Exhuming Franco: Spain's Second Transition, Second Edition

By Sebastiaan Faber

Through dozens of interviews, intensive reporting, and deep research and analysis, Sebastiaan Faber sets out to understand what remains of Francisco Franco's legacy in Spain today. Faber's work is grounded in heavy scholarship, but the book is an engaging, accessible introduction to a national conversation about fascism. Spurred by the disinterment of the dictator in 2019, Faber finds that Spain is still deeply affected—and divided—by the dictatorial legacies of Francoism.

This new edition, with additional interviews and a new introduction, illuminates the dangers of the rise of right-wing nationalist revisionism by using Spain as a case study for how nations face, or don't face, difficult questions about their past.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780826501745

Sebastiaan Faber

Sebastiaan Faber, professor of Hispanic studies at Oberlin College, is the author of several books, including Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War and Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–1975 (both published by Vanderbilt University Press).

Book preview

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION:

Faber’s book returns to a crucial problem for Spanish democracy and offers a catalogue of answers that are an invitation to rewrite the history of Francoism.

—ÓSCAR BUZNEGO, El periódico de España

Independent, intelligent, uncomfortable, open to dialogue and discussion. Necessary.

—GUILLEM MARTÍNEZ, Contexto

[This book] makes clear that our teaching of history cannot take anything for granted. We have to know what happened in order to exhume not only Franco’s remains but the subsoil of authoritarian habits that persist and prosper.

—MARIO MARTÍN GIJÓN, El Periódico de Extramadura

An excellent book which helps you get to grips with very real problems facing Spain and examine potential solutions.

—CHRIS BAMBERY, Brave New Europe

Sebastiaan Faber’s scholarship is unique among Hispanists, bringing together the rigor of academia with the incisiveness of journalism. Few scholars of contemporary Spain have taken the role of writing for a learned but non-specialist readership as seriously and successfully as Faber has.

—MARI PAZ BALIBREA, The Historian

The book has the feel of a respectful, well-informed and informative debate in Hyde Park Corner.

—JOSHUA GOODE, The Volunteer

EXHUMING FRANCO

EXHUMING FRANCO

Spain’s Second Transition

EXPANDED SECOND EDITION

SEBASTIAAN FABER

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nashville, Tennessee

Copyright expanded edition 2023 Vanderbilt University Press

Published originally in English in 2021.

First paperback edition published 2021.

All rights reserved

First printing 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Faber, Sebastiaan, 1969– author.

Title: Exhuming Franco : Spain’s second transition / Sebastiaan Faber.

Description: Expanded second edition. | Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023036847 | ISBN 9780826506375 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Franco, Francisco, 1892–1975—Influence. | Spain—Politics and government—1982– | Francoism. | Intellectuals—Spain—Interviews. | Collective memory—Spain. | Exhumation—Spain—History—21st century.

Classification: LCC DP264.F7 F25 2023 | DDC 946.084—dc23/eng/20230804

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036847

To Kim, Jakob, and Maya

Contents

INTRODUCTION to the Second Edition

INTRODUCTION to the First Edition. Securely Tied Down

1. How Dead Is He?

2. Surreptitious Survival

3. Ignacio Echevarría

4. Guillem Martínez

5. The Judiciary

6. Sebastián Martín

7. Ricardo Robledo

8. José Antonio Zarzalejos

9. Politics and the Territorial Challenge

10. Marina Garcés

11. Enric Juliana

12. Antonio Maestre

13. The Media

14. Cristina Fallarás

15. Olga Rodríguez

16. Marije Hristova

17. Ricard Vinyes

18. Emilio Silva

CONCLUSION. Not So Different After All

Acknowledgments

Interviews and Correspondence

Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

Can I ask you a quick question? Microphone in hand, the reporter Borja Jiménez walked up to four citizens from Seville who were standing outside the Basílica de la Macarena, one of the city’s most iconic churches, late in the evening on Wednesday, November 2, 2022. The remains of Queipo de Llano are about to be expelled, the reporter said, and we would just like to know if you think that’s a good idea. Or if you think that’s normal (Pérez Cortés 2022).

