recovery of historical memory

The starting point

In October 2000 the grave of the "Thirteen of Priaranza" was opened at Priaranza del Bierzo in the province of León: thirteen Republicans shot by Falangists on 16 October 1936. The exhumation broke a silence surrounding the thousands of wartime executions and disappearances, and in December 2000 the journalist Emilio Silva and Santiago Macías, among others, founded the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) and registered it with the Interior Ministry. ARMH works with roughly fifty archaeologists, forensic anthropologists and geneticists who locate execution sites from records, local testimony and anonymous reports, then identify remains through DNA testing. By 2014 it had carried out 158 exhumations and identified 1,337 victims.

The Pact of Forgetting and the 1977 Amnesty Law

Spain's left and right parties agreed during the transition not to confront the legacy of Francoism directly, and that Pact of Forgetting was written into the 1977 Amnesty Law. There were accordingly no prosecutions for the human rights violations of the period and no systematic exhumations, while Francoist monuments stayed in place. The Amnesty Law remains the movement's principal legal obstacle. ARMH calls mass graves "crime scenes", but Spanish law does not treat them as such, and the United Nations has repeatedly urged repeal, on the ground that amnesties cannot cover crimes against humanity.

Law, and retreat

In 2002 the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances asked the Spanish government to undertake proper exhumations, return remains to families and investigate the facts judicially, and a parliamentary constitutional committee passed a motion condemning the Franco regime's role in bringing about the civil war. Law 52/2007 of 26 December, known as the Historical Memory Law, recognised the victims of persecution and violence during the war and dictatorship, formally condemned Francoist repression, offered state support for exhumations, ordered the removal from public buildings and spaces of objects exalting the 1936 coup and the regime, and rejected the legitimacy of Francoist laws and trials.

Implementation fell short. The law obliged the public authorities only to collaborate with the victims' associations, not to carry out the exhumations themselves. The People's Party government that took office in 2011 neither repealed nor amended the law but largely ignored it: it closed the state office set up to exhume victims, curtailed state help for exhumations, and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy boasted of having cut the historical memory budget to zero.

Courts, and after

In 2008 Judge Baltasar Garzón opened a national investigation into Franco and his allies. State prosecutors questioned his jurisdiction, he dropped the case that year and referred nineteen mass graves to regional courts, which upheld the 1977 Amnesty Law and held that he had acted without authority. The Supreme Court nonetheless acquitted him of abuse of power. With the route blocked in Spain, litigation moved abroad: in April 2010 Judge María Romilda Servini de Cubría opened in Argentina the only case covering the whole Francoist period, on the principle of universal jurisdiction.

The Socialist government resumed funding for exhumations in 2018, and in October 2019 Franco's remains were removed from the Valley of the Cuelgamuros and reburied at Mingorrubio. The Democratic Memory Law, in force from 21 October 2022, makes the state responsible for exhuming and identifying the dead, creates a register of victims and a DNA database, annuls the illegitimate convictions of 1936 to 1938 and provides for the removal of Francoist symbols and fines for promoting them. Estimates of the number of victims remain contested; Spanish reporting cites at least 114,226, while the state victims' census holds some 67,500 names.