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CHAPTER 2

Regime Transition and the Rise of Forgetting, 1977–1981

“The transition to democracy demanded that we overlook thousands of memories and claims that weren’t convenient to bring up because they could endanger the pact of the transition.”¹ This statement, made during the parliamentary debate over the 2007 Law of Historical Memory by Ramón Jáuregui, an influential socialist official, is pregnant with insights about why Spain willed itself into political amnesia on embracing democracy. At first glance, Jáuregui’s statement reveals the striking pragmatism of left-wing leaders, who bore the moral responsibility of raising the issue of justice against the Franco regime and mobilizing civil society around the issue during the transition, if only because the left suffered the brunt of the Civil War killings and Francoist repression. But in the wake of Franco’s death, the left’s chief concern was not to punish the old regime but to get democracy off the ground in as swift and nonconfrontational a manner as possible.

Such a pragmatic stance for the left was rooted in a multiplicity of factors, beginning with the trauma of democracy’s collapse during the interwar years and the ensuing decades spent in the political wilderness due to the ban on political parties imposed by the Franco dictatorship. The left’s pragmatism was also anchored in the realization by the early 1970s that the kind of regime change that it had prepared for or had wanted for Spain—the toppling of the dictatorship—was unlikely to come into fruition due to the remarkable resilience of the authoritarian regime; this in turn deepened the desire for a swift transition. Left-wing leaders were also cognizant of the political environment in which the transition unfolded, especially rising political violence, and did not wish to pursue any policy that would make a delicate situation even more so. All of this made the left-wing parties extraordinarily cautious throughout the transition and its aftermath.

Decidedly less apparent in Jáuregui’s statement is the connection to the nature of the change in political regimes. As seen in this chapter, the impact of the democratic transition on how the issue of the past was handled in Spain was at least twofold. On the one hand were the limitations on the pursuit of justice against the old regime occasioned by a process of political reform that was anchored upon the legal mechanisms of the authoritarian state. The self-reinvention of the Franco regime intended to accomplish the paradoxical goal of change within continuity by satisfying both the old regime’s insistence that the transition to democracy be “legal” within Francoist law and the democratic opposition’s desire for the expedient return of civil and political freedoms. On the other hand was the ethos of political consensus that permeated the democratic transition. Such consensus was made official policy by the first post-transition government as a means to cope with the multiplicity of problems involved in building a new democracy in the midst of a full-blown eruption of ethnopolitical violence.

Democratic Change Within Regime Continuity

Spain’s transition to democracy began in earnest with King Juan Carlos’ stunning betrayal of his pledge to a dying Franco to uphold the principles of Francoism.² Franco had handpicked the young king as his successor and had made the Spanish monarchy the linchpin of the strategy of “continuismo,” or Francoism without Franco. But the king chose instead to put the nation on the path to democracy, as demanded by the public even before Franco’s death. A highlight of the anti-Franco protest movement was a 1967 demonstration that drew some 100,000 workers to the streets of Madrid demanding “Franco no, democracy yes” (Gilmore 1985: 105). These mobilizations provided a counterbalancing effect to the rising elite-led transition. As contended by Maravall (1981: 15), the early days of the transition encapsulated “two counteracting dynamics; the dynamic of reform, negotiation, and pacts from above, promoted by regime reformists, and on the other, the dynamic of pressure and protest from below.”

On the advice of his closest political mentors, the king’s democratizing agenda called for a process of regime change that “did not violate the essential spirit of franquismo” (Podolny 1992: 90). For all intents and purposes, this meant a process of democratization that, born out of the very structures of the Franco regime, was free of any reprisal against the representatives of the authoritarian state. At the helm of this process was Adolfo Suárez, a Francoist official (head of the Movimiento Nacional, the closest thing to a political party in the Franco regime, and former director of the national television services), and generally presumed to be a member of the renovadores, a group of Francoist insiders committed to the reformation of the regime from the inside out. Indeed, Suárez’s commitment to reforming the authoritarian state proved decisive in his selection by the king to head the transition to democracy.

