This article is followed by an interview with Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Spanish Historical, which locates and identifies the victims of Francoism in mass graves. The Association’s work seeks truth, justice and reparation for the families of the disappeared.

Anti-fascist activist Nicolás Sartorius said: “Franco died in his bed, but the dictatorship died in the streets.”. Months before and after the death of dictator Franco on 20 November 1975, following 36 years of fascist military dictatorship, the people of Spain took to the streets to demand their rights. There they encountered the unpunished use of state violence typical of a fascist regime in its final throes.

The social, neighbourhood, workers’, nationalist and student movements that had been fighting for their rights and freedoms for decades during the dictatorship took to the streets during the years of the ‘transition’ after the dictator’s death. They faced the brutality of police violence and armed right-wing gangs fighting for a return to the previous regime.

In Spain, the mainstream discourse of the forces of the old Franco regime has attempted to idealise and whitewash this phase as a largely calm and peaceful period, albeit ‘tainted’ only by terrorism (particularly attributed to ETA). In this, they have been joined by  part of the democratic and left-wing forces which negotiated the conditions for the transition from dictatorship to a regime with political freedoms. But the truth is that between 1975 – the year of Franco’s death – and 1982, when the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) won the parliamentary elections, there was a period of intense social struggle, first against the Franco regime and then against its laws, which still remained in force. 

This social struggle was brutally repressed by an “emerging democratic” state that refused to purge either torturing and murdering police officers or fascist judges. During those years, the old repressive apparatus, recycled as something new and democratic, killed hundreds and injured thousands of democrats. The people killed were fighting against the law on Freemasonry and communism and for freedom of thought, organisation, assembly and expression in the press and on the streets.

The workers’ movements in factories and the countryside fought for fair laws that would redistribute the profits of an elite group of Francoist landowners and capitalists who had profited from their collusion with the regime. Workers’ strikes, demonstrations and occupations spread throughout the whole of Spanish territory.

Women fought to win the rights that had been denied them for so many decades. It took women who had been controlled by the patronato de protección a la mujer (women’s protection board) 10 years after the dictator’s death to put an end to this element of repression that persecuted any woman who was somewhat free and not submissive. The continuation of this feminist struggle throughout the country has made the feminist movement in Spain one of the strongest and most socially influential in Europe.

The LGTBIQ+ rights movement fought against the law on social dangerousness, which replaced the law on vagrancy and thuggery, which persecuted and criminalised people for their sexual orientation. This law was finally abolished on 26 December 1978. However, the Spanish LGTBIQ+ movement has continued to slowly win rights by bravely confronting a significant part of society which uses Christianity to justify its backwardness and ignorance.

Students at universities and schools fought for freedom of thought and for public, secular and universal education. Public education, which for decades has allowed for a certain degree of social mobility, is now under attack by both liberal and fascist right-wing parties in Spain that represent those who refuse to accept the loss of their privileges.

The youth movement fought to lower the voting age from 21 to 18, giving the democratic forces 2 million more votes.

Neighbourhood movements fought for the right to fair housing and for the creation of social, recreational and sports centres in their neighbourhoods. These neighbourhood movements are still fully active today, confronting vulture funds and banks that are speculating on housing and evicting tenants and owners from their homes. The evictions are made possible by the help of armed fascist gangs and the police (forgive the redundancy).

National movements fought for the self-determination of their peoples and reclaimed their culture and the use of their languages, which had been banned under the Franco regime. Today, their languages are recognised as co-official languages in the Spanish state, and they continue to demand the exercise of self-determination for their peoples.

All these struggles created the political and social fabric that still endures throughout Spain today and culminated in the 15-M (Spanish Revolution) movement.

In contrast to these hard-won advances, other political reforms and laws were merely cosmetic changes that did not touch the worst aspects of the regime. The Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP), the court responsible for prosecuting political prisoners, simply changed its name to the Audiencia Nacional, and remains a symbol of what has come to be known as the ‘Regime of ’78’.

As Joan Pinyana of Memoria Libertaria – CGT states, the 1977 amnesty law, which was partly sold as something that would release anti-fascist political prisoners from the regime’s prisons and bring peace and justice, did nothing more than cement the impunity of all those who maintained the Franco regime. Judges, prosecutors, police officers, military personnel, prison guards, ministers and the rest of the state administration officials who maintained Franco’s regime of terror were exonerated from all the crimes they had committed with the stroke of a pen, and most of them remained in their jobs.

As a result, and despite the two historical memory laws passed by the Spanish state (in 2007 and 2022), we continue to have Francoist symbols and streets named after coup leaders throughout the country. Meanwhile, notorious torturers have gone unpunished, mass graves are still being opened and the remains of the disappeared exhumed by civil organisations. An unknown number of our dead are still buried in ditches.

“Against Fascism Workers Self-defence ” Liga Comunista Revolucionaria (now Anticapitalistas) Madrid 1. May. 1979. Photo: Txemi Martínez

Interview with Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Spanish Historical Memory. 

