Is Spain recovering its memory? Breaking the Pacto del Olvido

Human Rights Quarterly

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 858-880

  Davis, Madeleine ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HUMAN RIGHTS; MEMORY; POLITICAL HISTORY;

EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; EUROPE; SOUTHERN EUROPE; SPAIN; WORLD;

EID: 27644515960     PISSN: 02750392     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hrq.2005.0034     Document Type: Review

References (105)

1. See Carlos Cue, La ONU pide que se investigue donde estan enterrados republicanos fusilados tras la guerra, El País, 16 Nov. 2002, Madrid ed., at 22.
2. For the text of the UN Working Group's report, see Comisíon de Derechos Humanos, Derechos Civiles y Políticos, Incluso Cuestiones de Desapariciones y Ejecuciones Sumarias, available at www.geocities.com/priaranza36/informeonu.htm.
3. A La Mesa Del Congreso De Los Diputados, Enmienda De Modificacion (19 Nov. 2002), available at www.geocities.com/priaranza36/resolucion.htm.
4. On transitional justice, the series of volumes edited by Neil J. Kritz collects together much useful material. See 1 Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes (Neil J. Kritz ed., 1995) (Vol. 1: General Considerations, contains key excerpts from much of the best known literature).
5. See also Juan Méndez, In Defense of Transitional Justice, in Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (A. James McAdams ed., 1997).
6. On historical memory, see The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (Alexandra Barahona de Brito et al. eds., 2001).
7. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions (2002);
8. Transitional Justice, supra note 3.
9. Paul Preston, The Politics of Revenge: Fascism and the Military in Twentieth-Century Spain 41-42 (1990).
10. Id.
11. Id.
12. See Emilio Silva & Santiago Macías, Las Fosas de Franco: Los Republicanos que el Dictador Dejó en las Cunetas (2003).
13. Marife Moreno, Enterrados en Leon los Restos de 13 Fusillados de la Guerra Civil, El País, 19 Oct. 2003, Andalucia ed., at 30.
14. Lorca's family have said they oppose his exhumation. See Javier Arroyo, Pedimos el Edificio del Banco de España y Estamos Esperando una Respuesta, El País, 12 Oct. 2003, Andalucia ed., at 10.
15. See Javier Cuartos, La Memoria Recuperada en el Valle Asturiano de la Represion, El País, 28 July 2003, Andalucia ed., at 22.
16. Figure estimated by Emilio Silva. See Javier Rivas, Emilio Silva Presidente de la Asociacíon para la Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica "todavia existe un cerrojazo sobre una parte de la historia," El País, 26 Jan. 2003, Valencia ed., at 4.
17. Paloma Aguilar, Justice, Politics and Memory in the Spanish Transition, in The Politics of Memory, supra note 3, at 104.
18. Preston, supra note 5, at 46.
19. Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy 29 (2002).
20. Argentina's National Commission on Disappeared Persons (CONADEP) report documented 8,961 cases of forced disappearance. See 2 Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes 330 (Neil J. Kritz ed., 1995) (Vol. 2: Country Studies).
21. Chile's National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation documented 3,197 cases. See Madeleine Davis, The Pinochet Case 6-7 (2000).
22. Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Introduction to The Politics of Memory, supra note 3, at 1-2.
23. Id. at 3.
24. See Ley 46/1977 Amnistia, art. 2 (15 Oct. 1977) (Spain), available at www.geocities.com/priaranza36/Leyamnistia.htm.
25. Aguilar, Justice, Politics and Memory in the Spanish Transition, supra note 13, at 103.
26. Id. at 113.
27. Id. at 114.
28. S. Cardús i Ros, Politics and the Invention of Memory: For a Sociology of the Transition to Democracy in Spain, in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy 19 (Joan Ramon Resina ed., 2000).
29. Id. at 21.
30. Preston, supra note 5, at 33.
31. Id.
32. Id. at 34.
33. Aguilar, Justice, Politics and Memory in the Spanish Transition, supra note 13, at 98 n.16.
34. Preston, supra note 5, at 34.
