Human rights crimes are to be investigated and the 40 years of unlawful state are now also to be dealt with in school lessons. But for the conservative opposition, this only opens up old wounds.
He still divides Spain today: the dictator Francisco Franco, who died in 1975.
Spain’s former dictator Francisco Franco died almost 47 years ago. But the country has still not finished coming to terms with its traumatic past. Now Spain wants to face this with a new law that was passed on Thursday evening. The fact that it only found a wafer-thin majority in Parliament shows how controversial the way it was dealt with at that time is still today.
In a marathon session, 138 proposed amendments to the so-called “Democratic Remembrance Law” were debated. The result is a new set of rules that declares the 40 years of Franco’s dictatorship to be “illegal” and all judgments and proceedings against critics of the regime to be “illegal”.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez sees this as a further step in dealing with the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939 and the decades-long dictatorship that claimed more than 500,000 lives. In October 2019, Sánchez already caused a stir in this context at home and abroad: At that time, he had Franco’s bones transferred from the monumental burial site in the Valley of the Fallen to his family grave in a village cemetery on the outskirts of Madrid.
Dealing with the dictatorship in schools
Sánchez is not the first head of government to take on the difficult task of dealing with human rights violations from the Franco era, which remained unpunished thanks to an amnesty law passed at the dawn of democracy. The first attempt was made by the socialist head of government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. In 2007, the Spanish Parliament approved a “Law on Historical Remembrance” for the first time. It served as the basis for creating a register of around 4,000 mass graves in which 60,000 Franco opponents had been buried.
But the opening of the graves and the identification of the victims progressed slowly. The new law therefore stipulates that the state must pay for the exhumation and no longer, as before, the municipalities or private individuals.
A new special public prosecutor’s office is also being set up. It is to investigate human rights violations under the dictatorship. However, most of the perpetrators and victims have long since passed away. The Valley of the Fallen, where Franco was exhumed, is finally to be transformed into a memorial to the victims and a documentation center. To this day, there is no background information of any kind on site, nowhere is it known that almost 34,000 people were buried here. Most of them were opponents of Franco who had to build the tomb with its 152 meter high cross as forced labourers. The Franco dictatorship and the decades of repression are now also to be dealt with in detail in school books.
Felipe González criticizes the new law
Sánchez’s minority government passed the law only with the support of the Basque bourgeois nationalist party PNV and MPs from the left-republican Basque party EH Bildu. The latter had managed to ensure that the law was also applied to crimes against humanity until 1983, i.e. after the end of the Franco dictatorship.
The Basque party is particularly interested in the attacks in the early phase of Spanish democracy by the so-called anti-terrorist liberation groups (GAL). They hunted down terrorists from the Basque underground organization ETA and received money from the Interior Ministry’s reptile fund. Two high-ranking politicians, including then Interior Minister José Barrionuevo, later had to serve prison sentences for misappropriating public funds.
Barrionuevo was then in the cabinet of Felipe González’s socialist government. In the last few days, the former prime minister has also been very critical of the new law, which will last until the beginning of his first legislative period.
Conservative opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo was even more outraged. At a memorial service for councilman Miguel Ángel Blanco, who was executed by ETA 25 years ago and is arguably the conservative People’s Party’s (PP) best-known ETA victim, Feijóo pledged to overturn the new law once he comes to power . The conservative is currently well ahead of Sánchez in election polls.
But the new law did not only provoke resentment in political circles. Even the Association of Historical Remembrance (ARMH), which opened almost 800 graves and recovered the bones of more than 10,000 Franco victims, was dissatisfied. “The law does not make it clear who the executioners were,” complained Emilio Silva, who founded the association 22 years ago. He also criticized the fact that neither reparations payments for the victims’ families nor the return of confiscated goods were planned.