Three years ago, Spain commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of its civil war. The bloody conflict, which concluded with half a million deaths, resulted in Francisco Franco’s victory and thirty-six years of fascist rule, marked by tortures, executions, unfair trials, and hundreds of thousands dead or disappeared. Franco’s death in 1975 ended the brutal authoritarianism and heralded the country’s transition to democracy. Since Franco’s regime concluded without a violent transition, there was no dramatic break with the past, and many of his cultural and institutional legacies remained intact.
Moderate Franco loyalists started the transition period by using his enduring political capital to negotiate with the opposition and write a new constitution. Although tasked with reconciling victims of the dictatorship with its supporters at a time of political uncertainty, politicians delayed this daunting process and prioritized protecting one another. The 1977 Amnesty Law, known as the Pact of Forgetting, gave umbrella impunity to all crimes of a “political nature” committed during the civil war or the dictatorship.
A legitimate fear of a backslide into war haunted the entire process. While the government scrambled to find a political equilibrium and stabilize its democratization, the safest way to circumvent a potential coup or violent protests was evading controversy completely. With a public safely contained by either ambivalence or a hesitance to rock the boat, a lack of demand for retroactive justice allowed for a relatively peaceful transition into a constitutional monarchy that neither supported nor denounced Franco’s rule.
Spain’s amnesty law was written by the 1977 parliament, which had been elected earlier that year in the first democratic elections since the civil war. The votes were evenly split between former Francoists and the new opposition, and the two parties continued to alternate power until the twentieth century. As a result, the political institutions of Spain have enabled and enforced the gag rule on Franco.
But now, after decades of willful ignorance, direct victims of the dictatorship or their mourning family members are demanding accountability. In 2000, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory was founded to exhume mass graves, and it has already uncovered thousands of bodies. Former Judge Baltasar Garzón began investigating crimes against humanity—in an attempt to bypass the pact—until the Supreme Court prosecuted him for violating the amnesty law. €21 billion in compensation has been offered to prisoners, families of the dead, and the injured.
Most importantly, the 2007 Historical Memory Law officially condemned the Franco regime and recognized its victims. It also offered various restorative measures such as citizenship for exiles, removal of Francoist symbols from public spaces, funding to open mass graves, and nullification of unfair trials under Franco. The Democratic Memory Law, proposed in 2020, would further the initiative by requiring formal education on Spain’s past and a DNA database for victims. Nonetheless, the political parties on the right, the People’s Party and Vox, have consistently repudiated attempts to overturn the amnesty law, claiming that it is reopening old wounds, politically rewriting history, and dividing Spanish society.
Despite determined efforts, calls for justice are left unanswered, and the general populace remains ignorant, uncaring, or fearful of scrutinizing the failures of the past. Remnants of Franco’s propaganda endure: the “national savior” foundational myth, the belief that both sides of “dos Españas” have equal responsibility, and the notion of “ungovernable Spaniards” incompatible with democracy still exist. Many view Franco’s rule as both positive and negative—despite the atrocities, his years in power engendered social order, economic prosperity, and political stability. With such conflicting opinions on his rule and few institutional attempts to publicize the truth, Franco’s legacy lingers in limbo.
But many of the reasons for the Pact of Forgetting are no longer relevant. Spain has proven itself as a stable democracy, and there is little chance for war. The argument of avoiding painful memories is inadequate when most of the people wanting to confront the past are the victims themselves. As older Spaniards stay quiet, the younger generations born after the fascist era have begun to ask questions. Many do not share the same fear of political instability or war and have turned to the new anti-establishment party Podemos to challenge the status quo of complacency. And while Franco is not a widely celebrated figure, the lack of discussion has led to the absence of a taboo, which encourages the extreme far-right.
The recently successful Vox party has brought echoes of Francoist ideology. The ghost of his fascist rule lingers in its nationalist, conservative, and populist platform. The convoluted legacy of fascism in Spain allows Vox to capitalize on those romanticizing Franco without outright claiming him as a symbol. This is possible in part due to the country’s deficiency in its collective historical memory. The recent spike in political representation of the extreme right is just another consequence of the negligence to pursue justice.
Many victims of Franco’s dictatorship are still alive, forced to live on street names honoring his leadership and witness public commemorations of his death. Numerous families of those killed on his orders and buried in mass graves do not have a body. Spain’s government has taken steps to rectify this, but it has a responsibility to do more. Proper funding for exhumation, monetary compensation, and accurate education is a start. Truth commissions, investigations, and the prosecution of criminal acts conducted under Franco’s rule should follow. The Pact of Forgetting must end for Spain to properly acknowledge its past and turn to its future without regret.