The right-wing Spanish newspaper OKDiario was live-streaming the late-night exhumation—or, as the reporter put it, the expulsion—of general Gonzalo Queipo de Llano (1875–1951), who became world famous during the Spanish Civil War. Having joined the military coup to overthrow the Spanish government in 1936, he was put in charge of conquering Seville and repressing any and all resistance to the coup in Andalusia. This he did without mercy: known for his drunken, misogynistic radio harangues and for his likely role in the murder of the poet Federico García Lorca, he also is considered directly responsible for some forty-five thousand executions. When he died in 1951, at the height of the Francoist dictatorship, Queipo was given a hero’s burial. His tombstone, prominently visible in the church floor, had remained untouched since then.

As Jiménez, the reporter, held his microphone up to Manuel Pérez Cortés, one of the four people he’d approached, he clearly did not get the response he’d hoped for. Better to have him out than in, Pérez Cortés said, in a sevillano accent: "Mejó fuera que dentro."

Why? Jiménez asked, surprised.

"Because this man did a lot of harm to us sevillanos and to the macarenos, too," Pérez Cortés replied, referring to the people of the Macarena district.

Still, the reporter was not ready to give up. Here is part of the exchange that followed:

BORJA JIMÉNEZ (BJ): But in the end—and mind you, I am just posing this as a question—isn’t this an attempt to erase history?

MANUEL PÉREZ CORTÉS (MPC): "Not at all. What’s being done here is justice. This is a working-class neighborhood. Humble people live here. And many macarenos died at the hands of this man. Enough already with tainting history."

BJ: You’re here because of Queipo?

MPC: I’m a member of the Brotherhood of the Macarena [a religious association associated with the Basilica] and came here to attend Mass.

BJ: Yet you agree with the exhumation?

MPC: Of course I do.

BJ: Well, we’re actually having a hard time finding many people who agree.

MPC: It’s not that hard, believe me. [ . . . ] Maybe you’re not looking where you should. (Álvarez 2022)

The removal of the general’s remains from the Basilica in Seville in the early morning of November 3 was one of the first measures prompted by Spain’s new Law of Democratic Memory, which the country’s Senate approved on October 5, 2022, and which went into effect on October 20. (The law stipulates among other things that the mortal remains of those who led the 1936 military coup cannot be . . . buried in a publicly accessible, preeminent location that is not a cemetery; Boletín del Estado 2022, 32). The left-of-center coalition government of prime minister Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the Spanish Socialist Party, hailed the law as an important next step in the country’s coming to terms with the legacies of the Civil War (1936–39) and the Franco dictatorship (1939–75). But not everyone agreed.

The Law of Democratic Memory was adopted two years after the event that sparked the first edition of this book: the exhumation of the dictator’s remains from his tomb at the Valley of the Fallen, now renamed the Valley of Cuelgamuros, after the valley where it was built. Much like Franco’s exhumation, the debate around the memory law served to reveal not only the fault lines that divide the political Left from the Right, but also the considerable gap between the demands of the grassroots memory movement—whose insistent pressure helped prompt both the exhumation and the law—and the government’s response to those demands.

Emilio Silva, the founding president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (whom I interview in Chapter 18), has been quite critical of the new law, for example (Rivas 2022). He has pointed out three important weaknesses. First, while the law seems to place the victims of violence and repression front and center, it is strangely silent about the perpetrators; especially absent in the latter category is the Catholic Church, which supported the 1936 coup and became a powerful accomplice of the Franco regime. Second, possible reparations for victims are largely limited to the symbolic realm. For instance, the law declares all the judicial sentences and sanctions issued during the War and the Dictatorship for reasons of politics, ideology, conscience or religious belief or sexual orientation and identity to be illegal and radically null. Yet it also states that while this nullification will create the right to obtain a declaration of personal acknowledgment and reparation, it cannot be read as an acknowledgment of financial responsibility on the part of the state, any public administration, or any private citizen or be used to claim any kind of reparation or compensation of a financial or professional character (Boletín del Estado 2022, 20). Third, while the law creates a special state prosecutor for human rights and democratic memory, it does not revoke the 1977 Amnesty Law—a law that, as I explain in Chapter 5, the Spanish judiciary has cited time and again to block any judicial attempt to investigate, let alone prosecute, human rights violations committed between 1936 and 1975. Whether the new law will change the courts’ views remains to be seen. The first signals are mixed. In May 2023, a court in Madrid admitted a case brought by an activist who had been arrested and tortured by Francoist police in 1975—a first—only to suspend it on the day the victim was called up to testify (Pascual 2023b). In another, similar case, this one involving an arrest and torture suffered by a union activist in Barcelona in 1970, the regional government of Catalonia itself has joined the victim in bringing charges, although it is unclear whether the case will be admitted (Camps 2023).

