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The Opinion Pages

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The
Ghosts
Spain
Tries
to
Ignore
By DAN HANCOX

DEC. 8, 2016

In Spain, wrote the poet Federico Garca Lorca, the dead are more alive than
the dead of any other country in the world. Garca Lorca was writing in 1933;
only three years later, he was assassinated by a militia supporting Gen.
Francisco Francos fascist uprising, only a month into the Spanish Civil War.
Despite extensive detective work, excavations and even recent DNA tests of
his relatives, Garca Lorcas remains have never been found, and he has never
been given a proper burial. In this at least, he is not alone. It is thought that at
least 114,000 victims of fascist death squads remain missing or unidentified
from the period of the civil war and the dictatorship that followed Francos
victory in 1939. Most were political prisoners who supported the left-wing
Popular Front government, executed under cover of darkness, then bundled
into unmarked mass graves.
In recent years, the clamor to acknowledge and commemorate Spains
many ghosts has grown louder. Last month, 50 bodies were excavated in the
small town of Porreres on the Balearic island of Majorca, off the Spanish
mainland a full 80 years after their deaths. Most showed signs of having been
shot in the head at close range. According to local historians, they were lined up

alongside the wall of the town church before being executed. The passage of
time, and the lack of records about the executions, makes both finding and
identifying victims fiendishly difficult, although DNA testing will help in some
cases. It is thought there are 47 such mass graves on Majorca alone.
The excavation followed campaigning by a relatives group, the Memory
Association of Majorca, and the passing of a law by the Balearic Islands regional
parliament in May, which also funded the digging. Civil society, in particular,
has taken up the cause, thanks to an absence of government support. Last
month, Amnesty International started a campaign, Justice for Christmas, calling
for the government to investigate mass graves.
The citizen-driven historical memory movement came into being at the
turn of the millennium, and as public pressure grew, the Spanish government
under the center-left prime minister at the time, Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero,
passed a law of historical memory in 2007, lending government support and
funding to excavation, commemoration and reburial. Many on the right accused
Mr. Zapatero of politicizing tragedy and reopening old wounds, while historical
memory campaigners felt the legislation had been watered down.
When the right-wing Peoples Party won the election in 2011, the new prime
minister, Mariano Rajoy, promptly defunded the project and closed the Office of
Victims of the Civil War and the Dictatorship. The Spanish people, Mr. Rajoy
had said in 2008, would have to look to the future, and generate neither
tension nor division.
It may sound like a noble sentiment in isolation, but it is disingenuous.
Spain is no more able to escape its past than any other country, and historical
memory is not just an interest of Spains defeated left. Under Francos
dictatorship, the winners in the civil war not only spent 36 years writing the
history of their victory, teaching it in schools and enshrining it in popular
culture, but also left exactly the kind of solemn monuments to their dead that
have been denied to the missing 114,000. The most profound and awe-inspiring
example of these is Francos final resting place, the Valley of the Fallen. It is a
basilica topped by the largest memorial cross in the world, at nearly 500 feet
high and is the site of annual commemorations by the far right, dressed in
fascist uniforms, on the anniversary of Francos death.
As a new generation of fascists gains influence with governments from the

United States to Hungary, it may be the source of some surprise that Spain has
no equivalent to Greeces Golden Dawn or Frances National Front, especially
given the desperate and long-lasting effects of the economic crisis in Spain. In
part the absence of a major contemporary Spanish far-right party is a legacy of
the civil war and dictatorship, and the mass killings that ensued, which loom
over the country to this day. In part and this is the other reason Mr. Rajoy
would prefer to look to the future it is because the governing Popular Party
absorbed much of the Francoist political machinery. The partys founder,
Manuel Fraga, had been a government minister under Franco.
The fault lines over the mass graves run deep in Spanish politics and
society. During the transition after Francos death in 1975, as Spain edged
toward the re-establishment of democracy, the spirit of the age was enshrined in
the political parties self-explanatory Pact of Forgetting. There was no
reckoning, no equivalent of de-Nazification of the civil service, judiciary or
security forces. To cement the spirit of top-down amnesia, a 1977 amnesty law
prevents any legal proceedings into crimes committed during the civil war and
the dictatorship; Spain would not enter into anything resembling a truth and
justice commission.
This institutional blockade has not gone unnoticed outside Spain. In 2013,
the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances censured Mr.
Rajoys government and the Spanish judiciary, and demanded Spain overturn
the amnesty law and stop obstructing investigations into the hundreds of
thousands of missing victims. Ana Menndez Prez, Spains permanent
representative to the United Nations, rejected the suggestion that the Spanish
judiciary was not independent and impartial. (That would have been news to
Spains famous campaigning judge, Baltasar Garzn, whose attempts to bring
Francoist crimes to trial in 2008 were followed by his being put on trial himself
only a few years later.) Ms. Menndez Prez also accused the committee of
excessive focus on the past.
In doing so, Ms. Menndez Prez accused not just the United Nations
committee, but great segments of Spanish civil society, and the descendants of
hundreds of thousands of murdered Spaniards still searching for justice. Some
local administrations have begun taking action in contravention of the
government in Madrid (highlighting another Spanish tradition: the great
tension between the capital and the regions). Following the Balearic Islands

example, the Valencian regional government is now preparing the way to pass
its own historical memory law and apportion funds for excavations.
In April, Mr. Rajoy angered historical memory groups when he said on the
popular TV program Salvados that he didnt think there was anything his
government could do to help. Soon he may not have much choice. He returned
as prime minister in October, but with a slender minority government. The
major center-left opposition parties in the Spanish Parliament, the Socialist
Party and the new left-wing party Podemos, are planning to force the
government to restore funding to the historical memory project nationwide in
2017.
The dirt has been smoothed over in Majorca, but forgetting may not be
possible for much longer.
Dan Hancox is the author of The Village Against the World.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 9, 2016, on page A15 of the New York edition with
the headline: The ghosts Spain tries to ignore.

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