Suárez replaced Carlos Arias Navarro, the last prime minister under Franco, who was dismissed from his post in July 1976 after proving a weak and indecisive leader in executing the king’s demands for a speedy but orderly transition to democracy. Just before Franco’s death in 1975, Arias Navarro proposed a set of political reforms, including the legalization of political “associations” (which avoided the much-dreaded “parties” label). But these reforms never made it out of the Francoist parliament. Such policy failures generated massive mobilizations by the general public in favor of the country’s return to democracy. Arias Navarro’s inept response to popular demands for political reform was to ratchet up political repression, a move that generated international condemnation of the Franco regime, including threats of an economic boycott by Western European trading partners.³

Given his intimate association with the Franco regime, Suárez’s appointment came as a big disappointment for those hoping for a swift exit from nearly four decades of Francoism. “An historic error,” was the characterization of communist leader Ramón Tamanes.⁴ Yet Suárez was ideally suited for reforming the Franco regime from the inside out, a political transformation that had “no clear parallel or analogy in twentieth-century political systems” (Payne 1985: 25). Besides possessing a deep familiarity with the structures of the Franco regime, Suárez was young (forty-three), photogenic, and a master diplomat. The last trait allowed him to develop close ties and considerable trust with the democratic opposition in a remarkably short period of time. Soon after his appointment as prime minister in July 1976, Suárez began to organize secret talks, often late at night in Madrid restaurants, with the leaders of the still-illegal socialist and communist parties to convince them he had every intention of establishing a Western-style democracy.

To prove that his democratizing intentions were real, Suárez ordered an amnesty policy on June 30, 1976, that freed some political prisoners jailed by Franco and ended the harassment of left-wing leaders by the police, many of whom were returning to Spain for the first time after decades of exile abroad. Although criticized by some quarters on the left as insufficient, Suárez’s amnesty was widely praised by others, such as the left-leaning El País, a new liberal newspaper that quickly established itself as Spain’s paper of record, which termed it “the best possible of amnesties, although not the most comprehensive or the most desirable of amnesties” (Aguilar 2002: 193). The 1976 amnesty law, enacted as a royal decree, was also intended to plant the seeds for a central theme of the eventual democratic transition: the usefulness of forgetting as a way to overcome the divisions of the past and embark on a peaceful democratic future. The preamble to the law explicitly advocates forgetting the past as a precondition for peaceful democratic coexistence: “As Spain is now heading toward a fully normal democratic state, the moment has come to complete this process by forgetting any discriminatory legacy of the past in the full fraternal harmony of all Spaniards” (quoted in Aguilar 2002: 193).

In keeping with the king’s wishes for democratization, Suárez wisely remained deferential toward the Franco regime by insisting that its very institutions were being employed as democracy’s midwife. In this way, the transition to democracy was made legitimate under Francoist law. This explains common characterizations of the political reforms instituted in 1976 as “cross-eyed” since the reforms managed to accomplish two seemingly incompatible demands: full democracy for the historic opposition to the Franco regime led by the communist and socialist parties and constitutional continuity for Francoist authoritarians. On November 18, 1976, working in consultation with speaker of the Francoist Assembly Torcuato Fernández Miranda, the “Fundamental Laws,” the guiding legal framework of the Franco regime, were amended with the passage of the Law of Political Reform. This was an enormous victory for Suárez; only 15 percent of the deputies refused to endorse the law.

Suárez’s reform package called for the legalization of political parties and independent unions, freedom of association, the right to strike, dissolution of the Francoist parliament and the Organización Sindical Española (OSE), a corporatist syndicate that incorporated both employers and workers, and scheduling of democratic elections.⁵ No reference of any kind to the issue of justice against the old regime or reparations to its victims was incorporated into the text. On December 15, 1976, the Law of Political Reform was put to a national referendum, garnering 94.1 percent approval from the electorate on a turnout of about 80 percent of eligible voters. In essence, Suárez succeeded in forcing the Franco regime to self-liquidate while allowing the old regime to dictate the terms of the transition and accrue considerable power to shape the politics and institutions of the emerging democracy.

