ANALYSIS:The many dead in unmarked graves from Spain's civil war continue to haunt the living, and reveal the unstable foundations of the country's supposedly exemplary transition to democracy, writes PADDY WOODWORTH
LAST WEEK, Julio Alberto Poch, a 57-year-old Argentinian, working for a Dutch airline, was arrested as he stepped from his aircraft in Valencia, Spain.
The Spanish police were acting on charges from Buenos Aires that Poch had participated as a young air force officer in the notorious “death flights” from which leftists were thrown, alive, into the sea during the country’s 1980s military dictatorship.
Madrid’s prompt response to the Argentinian arrest warrant contrasts sharply with Spain’s capacity to deal with the grim history of its own dictatorship.
Some 30,000 people were “disappeared” during the Argentinian military regime. Those who are alleged to have kidnapped, tortured and killed them, ranging from generals right down to minor figures like Poch, are being energetically pursued by the Argentinian judiciary.
Tens of thousands of people also disappeared in Spain during the early months of the civil war, initiated by General Francisco Franco’s rebellion against the democratic Second Republic in July 1936. Yet Spain’s contemporary democratic authorities have been generally very reluctant even to find and identify their remains, let alone to bring any surviving culprits to justice.
In the week Poch was arrested, Baltasar Garzón, a controversial investigating magistrate, found himself before the Spanish supreme court on charges of perversion of justice, largely because he has attempted to put the crimes of the Franco dictatorship under judicial scrutiny.
Spain’s disappeared were in a different category to the many republicans who were formally executed by the Franco regime from 1937 onwards. Those victims were officially recorded and properly buried by the state apparatus set up by Franco.
The disappeared, however, were killed more or less arbitrarily in the first chaotic months of the war, as the Falange and other rightist militias were consolidating their power in areas which had fallen to Franco’s troops.
This was a real-life case of “round up the usual suspects”, as Captain Renault quipped in the film Casablanca. In post-civil war Spain, they included schoolteachers, chemists, feminists and trade unionists, almost automatically assumed to be “Reds”. They were usually bundled into a truck, driven to some remote spot, shot, and buried in a ditch.
There were, of course, also many victims of arbitrary terror on the republican side, as leftist militias imposed their brand of “revolutionary justice” on suspected fascist supporters. Because Franco won the war, however, most of these victims were found, identified, honoured as patriots, and given a decent burial.
Not surprisingly, the early victims of fascist terror remained in their unmarked mass graves throughout the dictatorship. Relatives knew that even leaving flowers on these pathetic heaps of earth – assuming they could be located at all – would carry heavy penalties.
It is much harder to explain why so little effort was made to find and identify these victims of terror between Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s, and the end of the last century. This seems particularly strange because the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), one of the historic architects of the republic, whose members figured prominently among the disappeared, was in power in Madrid for most of this period.
The usual explanation is that an attempted coup d’état in 1981 sent a clear message that the past was better left undisturbed.
The more disturbing possibility is that a “pact of forgetfulness” was the condition of the entire Spanish transition to democracy, and that to challenge it, even today, is still taboo, and may put the stability of the state at risk.
Curiously, it was only when José María Aznar’s right-wing Partido Popular (PP) won its first absolute majority in 2000 that some young people began to challenge this taboo in earnest. They were motivated both by impatience with what they saw as the timidity of their parents’ generation, and by a fear that the return to power of the Spanish right might bury the republican disappeared forever.
One of them, Emilio Silva, first went to look for his grandfather’s grave just before Aznar was elected. His grandmother had told him that her husband had been taken into custody by Falangists in the province of León.
She had tried to visit him, but only her young son was allowed access. The prisoner must have had a pretty clear idea of his impending fate, because he gave the boy his watch and his wedding ring. A few nights later, he was driven away with a dozen other men, who were shot by four gunmen and shovelled into a mass grave. His wife died without knowing where he had been buried.
Silva doggedly tracked down the site, however, and got the support of the local mayor for the exhumation of the remains. DNA tests proved crucial in identifying the bones of the 13 victims, who were at last buried according to their surviving relatives’ wishes.
News of this episode spread rapidly, and Silva found himself deluged with hundreds, later thousands, of requests to assist other families in similar situations.
He became one of the founders of the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory (ARMH). It has campaigned energetically not only for recognition and decent burial for the disappeared, but for an end to the “pact of forgetfulness” itself – that is, an open investigation into the crimes of the dictatorship.
The ARMH has encountered fierce opposition, at many levels in Spanish society, to its work. It had to engage the support of the UN working group on forced disappearances before the Spanish parliament would unanimously accept a watered-down law in recognition of the victims.
Local authorities still put enormous obstacles in its path. Just last week, the autonomous government of Aragon threatened it with a €300,000 fine for what appears to be, at most, a minor infringement of regulations in a recent exhumation there.
Judge Baltasar Garzón, who never does things by halves and often over-reaches himself, weighed in rather belatedly with the ARMH this year by opening investigations of crimes against no less than 114,266 Spaniards by the dictatorship. Powerful forces in Spanish society, and in the judiciary, have bounced him into the dock in the supreme court for his temerity.
The very idea that he could be accused of a “perversion of justice” for investigating such crimes must be repugnant to any democrat.
Yet the relationship with past atrocities is a delicate question for any society. It can be argued, for example, that the 1990s Balkan wars were, at least partially, sparked by the exhumation of mass graves from the 1940s.
And Spanish democrats may be right when they say they had no choice but to accept the pact of forgetfulness when they negotiated the post-Franco constitution of 1978, given the strength of fascist forces within the establishment at that time.
But it seems hard to believe that Spain is really so unstable today that it cannot afford to look steadily at the truth about its past. To say that that pact must remain in force in 2009 is to say that those fascist forces are still in place. If that were the case, and perish the thought, Spain’s transition to democracy, far from being exemplary, would be revealed as a sham.
The ARMH has set in motion a legitimate democratic challenge which all Spanish citizens would do well to embrace.
Paddy Woodworth is a freelance journalist and expert on Spain. He is the author of Dirty war, clean hands – Eta, the Gal and Spanish democracy (Cork University Press 2001). www.paddywoodworth.com