MADRID, 1 November 2007 — Spain took a historic step in confronting its past yesterday when Parliament unveiled a new law aimed at granting justice to hundreds of thousands of long-neglected victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.
Debated fiercely for more than a year, the law contains the most explicit, formal condemnation to date of Gen. Francisco Franco’s four-decade-long regime. Among other things, it requires the removal of statues, plaques and other symbols that still exist in honor of the deceased dictator.
But facing the past has inflamed passions in this polarized society.
Conservatives say the law only reopens wounds better left undisturbed, while some victims and their families are unhappy that the measure does not go far enough.
Thirty-two years after Franco died, and 71 years after the Fascist general overthrew an elected leftist government, igniting a devastating civil war, Spain is undergoing an unprecedented examination of that period’s brutalities.
Across the country, families have begun exhuming long-dead relatives from clandestine common graves where many of the losers in the war or the opponents of the regime ended up. New books, seminars and art exhibits have aired stories and events that were kept under wraps for years.
And now, the Law of Historical Memory is the landmark contribution to this process from Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and his Socialist government. Zapatero’s grandfather was executed by Franco loyalists.
Under its terms, Franco-era political courts that jailed thousands of dissidents will be declared illegitimate, along with the sentences they handed down; guerrillas who fought the dictatorship will be recognized; and it will be made easier for victims to apply for indemnifications.
The law declares that the gigantic Valle de los Caidos monument outside Madrid, where Franco is buried, be used to salute all who were killed in the war, and not as a place to pay homage to fascism.
All sanctions, judicial sentences and personal violence “produced for reasons of politics, ideologies or religious belief” during the Civil War and the dictatorship “are recognized and declared as radically unjust,” the draft of the law states.
The government argues that it is important to honor and provide a catharsis for those who suffered under the dictatorship and those who fought the losing battle against Franco and his mutinous army.
The Spanish Civil War, in which historians estimate up to half a million people were killed, was widely seen as the precursor to World War II. Franco’s fascist forces, backed by Nazi Germany and the Roman Catholic Church, fought and defeated the elected Second Republic, a leftist government with support from the Soviet Union.
Both sides committed atrocities in the war, but the government argues that right-wing victims and Franco supporters were years ago given reparations, proper burials and ample recognition. Those from the other side were relegated to ignominy.
“We want acknowledgment for the people who fought Franco, the people who died in a war that should not have taken place,” Esperanza Martinez Garcia, an 80-year-old former fighter who spent 15 years in jail as a political prisoner, said Tuesday.
“I always kept my dignity, and I’ve never been ashamed of my being in jail ... but there are people whose entire life was taken away, because they were killed or because they spent so many years in prison.” To guarantee Spain’s peaceful transition to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975, politicians (many of whom were themselves Franquistas) agreed to put aside the past. There was none of the truth commissions or judicial inquiries common in other postwar societies.
Dredging up the past now, conservatives say, will only undermine that spirit of reconciliation and further divide the nation.
“You are dividing Spain into the good victims and the bad victims,” said Jorge Fernandez Diaz, a member of Parliament for the right-wing Popular Party, the largest opposition group that ruled Spain for 12 years until being unseated by Zapatero and the Socialists in 2004. “This is not correcting injustice but reopening history and rewriting it in the manner that Mr. Zapatero sees fit.”
The right did not object to Sunday’s beatification at the Vatican of 498 priests, nuns and other pious Catholics who were killed by pro-leftist forces in the Civil War, saying the elevation of the church’s “martyrs” to the road to sainthood was a religious and not political matter.
Zapatero’s leftist government dismisses critics of the new law, suggesting the right is nervous about scrutinizing its complicity in the dictatorship.
“We are not reopening wounds; we are, in fact, finally attempting to close the wounds,” said Juan Antonio Barrio de Penagos, a Socialist legislator and one of the law’s sponsors.
