Regime Transition and the Rise of Forgetting, 1977–1981

      “The transition to democracy demanded that we overlook thousands of memories and claims that weren’t convenient to bring up because they could endanger the pact of the transition.”¹ This statement, made during the parliamentary debate over the 2007 Law of Historical Memory by Ramón Jáuregui, an influential socialist official, is pregnant with insights about why Spain willed itself into political amnesia on embracing democracy. At first glance, Jáuregui’s statement reveals the striking pragmatism of left-wing leaders, who bore the moral responsibility of raising the issue of justice against the Franco regime and mobilizing civil society around the issue during the transition, if only because the left suffered the brunt of the Civil War killings and Francoist repression. But in the wake of Franco’s death, the left’s chief concern was not to punish the old regime but to get democracy off the ground in as swift and nonconfrontational a manner as possible.

      Such a pragmatic stance for the left was rooted in a multiplicity of factors, beginning with the trauma of democracy’s collapse during the interwar years and the ensuing decades spent in the political wilderness due to the ban on political parties imposed by the Franco dictatorship. The left’s pragmatism was also anchored in the realization by the early 1970s that the kind of regime change that it had prepared for or had wanted for Spain—the toppling of the dictatorship—was unlikely to come into fruition due to the remarkable resilience of the authoritarian regime; this in turn deepened the desire for a swift transition. Left-wing leaders were also cognizant of the political environment in which the transition unfolded, especially rising political violence, and did not wish to pursue any policy that would make a delicate situation even more so. All of this made the left-wing parties extraordinarily cautious throughout the transition and its aftermath.

      Decidedly less apparent in Jáuregui’s statement is the connection to the nature of the change in political regimes. As seen in this chapter, the impact of the democratic transition on how the issue of the past was handled in Spain was at least twofold. On the one hand were the limitations on the pursuit of justice against the old regime occasioned by a process of political reform that was anchored upon the legal mechanisms of the authoritarian state. The self-reinvention of the Franco regime intended to accomplish the paradoxical goal of change within continuity by satisfying both the old regime’s insistence that the transition to democracy be “legal” within Francoist law and the democratic opposition’s desire for the expedient return of civil and political freedoms. On the other hand was the ethos of political consensus that permeated the democratic transition. Such consensus was made official policy by the first post-transition government as a means to cope with the multiplicity of problems involved in building a new democracy in the midst of a full-blown eruption of ethnopolitical violence.

       Democratic Change Within Regime Continuity

      Spain’s transition to democracy began in earnest with King Juan Carlos’ stunning betrayal of his pledge to a dying Franco to uphold the principles of Francoism.² Franco had handpicked the young king as his successor and had made the Spanish monarchy the linchpin of the strategy of “continuismo,” or Francoism without Franco. But the king chose instead to put the nation on the path to democracy, as demanded by the public even before Franco’s death. A highlight of the anti-Franco protest movement was a 1967 demonstration that drew some 100,000 workers to the streets of Madrid demanding “Franco no, democracy yes” (Gilmore 1985: 105). These mobilizations provided a counterbalancing effect to the rising elite-led transition. As contended by Maravall (1981: 15), the early days of the transition encapsulated “two counteracting dynamics; the dynamic of reform, negotiation, and pacts from above, promoted by regime reformists, and on the other, the dynamic of pressure and protest from below.”

      On the advice of his closest political mentors, the king’s democratizing agenda called for a process of regime change that “did not violate the essential spirit of franquismo” (Podolny 1992: 90). For all intents and purposes, this meant a process of democratization that, born out of the very structures of the Franco regime, was free of any reprisal against the representatives of the authoritarian state. At the helm of this process was Adolfo Suárez, a Francoist official (head of the Movimiento Nacional, the closest thing to a political party in the Franco regime, and former director of the national television services), and generally presumed to be a member of the renovadores, a group of Francoist insiders committed to the reformation of the regime from the inside out. Indeed, Suárez’s commitment to reforming the authoritarian state proved decisive in his selection by the king to head the transition to democracy.

      Suárez replaced Carlos Arias Navarro, the last prime minister under Franco, who was dismissed from his post in July 1976 after proving a weak and indecisive leader in executing the king’s demands for a speedy but orderly transition to democracy. Just before Franco’s death in 1975, Arias Navarro proposed a set of political reforms, including the legalization of political “associations” (which avoided the much-dreaded “parties” label). But these reforms never made it out of the Francoist parliament. Such policy failures generated massive mobilizations by the general public in favor of the country’s return to democracy. Arias Navarro’s inept response to popular demands for political reform was to ratchet up political repression, a move that generated international condemnation of the Franco regime, including threats of an economic boycott by Western European trading partners.³

      Given his intimate association with the Franco regime, Suárez’s appointment came as a big disappointment for those hoping for a swift exit from nearly four decades of Francoism. “An historic error,” was the characterization of communist leader Ramón Tamanes.⁴ Yet Suárez was ideally suited for reforming the Franco regime from the inside out, a political transformation that had “no clear parallel or analogy in twentieth-century political systems” (Payne 1985: 25). Besides possessing a deep familiarity with the structures of the Franco regime, Suárez was young (forty-three), photogenic, and a master diplomat. The last trait allowed him to develop close ties and considerable trust with the democratic opposition in a remarkably short period of time. Soon after his appointment as prime minister in July 1976, Suárez began to organize secret talks, often late at night in Madrid restaurants, with the leaders of the still-illegal socialist and communist parties to convince them he had every intention of establishing a Western-style democracy.

      To prove that his democratizing intentions were real, Suárez ordered an amnesty policy on June 30, 1976, that freed some political prisoners jailed by Franco and ended the harassment of left-wing leaders by the police, many of whom were returning to Spain for the first time after decades of exile abroad. Although criticized by some quarters on the left as insufficient, Suárez’s amnesty was widely praised by others, such as the left-leaning El País, a new liberal