been a thorn in the side of the Spanish state.¹⁶ Its boldest act of terrorism was the 1973 assassination of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s alter ego and designated political heir, which unleashed a wave of state oppression of the Basque region unlike that experienced by any other part of the country.

At the infamous Burgos trial of 1970, the Franco regime court-martialed and sentenced to death sixteen ETA members, including two women and two priests. Widespread international outrage, including opposition to the executions from the Vatican, a long-time supporter of the Franco regime, spared their lives. Decidedly less fortunate were the two ETA members and three communist leaders executed in September 1975, the last official act of state violence of the old regime, just as the democratic transition was appearing on the horizon. No fewer than thirteen countries withdrew their ambassadors from Madrid in protest against the killings. In March 1976, in one of the more notable acts of state violance during the democratic transition, the state police opened fire on a demonstration by Basque workers in the city of Vitoria, resulting in five deaths.

Less known, at least until quite recently, were the extrajudicial strategies the state used to suppress Basque nationalism and eradicate ETA. From the inception of ETA terrorism in the early 1960s through the mid-1980s, the state conducted a “dirty war” against suspected ETA members, which ended up killing many ordinary citizens on both sides of the French-Spanish border who got caught in the crossfire. The war’s architect was none other than Carrero Blanco, who believed that “only a specialized anti-terrorist force that would fight the terrorists with their own tactics could defeat the terrorists” (Encarnación 2007: 961). With that goal in mind, and well before his spectacular assassination by ETA in 1973, Carrero Blanco laid the groundwork for the creation in 1975 of Batallón Vasco Español (BVE), a right-wing anti-terrorist paramilitary group. Managed by military officers and staffed by mercenaries, the BVE was active on both sides of the French-Spanish border between 1975 and 1981, and became the prototype for the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (GAL), the state-sponsored death squads in operation between 1982, the year that marked Spain’s return to left-wing rule since the Republican period, and 1986.

Francoist Political Socialization

A more subtle but no less insidious form of Francoist repression was the cynical manipulation of Spanish history. As the victor in the Civil War, Franco had ample opportunity to rewrite history for his own political purposes. His manipulation of Spanish history aimed to confuse and obscure the facts about the Civil War, with the intention of socializing the citizenry into accepting a state-sanctioned interpretation of the war that bore little connection to history and served to justify the authoritarian regime. Aiding Franco’s manipulation of history was the public’s high level of ignorance about the events leading to the Civil War, a development greatly facilitated by the reluctance of ordinary Spaniards to talk candidly about the Civil War as part of their daily lives. According to one survey (CIS 2008), 43 percent of respondents claimed that during their childhood and adolescence their families spoke “little about the war,” while 30 percent claimed there was no discussion of the war at all. But ignorance about the Civil War was also cultivated by a dearth of objective attention to the war on the part of education authorities.

An exhaustive study of Spanish textbooks of the Francoist era by historian Rafael Valls (2007: 157) notes: “History textbooks of this period scarcely ever present detailed historical information about the Second Republic and the Civil War. Instead, they reduce their presentation to negative moral judgment of the Republican period, in which the names of major protagonists are omitted, together with their reformist efforts. The result is that textbooks avoid presenting even minimal historical context for this period, which could facilitate the students’ ability to understand its development.” Valls adds that treatment of the Civil War is not “well-developed” in the textbooks of the Francoist era.¹⁷ Indeed, the textbooks emphasize that during the 1930s Spain experienced not a war per se but rather an epic rescue by Franco’s Nationalist army. Thus, El Alzamiento (The Uprising), Franco’s rebellion against the Second Republic, is described in “near mythical terms,” presenting those who staged this insurgency as “representing everything of sanity that remained in society.” By contrast, particular scorn is reserved for the Republicans and the Republican period. Valls notes that the need to legitimize the illegal military intervention staged by Franco in 1936 led unavoidably to the “demonization of all reformist projects of the Second Republic and those who had been involved in carrying them out.” All Republican efforts are described as “anti-national, anti-Catholic, manipulated by foreigners, separatist, Marxist, Bolshevik and causing disasters, disorder, and crimes.” The deliberate point is to associate the history of the Republic with partisan squabbling and endemic anti-clericalism.