The stated objective of the new legislation, which occupies fifty-five single-spaced pages in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, is to build on, update, and improve the memory law adopted fifteen years earlier, in 2007, under the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, then leader of the Socialist Party. Indeed, comparing the two laws is as good a way as any to measure what’s changed in the way Spain, or at least part of Spain, thinks about its violent twentieth-century past. For example, while the preamble of the earlier law celebrated the spirit of the Transition, framing the country’s democratization as a process peculiar to Spain, the new preamble clearly places Spaniards’ ethical obligations toward the past in an international framework. Since the end of the civil wars and global conflicts that razed Europe in the twentieth century, and especially since the Holocaust, the opening paragraph reads,

the push for policies of democratic memory has become a moral duty, a duty that needs to be strengthened in order to neutralize forgetting and to avoid repeating the most tragic episodes in history. The solid commitment to the pedagogy of never again has become a fundamental ethical imperative for democratic societies around the world.

Desde el fin de las guerras civiles y conflictos mundiales que asolaron Europa en el siglo XX, y especialmente desde el Holocausto, el impulso de las políticas de memoria democrática se ha convertido en un deber moral que es indispensable fortalecer para neutralizar el olvido y evitar la repetición de los episodios más trágicos de la historia. El firme compromiso con la pedagogía del nunca más se ha convertido en un imperativo ético fundamental en las sociedades democráticas en todo el mundo. (Boletín del Estado 2022, 6)

One thing that clearly has not changed in that decade and a half since the first memory law was approved is the attitude of the Spanish Right. The deputies and senators of the largest conservative party, the Partido Popular (PP), voted against both laws, claiming in both cases that the legislation needlessly stirred up past conflicts. In 2022, they were joined in their no vote by the deputies of the far-right party Vox, which did not exist yet in 2007.

And much like fifteen years ago, politicians and the media—which in Spain are deeply politicized, as I explain in Chapter 13—tried to take advantage of the debate over the law to rally their base. The late-night interview at the Macarena Basilica in Seville is a case in point. The clichés the reporter invokes—the idea, for instance, that changing monuments amounts to erasing history—are the same that we’ve seen wielded in the debates surrounding colonial or confederate monuments in the United States. As in the United States and elsewhere in the world, in Spain debates about representations of the past in public spaces, primary and secondary education, universities, or the media—in short, about collective memory—have fed increasingly polarized culture wars that have slowly but surely undermined the electorate’s faith in democracy and its institutions, including public education. If the United States has been in the grip of library purges and election deniers, in Spain the PP, which has been in the opposition since 2018, has insisted that the progressive coalition government led by Sánchez is illegitimate because the parliamentary majority that supports it includes the votes from Basque and Catalan parties that seek independence for their regions.

Indeed, the electoral rivalry from the Far-Right Vox has pushed the PP leadership to espouse an Iberian variant of Trumpism, which combines a jingoistic form of Spanish nationalism with a steady stream of fake news and wild conspiracy theories that recycle old tropes from the Franco years. Two weeks after the Queipo exhumation, for example, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the PP’s president of the autonomous community of Madrid, published an op-ed in the conservative paper El Mundo in which she stated, among other things, that prime minister Sánchez was a compulsive liar whose government had caused a loss of Spain’s international credit (Díaz Ayuso 2022, 19). All of it, Ayuso claimed, was part of a devious plan: Sánchez and his allies were after nothing less than the imposition, through the backdoor and bypassing the constitutional process, of a de facto lay federal republic. The forces that seek to dismember Spain, she added, are in "connivance with international allies who are driven by resentment against the West and its principal manifestations: the European Union as a guarantor of liberal democracy, NATO, Spain as one its key pieces, and Hispanidad as one of the most promising manifestations of racial mixing in history." (Hispanidad, in this context, is a code word for the Spanish empire and its legacies.) This global conspiracy, Ayuso warned, is using history as its weapon. It seeks to poison the representation of the collective past through a set of tactics that include revisionism, indigenism, cancel culture, the suppression of chronology from history curricula, and the politicization and attempted decolonization of national museums. In the face of these threats, for Ayuso there are two types of Spaniards. On the one side are those moved by truth, courage, and loyal patriotism. On the other, the enemies of all that is good, who are moved and united by their desire to destroy our centuries-old nation and by resentment against the West (Díaz Ayuso 2022, 19).