In no small part due to his skillful and expedient management of the transition, Suárez emerged the undisputed winner of the national elections on June 15, 1977. He was “the best-known politician in Spain, and the one perceived as the most capable of solving a whole series of problems—prices, public order, unemployment, strikes and the inauguration of democracy” (Tusell Gómez 1985: 95). Suárez’s Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD), a coalition of fourteen small parties of a center-right orientation, won 34.6 percent of all votes and 47.4 percent of parliamentary seats. The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) came in second, with 29.4 percent of all votes and 33.7 percent of parliamentary seats. The Partido Comunista Español (PCE) tallied an embarrassing third place finish, with 9.3 percent of all votes and 5.7 percent of parliamentary seats, barely ahead of the neo-Francoist Alianza Popular (AP), which managed to get 8.8 percent of all votes and 4.6 percent of parliamentary seats. With this victory, Suárez was entrusted with governing the nation through the “Constituent” period, which concluded with another national election in 1979, which Suárez also won with 35 percent of all votes. Table 2 shows the configuration of political forces in Spain between 1977 and 1979.

Table 2. Spain’s First Post-Transition Elections (1977 and 1979)

Source: Spanish Interior Ministry.

The Left and the Missing Past During the Transition

Remarkably, Spain underwent the transition to democracy without calls for justice against the old regime from the democratic opposition—not even a formal condemnation of its evils was demanded. During the 1977 elections the issue of justice against the Franco regime generated virtually no attention. Curiously, the PCE, the last party to be legalized in anticipation of the elections, was the most decisive in making public its desire not to delve into discussions about the past and advocating for outright forgetting. The PCE, according to Aguilar (2002: 244), “did everything in its power not to stir up the old and difficult memories of its role during the Civil War.” Nowhere in the position papers of PCE party leaders during the transition can one find even passing reference to the issue of retribution toward the Franco regime (Carrillo 1965, 1967).

Instead of pushing for transitional justice, the PCE focused its demands on the creation of a provisional government of national unity that excluded members of the old regime and a referendum on whether Spain should adopt a monarchical or republican form of government.⁶ After the 1977 Law of Political Reform was enacted, the PCE proposal for a provisional government and a referendum on the monarchy was rendered moot since the law was widely interpreted as “a vote in favor of the monarchy” (Aguilar 2002: 170) and the communists began to press for a broad amnesty accord as their biggest objective.⁷ In his speeches during the 1977 electoral campaign, PCE general secretary Santiago Carrillo announced that in the first parliamentary session the main objective of the communists would be “an amnesty law for prisoners and exiles.”⁸

The socialists also skirted the issue of justice for the old regime. After the return of the PSOE leadership from exile in France in 1974, the party began to mobilize the general public with calls for dissolution of all repressive institutions and extension of rights to all persons deprived of them for political or trade union activity (see González 1976; González and Guerra 1977). But these calls were intended to demand “the introduction of democratic reforms and not the expulsion or trials of those guilty of repression” (Aguilar 2001: 100). By the 1977 elections, PSOE legislative priorities were listed as: (1) amnesty law; (2) law of political parties; and (3) dissolution of repressive laws.⁹

Even radical left-wing groups that did not support the establishment of democracy in Spain chose not to raise the possibility of military trials, bureaucratic purges, or any other type of retribution toward the old regime. Far-left groups such as the Revolutionary Communist League limited their demands to dismantling the Franco regime and its repressive apparatus. Not even ETA, by far the most radical force outside the mainstream political establishment during the democratic transition, had anything to say about transitional justice. Instead, like other revolutionary movements of the period, ETA members chose to distance themselves from the democratization process in Madrid in protest against what they perceived as an illegitimate transition to democracy, since neither the right nor the left approved of the principle of regional self-determination. Herri Batasuna, ETA’s political branch, branded the democratic transition “the pure continuity of Francoism” (Laiz 1995: 256).

