Mingorrubio municipal cemetery, which sits where the suburbs of north-west Madrid fade out into the countryside, must have been something of a comedown for a man who was originally laid to rest with a 150-metre-high cross for a headstone and four enormous bronze archangels to watch over him.
But six years after his remains were disinterred from the grotesque splendour of the Valley of the Fallen and flown by helicopter to Mingorrubio for reburial, Francisco Franco is at least in good company.
On the opposite side of the cemetery to the generalísimo’s mausoleum is the grave of his right-hand man Luis Carrero Blanco, whose life and tenure as prime minister were brought to a sudden end by a bomb which blew his car more than 30 metres into the air in 1973. Also buried in the cemetery are the murderous Dominican dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, and Carlos Arias Navarro – known as the “Butcher of Málaga” for his brutal repressions during the Spanish civil war.
It was Arias who, 50 years ago on Thursday, broke the news of the dictator’s death to the nation in a famous television broadcast.
“Spaniards, Franco has died,” said the grief-stricken prime minister. “The exceptional man who, before God and before history, assumed the immense responsibility for the most demanding and sacrificial service to Spain, has given his life, burned day by day, hour by hour, in the fulfilment of a transcendental mission.”
Half a century on, the deeds and legacy of the man whose military coup against the Republican government ushered in a four-decade dictatorship built around the authoritarian ideology of National Catholicism, continue to haunt, divide and confuse 21st-century Spain.
The current, socialist-led government, which has continued the work of its predecessors by introducing democratic memory legislation designed to help the country come to terms with the Franco era, is using the 50th anniversary of his death to trumpet Spain’s transformation into a progressive modern European democracy.
But the year-long series of events is also intended to serve as a reminder of the potency of fascism at a time when the far right is once more on the march and is appealing to younger voters with no memory – and scant knowledge – of the dictatorship.
“Surveys have shown us that about 24% or 25% of people aged 18 to 30 said they wouldn’t mind living under an authoritarian regime,” said Fernando Martínez López, a historian who serves as Spain’s secretary of state for democratic memory.
“That obviously led us to take the political decision to explain to young people what the dictatorship was. There is so much ignorance.” His fears were borne out still further last month when another poll revealed that more 21% of those surveyed felt the Franco era was “good” or “very good”.
Martínez said schoolchildren of previous generations simply had not been taught about what really happened during the civil war and the subsequent dictatorship.
“There’s a whole generation – especially people between their 20s and the age of about 45, who have studied so little of all this,” he said. “They’ve only studied it if they had teachers who were interested in it, and who brought it into their lessons. But now with the democratic memory law, it’s obligatory.”
Meanwhile, teachers in Spain have noticed that students who embrace the macho, misogynistic tropes of the “manosphere” can also express pseudo-nostalgic admiration for a dictatorship about whose realities they know next to nothing.
“Dictatorships aren’t something from the middle ages,” said Ángel Víctor Torres, Spain’s minister for territorial policy and democratic memory. “Young people have a kind of disconnect. Quite often, when I tell young people that there was a forced labour camp for gay people in Fuerteventura, they don’t believe it.”
Much of the lack of knowledge can be traced back to the methods Spain used to patch up its open wounds after Franco’s death. The 1977 amnesty law, which granted impunity to those who committed crimes during the civil war and under the Franco regime, was accompanied by a tacit social contract known as the “pact of forgetting”. The idea was to leave the past in the past and move on as quickly as possible.
The Spanish journalist, writer and historian Carlos Hernández de Miguel, author of Franco’s Concentration Camps, argues that while “awful concessions” made during the transition back to democracy may have been necessary, they should never have been allowed to remain in place for as long as they have.
“That allowed generations and generations of Spaniards to grow up without knowing what had happened in our country during the 20th century, or being brought up on a fictional tale that equated victims with torturers and democrats with fascists,” he said. “All that hid the magnitude of Francoist repression: the jails; the murders; the torture; the concentration camps – all that erased the close links with Hitler’s Germany and whitewashed a regime whose hands were stained with blood.”
More progress might have been made if a modicum of consensus were possible. But the governing Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) and the opposition conservative People’s party (PP) have spent decades accusing each other of playing politics with the past.
The PP boasted of cutting Spain’s historical memory budget to zero when it was last in power and has grumbled that the government’s democratic memory legislation serves only to “dig up grudges”. The party is ignoring the events planned to mark the beginning of the return to democracy. So, too, is the far-right Vox party, the third largest force in Spanish politics, which had dismissed the programme as an “absurd necrophilia that divides Spaniards”.
Given the lack of common ground, anomalies that would elicit gasps of disbelief in many other modern European democracies have abounded. Although Franco’s remains were removed from the Valley of the Fallen – now known as the Valley of Cuelgamuros and currently in the process of being “resignified” to become “a place of memory” – it was for years a pilgrimage site for those who wanted to mourn Franco’s death each 20 November.
These days, those nostalgic for el Caudillo (the leader) and his reign can sate their appetites with merchandise from the online store of the National Francisco Franco Foundation (FNFF), which, until the government succeeds in its plan to shut it down, will continue to exist to preserve and promote the dictator’s legacy. A book titled 50 Years of Lies about Francisco Franco is on sale for €27 (£24), while a FNFF water bottle costs €16 and a framed, black-and-white picture of the man himself is €60.
Other scars are less visible. Although the bodies of almost 9,000 people who were “disappeared” under Franco have been exhumed in the past few years, the remains of a further 11,000 people who were murdered and buried in ditches or mass graves are still waiting to be recovered and identified. The bodies of thousands of others will never be found as their furtive or impromptu resting places have been forgotten, dug up or paved over.
There is also lingering frustration over the fact that relatives and historical memory associations have to apply for grants to recover bodies; the central government does not exhume them directly, largely because of Spain’s highly decentralised system of regional governments.
And then there is the question of justice. The Spanish filmmaker Almudena Carracedo and her partner, Robert Bahar, spent six years making the award-winning 2018 documentary The Silence of Others, which followed victims of the Franco regime as they sought to hold it to account internationally.
“Spain has undoubtedly changed on many fronts to become a democratic society,” said Carracedo. “However, so many years later, we live with this seemingly invisible mantle of impunity that still pains and impacts victims of crimes of the Franco dictatorship deeply. The 2022 Democratic Memory law was able to bring to light the need for memory and truth, but the important third pillar – justice – is still blocked by the 1977 amnesty law that impedes victims from seeking redress for the crimes they or their families suffered.”
Like many others, Carracedo feels that Spain’s imperfect grasp of its own history has opened the door to revisionism and denialism. If justice delayed is justice denied, then knowledge delayed is knowledge denied.
“I would so love to say that Franco is dead,” she said. “But today, with the resurgence of the alt-right, he is somehow still painfully present. And it’s not something that comes out of the blue: all these youths who now raise their arms in fascist salutes were never really taught their history, and so they celebrate the myths they have heard. This fits a dangerous pattern of nostalgia that you see in many countries, not just Spain. ‘We lived better under the dictator,’ people say. It’s a warning sign.”
The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know.
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