35. Paloma Aguilar, Memoria y Olvido de la Guerra Civil Española (1996);
36. Aguilar, Justice, Politics and Memory in the Spanish Transition, supra note 13;
37. Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia, supra note 15.
38. Aguilar, Justice, Politics and Memory in the Spanish Transition, supra note 13, at 94-99.
39. See also J. M. Colomer, La Transición a la Democracia: El Modelo Español 174-75 (1998).
40. Aguilar, Memoria y Olvido de la Guerra Civil Española, supra note 31, at 348-54 (1996);
41. Aguilar, Justice, Politics and Memory in the Spanish Transition, supra note 13, at 94.
42. Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia, supra note 15, at 132.
43. Id.
44. Xavier Arzallus, "hechos de sangre ha habido por ambas partes," excerpt from the debate on the amnesty law found in Olvido Para Todos, El País, 15 Oct. 1977, available at www.geocities.com/priaranza36/ Leyamnistia.htm.
45. Preston, supra note 5, at 41.
46. Aguilar, Justice, Politics and Memory in the Spanish Transition, supra note 13, at 97.
47. See Richard Gunther, Spain: The Very Model of the Modern Elite Settlement, in Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (John Higley & Richard Gunther eds., 1992).
48. Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia, supra note 15, at 101.
49. Joan Ramon Resina, Short of Memory: The Reclamation of the Past Since the Spanish Transition to Democracy, in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, supra note 24, at 85.
50. See id. at 83-86 for a discussion of the last two.
51. On collective memory, see Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (1980).
52. See, e.g., Antonio Elorza, El regreso de la memoria, El País, 4 Jan. 1997, Andalucia ed., at 2;
53. Antonio Muñoz Molina, La Historia y el Olvido, El País, 9 November 1997, Andalucia ed., at 6.
54. Davis, The Pinochet Case, supra note 17, at 2-4.
55. Richard J. Wilson, Prosecuting Pinochet: International Crimes in Spanish Domestic Law, 21 Hum. Rts. Q. 927, 934 (1999).
56. Id. at 950.
57. For a discussion of the special role of the Audiencia Nacional, a Madrid court established in 1977, see id. at 934 n.13.
58. Francisco Umbral, El Caudillo, El Mundo, 20 Oct. 1998, reprinted in Carlos Malamud, Spanish Public Opinion and the Pinochet Case, in The Pinochet Case: Origins, Progress and Implications 157 (Madeleine Davis ed., 2003).
59. Malamud, supra note 47, at 157.
60. Government officials were revealed to have negotiated with Chile over the possibility of resorting to some kind of international arbitration to short-circuit the process as well as attempting to prevent the Spanish legal team mounting appeals in the UK courts. Garzón's last ditch attempt to appeal to halt Pinochet's release was frustrated by the government. See Davis, The Pinochet Case, supra note 17, at 57.
61. Malamud, supra note 47, at 159.
62. Id. at 161.
63. Id.
64. Paul Heywood, Sleaze in Spain, 48 Parliamentary Affairs 726, 731-32 (1995).
65. Paul Heywood, The Government and Politics of Spain 66-68 (1995).
66. See Rivas, supra note 12.
67. See Tracy Wilkinson, Exhuming Buried Memories, L.A. Times, 8 Dec. 2004, at 1.
68. UN Working Group on Forced Disappearances, Second Presentation of the ARMH to the UN Working Group on Forced Disappearances (20 Aug. 2002), available at www.geocities.com/priaranza36/ONUweb.html (translated by author).
69. Moreno, supra note 9.
70. See Carlos E. Cue, Los desaparecidos españoles, El País, 6 Aug. 2002, Barcelona ed., at 18.
71. UN Working Group on Forced Disappearances, Second Presentation of the ARMH to the UN Working Group on Forced Disappearances, supra note 57. The "right to truth" has been recognized by a number of courts in cases of Latin American disappeared persons.
72. Id.
73. See, e.g., Elaine Sciolino & Emma Daly, Spaniards at Last Confront the Ghost of Franco, N.Y. Times, 11 Nov. 2002, at A3;
74. Remembering the Days of Franco, The Economist, 26 Oct. 2002, at 48;
75. Giles Tremlett, Spain Poised to Seek the Graves of Franco's Disappeared, The Guardian, 23 August 2002, at 13.