For the entire duration of the democratic transition, the only significant breach of the silence over the past came from the leaders of the PSP, a small socialist party that eventually merged with the PSOE. During the parliamentary deliberations over the draft of a new constitution enacted by popular referendum in 1978, PSP president Enrique Tierno Galván, a former university professor turned politician (he was elected to the Congress of Deputies from the province of Madrid in 1977 and subsequently elected mayor of Madrid in the first provincial elections of 1979), proposed that the preamble of the constitution include a brief statement referring to “a long period without a constitutional regime, of negation of public freedoms, and lack of recognition of the rights of nationalities and regions that make up the unity of Spain” (Balfour and Quiroga 2007: 45). He argued that “forgetting the past completely is forgetting those who have suffered the consequences of the past. There is a large sector of the Spanish people who cannot be forgotten; those who have suffered, and the least they deserve is that reference be made to this past, because thanks to their suffering we are winning today.” Tierno Galván’s eloquent pleas failed to garner support from either Santiago Carrillo of the PCE or Felipe González of the PSOE, and in the end these pleas were drowned by the right-wing opposition led by AP, which contended that the constitution’s preamble “should leave history in peace” (Balfour and Quiroga 2007: 46).

The Traumas and Lessons from the Past

The PSOE and PCE decision not to make an issue of the past during the transition reflected how deeply traumatized the left was by the Civil War and its aftermath, a point broadly displayed at the 1962 Munich Congress, a gathering in which prominent figures of the Republican exile, including many old socialist hands, declared their desire for “political prudence” in any process of political change in Spain and renounced all active and passive violence before, during, and after the transition to democracy (Aguilar 2002: 103).¹⁰ Numerous position papers presented at the Munich conference made reference to the Civil War as a fratricidal war, and discussed the need to overcome this conflict through reconciliation rather than recrimination, together with a desire to avoid any repetition of the tragedy at all cost. These commitments, according to Aguilar (2002: 103), were greatly influenced by the “ghosts” of the Civil War, since what brought together the representatives of the Republican exile to Munich was having lost the war and being forced to live their lives outside of Spain. The conference concluded with a speech by Salvador de Madariaga, former ambassador to France during the Republican period, who noted to great applause that “The Civil War that began in Spain on 18 July 1936 and that the Franco regime has maintained artificially through censorship, the monopoly of the press and radio and victory parades ended in Munich the day before yesterday, 6 July 1962” (Aguilar 2002: 104–5).

As left-wing leaders began to assert themselves in domestic politics during the early 1970s, they displayed a keen desire to set aside the ideological battles of the past. This was in keeping with the view that heightened political polarization had caused the collapse of the Republic and the Civil War. Socialist elder Enrique Múgica in an interview with El País during the opening of the PSOE’s first party congress held in Spain in 1976 noted that “This country has to leave behind the many decades of conflict, translated into bloody antagonism, and it has to formulate a dialectic of class in terms of peaceful co-existence.”¹¹ PCE leaders made analogous statements. Perhaps the most eloquent words were those of Santiago Álvarez, a communist leader tortured and sentenced to death by Franco. In exhorting his fellow communists, the most important source of domestic opposition to Franco’s regime since the end of the Civil War, to moderate their political demands, he noted:¹²

This memory of the past obliges us to take these circumstances into account, that is, to follow a policy of moderation. We feel responsibility for this process of democratization and the need to make a superhuman effort so that this process is not truncated. This is a unique moment in Spanish history. After more than a century of civil wars and a vicious cycle of massacres among Spaniards, which began after the War of Independence and ended in June 1977 with the first elections based on universal suffrage, this is the moment when it is possible to end this cycle and to open a period of civilized life, politically speaking. In this sense we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of expressing opinions that might be misunderstood, which could be, or appear to be, extremist.