La Ley de Memoria Democrática: Spain between ‘olvido’ and remembrance
By Cameron White
Spanish children giving Republican salute before evacuation from Spain during the Civil War (Photo: Locospotter via Wikimedia Commons)
‘Es honrar a la gente anónima que hace la historia de España, gente cuya existencia merece ser rescatada de las garras del olvido’ (‘It’s about honouring the anonymous people that make up Spain’s history, people whose existence deserves to be rescued from the claws of oblivion’). These were just some of the words given by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez as part of an event held at the Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid on 31 October to mark the inaugural Día de Recuerdo y Homenaje a todas las víctimas del golpe militar, la Guerra y la Dictadura.
This date will mark a yearly day of remembrance and homage to all the victims of the 1936 military coup, the Civil War (1936-39) and the Francoist dictatorship (1936-1975) under the new Ley de Memoria Democrática (Democratic Memory Law). This new law builds on the 2007 Ley de Memoria Histórica (Historical Memory Law) in expanding efforts to dignify victims and save them from falling into the abyss of obscurity, which the new law stipulates ‘no es opción para una democracia’ (‘isn’t an option for a democracy’). Salient aspects of it include the declaration of the Francoist regime as illegal; the development of a map of disappeared people and a DNA repository to compare their genetic profiles; the definition of victims as anyone who suffered physical, moral, psychological or property damages or infringements on their rights from the outbreak of war in 1936 to the creation of the Constitution in 1978; and the revocation of titles awarded to Francoist recipients during the war and dictatorship.
However, the new law has not been without controversy, with its convoluted passage through Spain’s legislative chambers and recent reaction to it highlighting the cost at which remembrance comes in post-Transition Spain. In grappling with this issue, we must pay attention to the Spanish noun olvido: oblivion, forgottenness. We should bear in mind the words of Xabier Arzalluz, the then-deputy for Guipúzcoa who would go on to become the President of the Basque Nationalist Party (1980-2004), on the eve of the Amnesty Law passed in 1977. This guaranteed impunity for all those who participated in pro-Francoist crimes during the Civil War and the dictatorship, and Arzalluz claimed that this forgottenness was ‘la única manera de que podamos darnos la mano sin rencor’ (‘the only way of turning a page without resentment’). With Spain now having known democracy for 44 years, eight years more than it knew dictatorship under Franco, there is naturally tension between those who, in accordance with the structural amnesia encoded in the 1977 Amnesty Law, have learnt to live with the memory of the Francoist atrocities, and those who were either victims or are relatives of victims who have sought and continue to seek justice in the decades since.
Thus, on the eve of the Ley de Memoria Democrática passing through the Senate, fifteen months after it had passed through the Congress of Deputies, it is perhaps not surprising that the Fundación Transición Española presented the government with a petition supported by 200 signatories accusing them of distorting a constitutional pact (the Transition) and labeling the new proposed law as childish. For them, it opens wounds that the Transition sealed, thereby disrupting the spirit of reconciliation which supposedly marked the 1978 Constitution. In particular, Teresa Freixes, a law professor at the University of Barcelona, opined that naming the law as democratic prevents anyone from having a different recollection which could be deemed undemocratic.
Arguably the most acute recent development as a result of the law has been the exhumation of Gonzalo Queipo de Llano’s remains, a Francoist general who oversaw the repression and deaths of over 45,000 people in Andalusia, including the distressing torture and murder of the ‘17 rosas de Guillena’ in 1937, from Seville’s La Macarena in the early hours of Thursday 3rd November. As the van transporting the remains left the site, there were reported cries of ‘¡Viva Queipo!’ (‘Long live Queipo!’) from some, meanwhile Paqui Maqueda, president of the Nuestra Memoria association, and some of whose relatives still lay in some of Andalusia’s 708 mass graves, is said to have shouted ‘Honor y gloria a las víctimas del franquismo’ (‘Honour and glory to the victims of Francoism’). We see in this episode a manifestation of how Spain is caught between olvido and remembrance, at once attempting to deliver justice to the victims of its fascist past and restrained by a systemic forgottenness enshrined in the 1977 Amnesty Law, with some remnants of Falangist admiration even sinisterly lurking in the air.
Another key aspect of this episode was the criticism from people in favour of the tenets of the Ley de Memoria Democrática. Maqueda divulged that pronouncing the names of her relatives who fell to Francoism in front of the van transporting Queipo de Llano’s remains healed her family’s wound, although she would have also liked the exhumation to have taken place ‘a la claridad del día’, arguing that ‘actos de memoria, de reparación, de justicia, tienen que ser con plena participación de la sociedad’. Thus, acts of collective remembrance necessarily require the participation of society in its entirety in order to register an impact. This resonates with comments from Lucía Socám, also at the event and whose great aunt, Granada Hidalgo Garzón, was one of the women brutally executed in Guillena. Socám commented that the fact that the remains were taken away in almost clandestine fashion in the middle of the night constituted ‘una puñalada más para las víctimas’ (‘another stab in the victims’ backs’), bringing into question the sincerity of Pedro Sánchez’s words on 31 October. In other words, how can victims’ existence be rescued from the claws of forgottenness if the exhumation of leading figures who engineered their horrific plight is not fully acknowledged by all in broad daylight?
The extent to which the new law will be able to engender delible progress in an attempted shift from olvido to remembrance is also questionable, since the new law is politically contentious and may have a limited longevity. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, president of the Partido Popular (PP) and in favour of rescinding the law, could well become the next Prime Minister. He has claimed that it represents an ‘atenta contra el espíritu de la Transición’ (‘attack on the spirit of the Transition’), and elsewhere that it is illogical to live off the currency of their great-grandparents’ fights, instead calling for a specific law to recover the nationality of Spanish descendants ‘fuera de planteamientos ideológicos y fuera de rencores’ (‘outside of ideological approaches and grudges’).
Whether it be the claims that it is a childish distortion of the so-called peace procured through the Transition, that it prescribes a unilateral view of history outside of which any other recollection could be deemed undemocratic, that it resentfully prises open healed wounds, or that it is a step in the right direction but is yet to fully bring people together in a truly collective act of remembrance and acknowledgement of the past: it is clear that the mixed reception of this new law points up a Spain caught at the confluence of the forces of liberating remembrance and embedded olvido. Despite the law’s mission to construct a democratic memory in which there is no excuse for the atrocities of mass murder and repression, its political shelf life remains to be seen, and so with it, that of progressive remembrance in the face of constitutionally-prescribed forgottenness.