“A Forgetting for Everyone, by Everyone”? Spain’s Memory Laws and the Rise of the European Community of Memory, 1977–2007

Fuentes, Julia López

doi:10.1086/718121

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Julia L opez Fuentes argues that the Law represented "an attempt by Spain's national government simultaneously to assert its European belonging and to suppress and discredit narratives of Republican victimhood and conflict that threatened the dominant narrative of Spain's successful transition to democracy". 35 In 2016 Zapatero suggested that "the law was fair as it left neither side satisfied". 36 The election of Mariano Rajoy's Popular Party government in 2011 brought a shift in policy and funding for historical memory projects were removed in 2012 as part of his government's response to the global financial crisis.…”

Section: The Origins Of Silence: Francoist Repressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratising Collective Memory Through Forensic Exhumations in Spain

Chulio

2022

Aus J of Politics History

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Following the close of Spanish Civil War (1936-39) a dictatorship was installed by Francisco Franco which saw his narrative of the conflict embedded in the landscape of an ideologically divided nation through monuments and mass graves. The dictatorship was followed by the period of Transition (1975-81) whereby amnesty was negotiated leaving the crimes of the past ensconced in private memory. The recent wave of exhumations of mass graves aim to shed light on the hidden buried world containing legacies of Spain's recent past. This paper examines the experiences of participants in exhumations with expertise in the disciplines of history, archaeology, forensics, and psychology. It contrasts their narratives of silence and lack of awareness about Spain's mass graves with the work of exhuming the Disappeared, understood by members of the exhumation movement as a pedagogical mechanism of social memory that operates through the resignification of the dead as a counternarrative of the past.This paper examines the meaning generated by the exhumation and reburial of victims of enforced disappearance in Spain. The Spanish exhumations are distinctive given they are not connected to legal investigations and the attribution of guilt. They are connected rather to a struggle over historical memory. I consider the legacy of the Amnesty Law of 1977, and how human rights narratives and scientific forensic techniques frame understandings of the past. The exhumation movement sees the legacy of the Amnesty Law and the Transition in Spain as having silenced historical memory, and the recovery of the Disappeared as a necessary prerequisite for the development of a fully functioning democratic society. The paper examines how exhumation serves wider needs for justice and reconciliation through the acknowledgment of the past, and the use of forensic evidence in the resignification of the dead in the public sphere. The exhumations, and the pedagogical activities that surround them, aim to challenge enduring narratives of a model transition to democracy, and to recover the memory of the violence of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.The paper draws on the findings from twenty-three months of ethnographic research in Castilla y Le on, the Basque Country, Andalucía, Castilla la Mancha, Galicia, and Madrid, at the sites of exhumation efforts by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) and the Society of Sciences Aranzadi (Aranzadi, hereafter) based out of the Deusto University in San Sebastian. The fieldwork involved interviews with survivors, human rights activists, forensic and archaeological experts, psychologists, lawyers, and local residents. The purpose of these interviews was to gain insights into everyday Spaniards' understanding of the past and the impact of public

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Section: The Origins Of Silence: Francoist Repressionmentioning

confidence: 99%