Whenever the actual conflict among the Spaniards is discussed in Francoist textbooks, it is euphemistically referred to as “The Crusade,” “The War of Liberation,” or “The War of Salvation,” and generally characterized as a clash of patriots against hostile foreigners, communists, and anarchists in particular. The intention of state authorities was to portray the Nationalist victors as saviors and the defeated Republicans as foreign-influenced traitors. Only after Franco’s death in 1975 did official education materials accept terms such as “The Spanish War” or “The War of Spain” to refer to the Civil War. It was also during the late Franco period that “acts of heroism on both sides” of the Civil War began to be noted. This period also began to see descriptions of the early Franco period as having entailed “a difficult period of domestic conciliation.” The textbooks, however, “say nothing about the repression and violence carried out during the Civil War by the rebels, or the repression of the first years under Franco, of the large population of exiles caused by the war, nor of the severe poverty that the majority of the population suffered during the twenty years from 1940 to 1960.”

Glorifying the Nationalist Cause

State policy under Franco reinforced what was being taught in the classroom by emphasizing the theme of national salvation from the chaos and destruction of the Civil War together with a determination never again to experience this kind of travail. It was routine for Franco to exaggerate the number of people who died in the Civil War, a conflict he himself provoked. Un millón de muertos (one million dead) was the phrase commonly used by Francoist authorities when accounting for the number of Spaniards who perished in the Civil War, a figure that, as seen already, does not correspond with historical research. More disturbing still, the mythical figure of one million was employed by the regime to suggest “ownership of the victims by the Nationalist side,” as if “the only deaths had been those of the winning side; as if no Republicans had died on the fronts and in the rearguard, or had been shot in the subsequent period of repression” (Aguilar 2002: 75). In any case, the main intention of exaggerating the number of casualties was a calculated one: “to impress upon the people the extraordinarily high cost of the war (Jackson 1965: 526). This mission was boosted by conceptions of the Civil War in the popular culture. The phrase “one million dead” became engraved in the minds of the Spanish, especially after it became the title of one of the better-known fictionalized accounts of the Civil War by the novelist José María Gironella.

Key events of the Civil War were reconstructed in a way that bore virtually no connection to the historical record. A case in point is the bombing of Guernica, arguably the most iconic battleground of the Civil War, by German planes in April 1937, at Franco’s request. According to official documents from the Basque government, the bombing reduced this historic Basque village to rubble and killed 1,654 people (about a third of the village’s population). Such devastation inspired Picasso’s iconic Guernica, a painting intended by the artist to depict the horrors of right-wing violence in his native Spain and credited with helping change world opinion about the Spanish Civil War in favor of the Republicans. Incredibly, the Franco regime turned this episode into evidence of the cruelty of the Basque people.¹⁸ According to the Franco regime’s official story, “the villagers torched their own city”; no German participation in the bombing is even acknowledged (Aguilar 2008: 163).

Public monuments glorifying the 1936 Nationalist uprising against the Republican government were designed to shape public perception about the Civil War and the dictatorship. The town of Belchite, in the province of Zaragoza, site of the Battle of Belchite (1937), was subjected to a bizarre form of memorializing by being preserved in its complete destruction as a “vivid testament of the catastrophe that occurred in Spain and of the supposed viciousness of the Republicans” (Aguilar 2008: 163).”¹⁹ Franco rebuilt the city in 1939, next to the ruins of the old one, as an example of his regime’s capacity to bring peace and order back to Spain. The ultimate (and most controversial) act of consecration of the memory of “the Spirit of 1936” and its protagonists, however, was the construction of El Valle de los Caídos, Franco’s monumental edifice to the “heroes” of the Civil War, roughly 30 miles from Madrid. The monument owes its notoriety, among other reasons, to its imposing architecture, widely derided as a prime example of fascist theatricality. As such, El Valle seems to have failed to live up to the expectations of its main architect, Diego Méndez, who envisioned homage to traditional Spanish neoclassical architecture, along the lines of the neighboring royal monastery El Escorial, distinguished by its austere design. El Valle houses the Basílica de la Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos, only slightly smaller than St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican (its original size was actually larger than St. Peter’s but it was later modified out of respect to the pope), topped by a 500-foot cross, the tallest in the world, visible from miles away.²⁰

Franco intended El Valle—commenced in 1940, just months after the end of the Civil War—to be built in just one year to memorialize “the Christian struggle against the ardently anti-clerical Republic,” in keeping with the notion of Spain as “God’s chosen nation” (Hite 2008: 5). However, due to the economic hardship of the postwar years and the difficulties posed by the complexity of its design, the monument took nearly two decades to complete. Trying to lower construction costs during a time of great economic stress, Franco resorted to using Republican prisoners to help build the monument, thereby surrounding it with even greater controversy and infamy.²¹ The workers were forced to quarry a cavern 250 meters deep into the rocks of the Sierra de Guadarrama, which houses the monument’s main basilica.