50 years after the death of dictator Francisco Franco, there are still Francoist symbols and streets named after fascist military figures. What are the obstacles to removing these symbols and names?

Regarding the symbols, I would say that there is no obstacle to removing them. What there is, is a great lack of political will. This is represented by the fact that 1,300 metres from the official residence of all the presidents of the Spanish government from 1977 to the present day, there is a large victory arch celebrating the victory of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini – the three armies that paraded through Madrid on 1 May 1939. That arch has been illegal since the Memory Law banned it in December 2007, but all the ministers and presidents of Spain since then have passed through it. No one has wanted to comply with the law. 

However, 17 years ago, in this same city, the Carabanchel prison, which was one of the great centres of repression of the dictatorship, was demolished. Carabanchel was infinitely larger than the arch, so there was no problem in making the arch disappear. It must be that politically the arch is much larger than the cells of that prison.

Your association has participated in multiple exhumations. How many mass graves are estimated to still remain in Spain? And what have the different governments done about it?

Well, it is very difficult to know how many graves remain in Spain because we do not have the data. The government is working with a figure of around 10,000 people still to be exhumed, but we do not know the source and we are not given the technical details of that investigation. Spain is the only country in the world in which people have disappeared due to political violence and the state has to award grants to associations to search for them [interviewer’s note: instead of having a dedicated state-led institute]. 

It is regrettable that the government does not allow the families this right. It does not take care of them. In fact, we have just learned from a video that Pedro Sánchez’s government has exhumed 9,000 people and only 70 of them have been genetically identified. This is part of the lack of attention shown to the families. 

As an association, we began the search for the disappeared because a family asked us to. It should be shameful for the government that an association like ours, which does not receive a penny of public aid, because it does not want it, has identified more disappeared persons in the last six years than the Spanish government.

For decades, Spanish schools have taught that Franco’s dictatorship was not a dictatorship – that word was always avoided. What issues remain unresolved in Spanish education?

In many school books and school programmes, Franco’s dictatorship was aseptically referred to as “the Franco era”. But it is not only a question of language, of not calling it a dictatorship. Until six years ago, textbooks were not required to say that the coup d’état of 1936 had been a coup d’état. There was a political will to generate ignorance among young people, to hide the crimes of the dictatorship, to avoid creating new witnesses and new citizens who knew about that past. 

Fundamentally, this was because the Spanish elites, who have their origins in the political and economic corruption of Franco’s dictatorship, carried out a major whitewashing of their participation in Francoism and wanted to use this whitewashing to achieve democracy. To do this, they needed a lot of help from the media, educational policies and parliamentary silence.

Which are the main Spanish companies that benefited from the dictatorship and are still active today?

There are quite a few Spanish construction companies, such as Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas and Ferrovial, that grew under the protection of Francoism, but for me there is one paradigmatic case, which is Naturgy. Naturgy is one of the largest energy companies in Spain and was born out of the murder of a Galician Republican MP named José Miñones. Miñones was a progressive man and owner of the main electricity company in Galicia. After he was assassinated by the fascists in December 1936, a friend of Franco’s, Barrié de la Maza, took over the company at gunpoint, changed its name to Unión Fenosa. Today it is called Naturgy. 

In another country, Naturgy might have to pay compensation to the family of the original owner’s descendants and hold some kind of public event to acknowledge that it was born at gunpoint. This is an example of how the Spanish economic structure is linked to the dictatorship. 

About four weeks ago, a report was released stating that only 26% of Spanish millionaires are so because of their own initiative, which means that 74% inherited their wealth. Within that 74% there is a very high percentage of people who have inherited businesses that were created or strengthened by the corruption of the Franco regime.

Nazi concentration camps are well known. Much less well known are the concentration camps of other fascist regimes, such as Franco’s. It is estimated that there were some 300 camps between 1936 and 1947. What was their main function and have there been any reparations for the victims of these camps?

We now know that there were more than 300 concentration camps, mainly thanks to the research of a journalist, Carlos Hernández. Years ago, I visited some of them with prisoners who had been interned there, such as Félix Padín, an anarchist who was in the Miranda concentration camp. 

We can say that they were not biological extermination camps, but rather civil and political extermination camps. The aim was to educate those who had opposed the coup – the people who had taken up arms against fascism before any other people in Europe. The aim was to instill enough fear in them so that they would work to rebuild the country and be the labour force of the victors. 

In some, such as Miranda Castuera or Puerto de Santa María in Cádiz, atrocities and murders were committed. In Castuera in particular, they used the Indian rope, tying two groups of prisoners together with a rope, the larger group in front and the smaller group behind, then throwing the front group down a mine shaft, which ended up dragging those tied behind them. 

The aim was to terrorise that part of the population that had, let’s say, political awareness and political participation in order to design a society where certain behaviours had been exterminated and obedience through fear was the norm throughout society.