When the Spanish anti-fascist poet Marcos Ana died in 2016, the local council in his home city of San Fernando de Henares held a minute’s silence in his honor. The honor was well-deserved: Ana was the longest-serving political prisoner during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, spending twenty-three years behind bars between 1939 and 1962. His prison poetry had become internationally renowned in the 1950s and ’60s, while his 2007 memoir Decidme cómo es un árbol (Tell Me What a Tree Is Like) had been a bestseller in Spain and translated into various European languages.

Yet not everyone accepted the minute’s silence. Objecting to the tribute, a councilor from the far-right party España 2000 accused Ana of having been a “murderer poet” who had killed two priests during the Spanish Civil War. The same smears, based on Ana’s trumped-up conviction in a Franco-era mass trial, had been used against the poet as he spearheaded the international amnesty campaign for Spanish political prisoners in the 1960s and ’70s. “There was practically no defense,” Ana recalls in Decidme cómo es un árbol of his 1941 court martial. “The lawyer, a Francoist official, only went so far as to request clemency, accepting the charges against us as already [proven] beyond doubt.”

Izquierda Unida (United Left) councilors subsequently brought a defamation case against the España 2000 representative in question, Sandro Algaba. Yet the Madrid regional high court ruled in the latter’s favor, citing the Francoist court martial as a still legally valid conviction under Spanish law. Indeed, despite the lack of incriminating material proof or witness testimony against Ana, the Madrid court found that given the fascist-era conviction, Algaba’s allegations were based not on “blind ideology . . . but on the reality of the facts as they happened.”