By the time El Valle was inaugurated in 1959, its purpose had shifted dramatically by seeking to advance two seemingly contradictory goals: honoring Franco’s victory over the Republicans during the Civil War (the original intent) and serving as a new symbol of national reconciliation. The latter is hardly a match for the former. The more than half a million people who visit El Valle annually, the vast majority foreign tourists, cannot escape the overwhelming sentiment of witnessing a shrine to Francoism.²² Almost every feature of the monument seeks to link Franco’s triumph over the Republicans to Spain’s religious tradition of epic evangelizing crusades: from the reconquest of Spain in the fifteenth century over the Arabs, to the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, to the “discovery” of the Americas. In this sense, El Valle serves as a powerful symbol of the symbiotic relationship between church and state that was consolidated under Franco.

El Valle’s awkward nod to national reconciliation is suggested in the few hundred Republicans buried at the monument alongside some 50,000 Francoist supporters. How the remains of the defeated Republicans ended up buried beside those of the Nationalists at El Valle remains the source of some dispute. Some reports propose that this was a last-minute development suggested by the Catholic Church to underscore the monument’s new mission of closing the wounds of the Civil War. According to this narrative, relatives of Republican casualties could have the remains of their loved ones buried at El Valle provided they had documentation proving their relatives were Catholics. Most likely, however, the Franco regime exhumed some of the unmarked Republican graves found throughout the country and reburied the remains at El Valle without anyone’s consent, or simply buried Republican workers who helped build the monument. In any case, the existence of Republican remains at El Valle did not deter Franco himself from offending their memory in a speech to mark the dedication of the monument:

The anti-Spanish forces have been defeated and destroyed but they have not died. Periodically, we see how they raise their heads, and, in their arrogant blindness, seek to poison and stimulate once again the innate curiosity and ambition of the young. For that reason it is necessary to silence the advice of the bad teachers over the new generations.²³

After 1959, promoting national reconciliation was dictated by the political realities of the day. For starters, two decades into the Francoist era, the myth of salvation from war and destruction—the founding myth of the Franco regime—was wearing thin, if only because memories of the Civil War among ordinary Spaniards were becoming increasingly distant. After 1959, the regime was also quite keen on improving its image abroad, having found itself internationally isolated after the end of World War II and the defeat of fascism in Germany and Italy. The effort at promoting national reconciliation culminated in 1964 with the extravagant “Campaign of 25 Years of Peace,” a series of commemorative events marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Civil War. This grand commemoration included films, publications, and even a “peace parade” (highlighted, ironically enough, by a strong military presence) and was intended by the Franco regime to relegitimize its authority by highlighting its accomplishments rather than its origins (Aguilar 2002: 118–19).

Franco’s vast propaganda machine, organized around a national news and documentary service, Noticiarios y Documentales Cinematográficos (NODO), played a prominent role in promoting the authoritarian regime’s new emphasis on national reconciliation. Created in 1943 to facilitate dissemination of state cultural and information policy and to distill both domestic and international news for the public, NODO served the state with the dual purpose of consolidating control over information and using information as a propaganda tool. Its main products were newsreels, shown in the nation’s cinema houses alongside feature films, the primary form of popular entertainment prior to the advent of television in the late 1960s.²⁴

As a propaganda tool, NODO’s primary mission was to promote the Franco regime and its accomplishments. The typical NODO newsreel highlighted the progress of the dictatorship, as suggested by the building of a new public work, such as a dam or a highway, as well as the purported benevolence of the dictator, as seen through the expansion of housing and recreational opportunities for the workers. Franco himself was a frequent subject of NODO documentaries. From 1943 to 1959, NODO’s coverage of Franco emphasized crediting the dictator with keeping the nation from falling back into civil war; after 1959, coverage aimed to tie the dictator to the advent of “peace and progress.” According to Ellwood (1995: 202), between 1943 and 1975, Franco appeared in over nine hundred NODO reports, which was equivalent to 4 percent of NODO’s total production. Franco’s appearances dwindled over the years from a record forty-five in 1965 to a mere nine in 1974, and two in 1975. This decline largely reflects NODO’s skilled manipulation of the image of the dictator. Franco was most likely to appear on the screen during periods of economic growth and relative stability, and to fade away during times of economic crisis and domestic turbulence. Conspicuously absent were references to the economic misery of the immediate postwar years and the repression of political dissidents.