Spanish readers of Ayuso’s text will have no trouble recognizing some of the ideas circulated by María Elvira Roca Barea, the high school history teacher whose bestselling books have sought to imbue Spaniards with a new sense of national pride (see the Introduction to the First Edition). A central idea of Roca Barea’s revisionist take on the Spanish past—which borrows generously from the same strains of reactionary thought that fed into Franco’s brand of Spanish nationalism—is that the country’s international reputation is still suffering from a black legend propagated by its historical enemies, namely the protestant European north (England, Holland, and Germany) and many generations’ worth of self-hating Spanish elites. As José Luis Villacañas has argued, Roca Barea’s work is part of a much broader campaign from the Right that has also targeted countries in the Western hemisphere (Villacañas 2019). When, in the fall of 2022, a controversial new documentary featuring Roca Barea was premiered in the United States, its producers expressed the hope that it would be widely screened in US high schools—an idea that several historians I spoke to considered near-delusional (Faber 2022a).

Still, while the obsession with Spain’s image abroad has been almost constant since the country’s defeat in the Spanish-American war of 1898, politicians in Spain have almost exclusively invoked it to score points in domestic battles (Faber 2022b, 30). The same is true for Ayuso. Yet her admixture of Trumpist tactics with recycled chunks of reactionary Spanish nationalism dating back to the Franco years also points to the central questions running through this book. What is the relative importance of Francoist legacies in Spain today? Are those legacies limited to the Right or do they include the Left as well? Will removing explicitly Francoist traces, such as military tombs, from public spaces help bring about real change? How closely connected are the legacies of Francoism to specific narratives of the twentieth-century past? Are the conservative media correct in their claim that a majority of the country is uninterested in revisiting the past and unwilling to embrace views critical of the dictatorship? The calm replies from Manuel Pérez to the right-wing reporter’s tendentious line of questioning on that November evening in Seville suggest that, over the past two decades, the arc of public opinion on the question has bent further toward justice than the conservative elites would like to think.

The first edition of this book appeared in April 2021, somewhere between the second and third waves of the COVID pandemic. For the Spanish translation, which came out in February 2022, I added two interviews. With the journalist Olga Rodríguez (Chapter 15), I spoke about her career as a war reporter, her view of the Spanish media, and her commitment to human rights as a descendant of a family persecuted by the dictatorship. My conversation with the Catalan philosopher Marina Garcés (Chapter 10), meanwhile, deals with her family background and national identity, as well as her experience as a witness in the Supreme Court trial in which several Catalan politicians were convicted for their role in the 2017 referendum for independence. Both conversations took place in November 2021.

A book this closely tied to current events runs the risk of a short shelf life. It’s certainly true that things on the ground have changed since I spoke with my interlocutors between late 2019 and late 2021. A pandemic has come and (hopefully) gone. The war in Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis have shaken up the geopolitical landscape. Spain, too, looks different than it did in 2020. The Catalan crisis has calmed down, thanks in part to the central government’s pardons for convicted Catalan politicians—the fire truck and ladder that Enric Juliana refers to at the end of Chapter 11—but also because the independence movement has finally come to realize that the route it embarked on ten years ago proved to be a dead end (Gozalo Salellas 2023). There has also been some activity at what, until 2022, was known as the Valley of the Fallen. Three and a half years after the removal of the remains of former dictator Francisco Franco, the body of José Antonio Primo de Rivera—the founder of Spain’s fascist party who was executed by the Republican authorities in 1936—was also exhumed and reinterred elsewhere (Pascual 2023 a). In June, government officials opened the Valley’s crypts to begin the search for the remains of 128 bodies at the longstanding request of their families. The task is immense, as they are buried with around 30,000 others (Borraz 2023).

