Of all the hard truths a people have to face up to, the hardest often proves to be the truth about their past. It is only the bravest who can face it. Judged on that basis, South Africans are one of the few who measure up. It now looks that Spain is being forced to look the past in the face. It is a leading member of the European Union with a democratic system. Yet since the end of fascist power with the death of Franco in 1975 and the return of King Juan Carlos as a constitutional monarch, none of Spain’s elected governments has wanted to face some extremely unpleasant facts of Franco’s history.
Civil conflicts are often the most violent of wars. However, even by such standards, the Spanish Civil War from 1936 until 1938 was an extremely brutal affair. The victory of Franco’s Falangist fascists unleashed a wave of bloodletting in which anyone suspected of still harboring anti-fascist views was taken out and shot. There are still no clear figures for this reign of terror, but some estimates suggest that in excess of 80,000 people were murdered by fascist police and military.
After the war, Franco was the undisputed dictator of his country. It had been supposed that once he had secured his position, the executions ceased. There is, however, now overwhelming evidence that the disappearances and murders by the authorities continued right up to the time of his death.
It has only been thanks to the efforts of private groups that the facts are now becoming known. Successive Spanish governments, of both left and right wing, have preferred to let the matter rest, perhaps believing that ignoring such unsavory events was the best way to let the old wounds heal.
There is, however, an alarming side to this attitude. At the height of the terrorist activities of the Basque killers of ETA in the 1980s, government death squads were unleashed on the terrorists. Though some officials were prosecuted for this campaign, it is clear that the full truth has never come out. The worry for the Spanish is that this form of official terror may in some way have become institutionalized covertly within some parts of the Spanish law-and-order system. The same psychology that could let official killers operate within 1970s Spain could have been operating in the 1980s and early 1990s against Basque terrorists. In both cases, as far as the state was concerned, the enemies were clear. The only question was the way in which they were combated. Such reprehensible behavior is more typical of the death squads of South and Central America, countries which all, with the exception of Brazil, had their modern genesis in Spanish colonization. It may now seem droll that it was a Spanish warrant that led to the arrest in London of Gen. Pinochet, the murderous Chilean dictator.
What is perhaps most striking is the difficulty the freelance investigators have faced, in persuading local people to tell what they knew of extrajudicial executions and to point out the sites of mass graves. There still remains a fear that even in democratic, EU member Spain, the official killers could yet return.
It is completely wrong to think that ignoring these historic crimes will assist with reconciliation. As South Africa has demonstrated so potently, first you have to have truth; then you can have reconciliation.
