Spain’s New Memory Law Will Finally Recognize Franco’s Victims
Even after Spain’s late 1970s transition to democracy, its political establishment maintained a tactful silence over the record of Franco’s dictatorship. But a bill advanced by the left-wing government insists on the need to acknowledge the dictator’s crimes — and identify the estimated 112,000 people lying in unmarked graves across Spain.
Josefa Peiro, 80 holds a portrait of her father, Jose Peiro, on August 29, 2018 in Tavernes, Spain. Jose Peiro was executed in Paterna on November 30, 1939. According to local authorities, over 2,000 bodies of victims of Franco’s regime were buried in this cemetery after being executed since 1939 to 1956 following the end of the Spanish Civil War. (David Ramos / Getty Images)
“We acknowledge those who are in mass graves, yet to be identified, and the enormous suffering that this situation, which is not fitting for a democracy, has caused.” So asserted Spain’s deputy premier Carmen Calvo, after the Socialist–Unidas Podemos coalition approved a new draft law that seeks historical redress for the victims of fascist dictator Francisco Franco.
The Democratic Memory Law — now all but certain to be passed by parliament — will see the state take legal responsibility for identifying the estimated 112,000 victims of Francoism still buried in unmarked graves across Spain. It will also convert the Valley of the Fallen — long the dictator’s mausoleum, and today a Catholic basilica — into a civil cemetery, and outlaw public exaltation of the dictator.
By the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), about 150,000 Republicans had been killed in the Francoite terror; a further 20,000 prisoners were executed in the immediate wake of the Nationalists’ victory. Yet with Spanish democracy refounded in the 1970s on a “pact of forgetting” and a bipartisan amnesty, it was only in the early 2000s, with the proliferation of grassroots historical memory groups, that momentum grew for the country to tackle this dark chapter of its history.
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