Over the past five years, the PP and Vox have steadily drifted rightward, as we saw. The activists, politicians, and parties to the left of the Socialists, meanwhile, spent much of their energy on internal conflicts in which it became very hard to distinguish personal differences from disagreements about policy and tactics. Yet in the course of 2023, the threat of electoral disaster convinced most of them to come back together in a united front, which they called Sumar (adding up).

Sumar, whose creation was widely seen as the closure of a twelve-year cycle initiated with the indignados movement in May 2011, appeared on the scene just in time for the snap elections for parliament, which were held in late July 2023 (Adánez 2023). They were a nail-biter. Hundreds of opinion polls had predicted a combined majority for the PP and Vox comfortable enough to form a right-wing government. Both parties had vowed to undo most of the progressive reforms of the past four years, including laws on sexual consent, labor rights, and gender identity. The Law of Democratic Memory, they promised, would also be revoked immediately. In the end, however, the Right’s hopes for a return to the national executive branch were squashed by voters’ support for precisely those parties that the PP and Vox have insisted on branding as dangerous and illegitimate—to wit, the entire Left and all the parties who espouse non-Spanish forms of nationalism. Although the elections were extremely tight, one thing became clear: the PP’s adoption of Vox’s narrow project for Spain is fatally limiting the electoral appeal of both right-wing parties in important regions of the country, including Catalonia and the Basque Country.

At bottom, the 2023 elections pitted two ideas of Spain against each other, the philosopher Santiago Alba Rico wrote days after the vote. One insists on simplifying the country. The other accepts, and even celebrates, its complexity. The victory at the ballot box, narrowly but no less decisively, was for the latter. Paradoxically, what the Spanish Right has always called ‘Spain’ is an abstract and very simple idea, Alba Rico wrote, while what they’ve labeled as the anti-Spain is the Spain that really exists. If we accept that Spain is a difficult country, radically complex in historical and territorial terms, he concluded, then we must accept that in the summer of 2023 Spain voted for itself (Alba Rico 2023).

To be sure, none of the changes that have occurred since the first edition of this book was published are insignificant. Still, the more general challenges my interlocutors address in these pages are as central to the future of Spanish democracy as they were in 2021, if not more so: corruption in politics, corporate life, and the media; the national question; and the role of the judiciary in questions of transitional justice, in relation to the legislative and executive branches, and with respect to democratic values. All these problems have a peculiarly Spanish history and were significantly shaped by a dictatorship that lasted close to four decades. Yet I continue to maintain that today they are more similar to challenges faced by other countries than many Spaniards tend to think.

INTRODUCTION

Securely Tied Down

If it hadn’t been for a couple of straps and last-minute screws, the embalmed corpse of Francisco Franco may well have slipped from its coffin and crashed onto the esplanade. The scene—macabre and surrealist, with the entire world looking on—would have been worthy of Luis Buñuel. Fortunately for Franco, things happened otherwise.

A bit before one o’clock in the afternoon on October 24, 2019, eight pallbearers carefully carried the former dictator’s remains out of the basilica at the Valley of the Fallen, toward the hearse that had pulled up a short distance away. Peeking out from under a brown cloth covering the coffin were two bright orange straps that kept the entire thing together. Just moments earlier, when Franco’s tombstone was lifted, it had become clear that forty-four years under ground had left their mark: the coffin had suffered serious water damage. Because the wood had decayed in several places, the funeral experts who were supervising the operation recommended transferring the dictator’s remains to a new container. Yet the family members present, who had been opposed to the exhumation until the very end, rejected that idea out of hand. (Here we are, grandpa, Franco’s granddaughter had groused a moment before. Here we are, with these defilers of your grave!) (Escolar and Ejerique 2019).

The experts refused to give any guarantees. Still, the rickety coffin had to be moved, so they put in a couple of screws to strengthen its rotten corners and strapped it on to a large wooden plank that they happened to have on hand. The emergency measures worked: the coffin made it to the