Democracy Without Justice in Spain. Omar G. Encarnacion
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killed on the Republican side would rest undisturbed in so-called fosas comunes (mass graves).7 This unequal treatment of the war dead left a daunting and gruesome future legacy. Once the excavation of the mass graves began in the mid-2000s, as part of the movement to “recover” the historical memory, one observer noted that “The dotted map of likely sites between the Basque Country and Andalusía, Castilla-León and Valencia makes the peninsula look like a child with chickenpox” (Treglown 2009: 18).
The number of people forced to leave Spain suggests further evidence of the brutality of the Civil War. Approximately 500,000 people fled the country between 1936 and 1939, the bulk of them repatriated to France and North Africa, in “the largest forced migration of people from Spain since the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula in the beginning of the 17th century” (Alted 2005: 52). How many of them never returned to Spain after the Civil War, making their permanent home abroad and comprising what is commonly referred to as the “Republican exile,” remains in dispute. Estimates range from a third to a fourth (Rubio 1977: 207). What is clear is that the Republican exile triggered a tremendous brain drain that dealt a grave blow to the nation by depriving it of considerable professional and intellectual capital, including the leaders of the Republic, who set up a government in exile in France, and some of the most prominent Spanish thinkers of the day, including an estimated 12 percent of all university professors (223).
Exile for many Republicans turned out to be more horrendous than what they had escaped from in Spain, giving rise to the popular view of the exile experience created by the Civil War as a “second” civil war.8 In this second war, the Civil War is extended beyond Spanish soil into Europe and transatlantic locations across the Americas, such as Mexico, Argentina, and Puerto Rico, where those detached from the homeland were engaged in a perpetual struggle with the memory of the conflict they left behind. Dehumanization, despair, and even death characterize the lives of Republican exiles (Stein 1979; Kamen 2007). An unknown number of Spaniards were interned in hastily created concentration camps along the Spanish-French border toward the end of the Civil War. Also unknown is the number of Republican “war children” evacuated from Spain by their parents once a Nationalist victory seemed imminent and sent to Russia, where they faced the hardships of World War II, including having to defend Russia against Hitler’s invasion. Approximately 8,000 Republican exiles were imprisoned at Mauthausen, a Nazi concentration camp in upper Austria, and only about a quarter survived this harrowing experience.9
A second wave of Spanish exiles, estimated at more than 300,000, was triggered by the economic misery of the postwar years (Foweraker 1989: 64). During the so-called años de hambre (the years of hunger), 1939 through the late 1940s, near abject poverty befell many parts of the Spanish territory, the result of the convergence of a multiplicity of factors, including agricultural stagnation (the consequence of a terrible drought, one of the worst in Spanish history), widespread unemployment and underemployment, the western economic boycott of the Franco regime intended to accelerate its demise (which kept food and medicine away from Spain), and an ill-advised policy of economic autarky designed by the government (led mainly by military officers) to free Spain of foreign economic influence and dependency.
The signs of misery were everywhere. Describing life in postwar Spain, British journalist John Hopper wrote (1986: 64): “Poor peasants lived off the grass and weeds, cigarettes were sold one at a time, the electricity in Barcelona was switched on for only three or four hours a day, and trolleybuses in Madrid stopped for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon to conserve energy.” Health indicators suggest that in the immediate postwar period (1940–1945) malnutrition, low infant birth weights, and disease led to at least 200,000 excess deaths over the 1935 mortality rate (Boyd (1999: 96). The overall standard of living was cut by half between 1936 and 1956, and not until the early 1960s were prewar levels of economic growth were restored (Foweraker 1989: 64). Broke and impoverished, Spain was forced to depend on foreign aid in the form of loans and foodstuffs (beef and grain) from Argentina’s Peronist regime, which was sympathetic toward Franco, to deal with a desperate economic environment approaching mass starvation.
A Violent and Vengeful Regime
After the Civil War ended in 1939, Franco inaugurated a political regime that was diametrically opposed to the Second Republic. Reflecting the influence of the Falange, the nascent authoritarian regime defined itself as “a nationalist-syndicalist, totalitarian, one-party state” (Boyd 1999: 92). Accordingly, civil and political rights were circumscribed, including limits on expression and association; regional autonomy was abolished; and secularism, arguably the main trait of the Republican era, was all but destroyed with the restoration of Catholicism as the state’s official religion. This new political order, christened with the fascist moniker Estado Nuevo (New State), was imposed without regard for its human cost. Its establishment meant that the bloodshed and suffering of the Civil War extended well past the end of the war. In fact, Spain was more deadly after the end of the Civil War than during the war itself. The estimated 200,000 “red” prisoners who died of execution, hunger, and disease in the concentration camps established by Franco in 1939–1943 far exceeds the number who died on the battlefield (Jackson 1965: 539; Preston 1995: 230).10
The violence of the postwar years was in keeping with the Franco regime’s intentions of eradicating any vestige of Republican opposition and gaining the acquiescence of the population as a whole. As observed by Vincent (2007: 157), “The Francoist regime was born in violence and depended on violence. Killing was essential to its initial display of power.” Violence was also central to the regime’s sense of identity, which celebrated Franco’s absolute military victory over the Republicans during the Civil War. Franco would remind the Spanish people: “We did not win the regime we have today hypocritically with some votes. We won it at the point of the bayonet and with the blood of our best people” (Rigby 2000: 73). Violence was also part of the Franco regime’s early ideological framework of National Catholicism, which included a brew of traditional Spanish fare such as Catholicism, the view of the peasantry as the embodiment of national virtues, unification of Spanish territory under one homogeneous culture and a single hegemonic language (Castilian), and the use of violence as a “creative and purifying” force (Richards 1996: 152).
For Franco, an absolute military victory over the Republicans during the Civil War was not sufficient; it was imperative to cleanse the country of the foreign virus of liberalism that had infected the nation. This reflected Franco’s regard for socialism as “a hereditary form of biological degeneracy,” a claim that many on the Republican side regard as evidence that Franco’s aim to eradicate the enemy was “tantamount to genocide” (Treglown 2009: 21).11 Indeed, Franco was in the habit of using the metaphor of Spain as a sick patient in need of radical treatment, which he employed early during the regime in a speech to the nation on December 31, 1939, when he announced his intention to purify Spain of “wicked, deviant, politically and morally poisoned elements … those without possible redemption within the human order” (Richards 1996: 158). The prescription for such a condition, according to Franco, required nothing short of the creation of a quarantined society, one undergoing treatment in isolation and divorced from corruptive behaviors and practices such as those that had afflicted Spain under the Republican period and brought about the Civil War.
Among the most obvious targets of Franco’s post-Civil War policy of purification were the huídos (fugitives), the Republicans who took to the hills rather than surrender to Franco, and subsequently the maquis, the Spanish exiles who joined the French resistance and began to reenter Spain after the end of World War II with the hope of toppling the Franco regime. After Franco’s Nationalist army succeeded in eliminating not only the surviving cadres of the Republican political parties but also “the leaders, middle-rank functionaries, and rank-and-file members of the socialist and anarcho-syndicalist unions as well as members of the liberal intelligentsia,” the huídos were the only source of internal resistance against the authoritarian state (Preston 1995: 230). The maquis began to appear in 1944, when signs of the collapse of the Nazi regime in Germany were becoming apparent, and at least until 1948 remained a considerable irritant to the Franco regime by staging attacks throughout the country, often taking over small localities. Neither group, however, in the end was a match for Franco’s army, which succeeded in eradicating all guerrilla