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.
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