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.
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
