Introduction

      William Faulkner’s famous dictum that “the past is never dead; in fact, it is not even past” aptly captures how the past looms over contemporary Spanish politics. In 2007, the Congress of Deputies approved the Law of Historical Memory with the intention of reconciling the dark legacy of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), that epic interwar showdown between democracy and fascism generally regarded as a dress rehearsal for World War II, and the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, whose 1936 coup against the popularly elected Second Republic set the Civil War in motion. Scores of mass killings committed by both sides of the conflict (the right-wing Nationalists and the left-leaning Republicans) earned the Spanish Civil War worldwide infamy. But the violence of the Franco dictatorship, less known outside Spain, was just as brutal and horrific. Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist for nearly four decades, from his declaration of victory over the Republican army on April 1, 1939 to his death of natural causes on November 20, 1975, with the bulk of the violence falling disproportionately during the early years of the dictatorship. With the major democracies of the day (Britain, France, and the United States) at war with Germany’s Nazi regime, Franco undertook a vicious policy of limpieza (cleansing) that resulted in the execution and imprisonment in concentration and labor camps of hundreds of thousands of left-wing sympathizers. This bloody campaign gave Franco bragging rights of being the Cold War’s most successful anticommunist crusader.

      Spain’s encounter with the past in 2007 was long overdue given the unorthodox handling of the political excesses of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship during the 1977 democratic transition. To coincide with the restoration of democracy, the national parties from the right and left negotiated the so-called “Pact of Forgetting” with the intention of letting bygones be bygones. As a consequence of this informal agreement no one was put on trial for the political crimes of the old regime or disqualified from playing a role in the politics of the new democracy, since the pact was accompanied by a broad amnesty law that granted immunity for all political crimes committed prior to 1977. The contrast with Spain’s sister Southern European dictatorships, Greece and Portugal, whose transitions to democracy roughly coincided with the Spanish transition, is striking. The members of Greece’s Colonels’ regime (1967–1974) were hauled off to court on charges of high treason, resulting in death sentences for the top military leadership, sentences later reduced to life in prison. Portugal’s Salazar-Caetano regime (1932–1974) was subjected to a policy of “lustration” intended to purge the state and society of authoritarianism. The purging began with the military and was gradually extended to the civil service and authoritarian collaborators in the business community, the media, and the Catholic Church.

      Another consequence of the Pact of Forgetting was to thwart any attempt at “truth-telling” like Argentina’s Nunca Más (Never Again), the report by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons that chronicled the human rights abuses of the military dictatorship between the years of 1976 and 1983 and that launched several analogous efforts across South America, and South Africa’s landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which examined the sins of apartheid. Furthermore, the pact to forget effectively precluded an official condemnation of Franco’s military coup in 1936 and even a memorial and an official apology to the many victims of the old regime. Adding insult to injury, the pact facilitated the survival of numerous monuments across the Spanish territory honoring Franco, including the infamous El Valle de los Caídos, Franco’s megalomaniacal monument on the outskirts of Madrid to his Nationalist crusade, which today houses his remains and those of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish fascist