NODO was also in the business of producing documentaries that provided an in-depth look at historical events. The agency’s most famous documentary, El Camino de la paz (The Path to Peace), dealt with the Civil War. Released in 1959, after memories of the war were no longer so vivid, the film conveyed the false impression that Franco’s Nationalist uprising had been necessary to restore peace and order following the Second Republic’s attacks on Spanish culture and institutions. Yet, as explained by Aguilar (2008: 128), El Camino de la paz also marked an important departure from the traditional depiction of the Civil War by suggesting a more realistic treatment than previous propaganda products from the regime. For one thing, an actual war was acknowledged, in contrast to previous interpretations of the Civil War as a crusade or liberation, and “reds” and “nationalists” were even mentioned as warring parties. The overall treatment, Aguilar wrote, is “more tragic than heroic,” a point underscored by use of actual war footage. The larger message—that no one should forget the bloodshed of the Civil War and the sacrifices that this fratricidal conflict entailed, was emphasized in the film’s closing words: a plea to God “to never again allow Spanish blood to be spilled in civil wars.”²⁵

A Paradox of Forgetting

Although the Pact of Forgetting was intended to set the past aside, it had the paradoxical consequence of allowing for the persistence of plenty of reminders of the very things Spaniards were trying to forget. In keeping with the desire to avoid anything that could arouse political passions, those in charge of the democratic transition took no official position on the hundreds of monuments and memorials honoring either the Nationalist side in the Civil War or the Franco regime itself. Without national policy from the central government in Madrid dictating how to dispose of Francoist monuments and memorials, Spanish regional governments—created after 1977 when Spain undertook a massive process of state decentralization leading to the establishment of seventeen “autonomous” communities—adopted separate approaches. In Republican strongholds like Catalonia and Valencia, and in fiercely independent regions such as the Basque Country, symbols of the old dictatorship, like street names, were quickly replaced with Republican symbols and names of local significance. In parts of the country where Spanish nationalism was not controversial or Franco’s Nationalist crusade enjoyed popular support, such as parts of Andalusia and Navarra, there has been little incentive to purge public spaces of the material legacy of the old regime.

More generally, the unwillingness of the political class to deal with the complexity of Franco’s material legacy has resulted in a “syncretic process whereby the symbols of the old and new Spain coexist alongside each other” (Rigby 2003: 77). The most important material reminder of the dictatorship is the infamous Valle de los Caídos, but it is hardly the only one. Spanish currency bearing Franco’s image remained in circulation until the disappearance of the peseta in the late 1990s with the introduction of the euro. The Francoist coat of arms was displayed in churches, convents, and monasteries for decades after the fall of the regime. As of 2004, Madrid was home to some 360 streets bearing the names of people or acts associated with the Franco regime, and until 2005 a statue of Franco in full equestrian attire adorned the Plaza de San Juan de la Cruz in Nuevos Ministerios, a central area of downtown Madrid that is home to embassies, government offices, and multinationals.²⁶ Remarkably, the statue, erected in 1959 by the Franco regime to mark twenty years of peace since the end of the Civil War, managed to survive the transition to democracy by nearly thirty years, until it was removed from public view on April 17, 2005, in an operation conducted under cover of night by officials from the city of Madrid and without authorization by the central government, with the pretext of renovating the plaza in which the statue stood. The sensitivity of the operation reflected a heated debate between those who argued that removing the statue amounted to “erasing history” and those who felt the public display of the statue suggested a callous disregard for the memory of Franco’s victims.²⁷ This debate intensified as developments in Madrid triggered a flurry of efforts by officials in other Spanish cities to “rid the country of its fascist debris,” as put to this author by a Spanish human rights activist.²⁸

The Pact of Forgetting also left in place the very uneven fashion in which Franco had memorialized the victims of the Spanish Civil War. As observed by Faber (2006: 211), “by the time Franco died in 1975 his followers had had almost forty years to mourn their victims, exalt their heroes, and distort the historical record to their benefit while the opposition had been largely maimed and muted by censorship and repression.” Ironically, the transition to a democratic regime would serve to perpetuate rather than address this imbalance in how the past was memorialized.