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