76. Cue, La ONU pide que se investigue donde estan enterrados republicanos fusilados tras la guerra, supra note 1.
77. Carlos E. Cue, Las fosas de la guerra colocan a España en la lista de desaparecidos de la ONU, El País, 20 Jun. 2003, Andalucia ed., at 29.
78. See Reyes Mate, Politicas de la memoria, El País, 12 Nov. 2002, Andalucia ed., at 14;
79. Marc Carrillo, Represion franquista y constitucion, El País, 2 Dec. 2003, National ed., at 14;
80. Ian Gibson, Retaguardia, El País, 7 Oct. 2003, Andalucia ed., at 2.
81. This includes historical analyses, personal memoirs, or testimonies and novels. The following are only some examples: Dulce Chacon, La voz Dormida (2002) (a novel about Republican women);
82. Ricard Vinyes et al., Los Niños Perdidos del Franquismo (2002) (details the theft of children from Republican families by Francoists);
83. Isaias Lafuente, Esclavos de la Patria (2002) (documents Franco's use of Republican prisoners as forced labor).
84. Resolution of the Congress of Deputies, Modification Amendment (19 Nov. 2002), available at www.geocities.com/priaranza36/resolucion.htm (translated by author).
85. Id.
86. For the text of the report and other useful documentation, see Equipo Nizkor, Informe sobre la cuestión de la impunidad en España y los crímenes franquistas (Report on the question of impunity in Spain and crimes under Franco), available at www.derechos.org/nizkor/ espana/impu/index.html.
87. Id.
88. Id.
89. Id.
90. Ministerio de la Presidencia, Real Decreto 1891/2004, 10 Sep. 2004, Boletin Oficial Del Estado (State Official Gazette), no. 227 (20 Sep. 2004), available at www.boe.es/boe/dias/2004-09-20/pdfs/ A31522-31523.pdf.
91. Id. art. 2(c).
92. Alexandra Barahona De Brito, Introduction to The Politics of Memory, supra note 3, at 2.
93. Preston notes that this image of a broken Spain, or of "two Spains," was a common motif in the historiography of Spain even before Franco and contributed to a characterization of the national past "in terms of a propensity to pitiless bloodlust and savage discord." Preston, supra note 5, at 30.
94. Such a view, while politically marginalized, has remained strong in journalistic, literary, and artistic accounts of the civil war, amongst which Orwell's Homage to Catalonia has been especially influential. The enduring fascination that Spain's civil war has exerted for left-wingers outside Spain has much to do with the role of the international brigades in that conflict as well as with its symbolic value as a (lone) struggle against fascism, a struggle in which Britain and France refused to intervene to assist the Republic.
95. See Vicenc Navarro, Consecuencias de la Transicion Inmodelica, El País, 8 Jan. 2003, at 12, for a discussion of these versions of history and a defense of the second.
96. Preston, supra note 5, at 31.
97. Editorial, El PP rechaza que la justicia pague las exhumaciones, El País, 11 Dec. 2002, Barcelona ed., at 4.
98. El PP rechaza una mocion sobre ayudas de victimas del franquismo, El País, 15 Oct. 2003, Madrid ed., at 24.
99. See the text of the parliamentary debate on the website of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, PP impide anulación sumarios franquistas, available at www.memoriahistorica.org/ modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=10.
100. Id.
101. See PSOE spokesman Alfonso Guerra González, contribution to the parliamentary debate, Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, Debate en el
102. However, it is clear that gaining official, public acknowledgment of matters that were long denied or ignored by the authorities is itself an important element of truth-seeking initiatives. See Hayner, supra note 4, at 24-27.
103. On "irruptions of memory," see Alexander Wilde, Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile's Transition to Democracy, 31 Journal of Latin American Studies 473 (1999).
104. For a recent critique of the democratization paradigm and a call for its reassessment, see Thomas Carothers, The End of the Transition Paradigm, 13 Journal of Democracy 5 (2002).
105. Gunther, supra note 39.