Is Spain Recovering its Memory? Breaking the Pacto del Olvido

Abstract

This article considers the ongoing effort by campaigners in Spain to gain official recognition of the human rights crimes of the Franco dictatorship. Despite estimates placing the number of Republican supporters summarily executed and buried in unmarked graves during and after the civil war at 30,000, demand for an official investigation has only surfaced in the past five years. The article offers an explanation both for the longevity of Spain's unspoken pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting) and for its recent unraveling, in the context of contemporary debates involving issues of transitional justice and memory politics.

Transitional or Post-transitional Justice? Recent Developments in the Spanish Case

“…Without the collective reflection that, as Davis (2005) sustains, Spanish society was forced to make at that time, it would have been less probable that this judge would have dared, some years later, to try to put Franco and his main collaborators in the dock. 25 In any case, this initiative would have never been possible without the pressure exerted by several victims' associations, particularly those with relatives in mass graves, as these presented the reports upon which Baltasar Garzó n has based his committal for trial.…”

Transatlantic unity on display: the “white legend” and the “pact of silence” in Madrid’s Museum of the Americas

“…First, it is telling that the intention to refrain from moral judgment fits well with the general policy and practice of a “pact of silence” that reigned during and after the transition to democracy, “a deliberate, but largely tacit, agreement to ‘forget’ the past” (Davis 2005:863–4, see also González-Ruibal 2009:65). The tendency to silence the Spanish Civil War is merged here, I suggest, with the White Legend of Hispanism, so that the impact of conquest and colonization across the Americas could be framed as benevolent or suppressed when troubling.…”

From Countermemory to Collective Memory: Acknowledging the “Mississippi Burning” Murders

“…Exactly how countermemory becomes collective memory, however, remains an underexplored topic in memory studies. Relatively few empirical case studies have explicitly examined the process through which countermemory becomes collective memory, and those that have examine cases of national memory (Barkan ; Cohen ; Davis ; Torpey ; Tsutsui , ).…”