Dissemination presentation about the role of archives trying to break the institutional silence about the systematic repression carried out by the Francoist side during the Spanish Civil War and afterwards. Presented at Philadelphia 2011 during SALALM (seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials)

1. Gustavo Castaner
IMF
AWB Spain

2.  The views expressed herein are those of the
author and should not be attributed to the
IMF, its Executive Board, or its management

3.  The spanish transition to democracy has
frequently been considered a ¨model¨ for
other countries
 A look back after 30 years reveals that in fact
the spanish transition was based on
agreements with the dictator´s followers
that guaranteed impunity for them and their
crimes

4.  Franco´s regime pales compared to Hitler´s
and Mussolini´s. He died in bed, apparently a
harmless old man. A deeper look at his
regime reveals a fierce repression, sustained
during nearly 40 years, that controlled all
aspects of spanish life, and that in fact was
much more dire than other dictatorships
(Chile, Argentina…)

5.  Imagine statues of Hitler and Mussolini in the
streets of Germany and Italy… That
seemingly impossible situation was the case
until 2007 in Spain, with the passing of the
Law of Historical Memory…
 Much worse, thousands of corpses of the
victims of Franco´s brutal repression lie in
forgotten mass graves without any
recognition

7.  Archives have been a crucial tool for the
retrieval of the forgotten memory of the
francoist´s repression
 Franco´s regime kept exhaustive archives
detailing the multiple-pronged prosecution of
the vanquished. Even facing difficulties of
access, these archives have proved vital for
the research about this grim period of
spanish history
 Contrary to the somewhat extended image of
a bumbling regime, the francoist state was a
well greased repressive machine, with
excellent information services that ensured a
constant flow of information on the enemies
of the state

8.  The military analists share the conviction
that Franco could have won the war in one
year, with the professional army on his side
and the full support of Germany and Italy.
Instead he took three. This was a completely
intentional approach. This was to be a
¨cleansing war¨, to get rid of communists
and enemies of Spain.
 Against an enemy deprived of humanity, ¨the
reds¨, all strong-armed tactics previously
rehearsed in Africa were fair game, including
systematic executions and gang rape

9.  The best known case was Badajoz, where
Franco´s troops shot between 2,000 and 4,000
people in the bullfight ring after taking the city.
 In words of Jay Allen, reporter of the Chicago
Tribune: ¨They were young, mostly peasants in
blue blouses, mechanics in jumpers, ¨The Reds¨.
They are still being rounded up. At 4 o’clock in
the morning they were turned out into the ring
through the gate by which the initial parade of
the bullfight enters. There machine guns
awaited them. After the first night the blood
was supposed to be palm deep on the far side of
the ring. I don’t doubt it. Eighteen hundred men
–there were women, too- were mowed down
there in some 12 hours. There is more blood
than you would think in 1,800 bodies¨

10.  Francisco Espinosa Maestre has documented
in his book ¨The column of death¨ the
bloody advance of the African Army through
Extremadura, spearheaded by the shock
troops of the Spanish Legion. Before entering
each village there was a negotiation with the
landowners on the names that would
integrate the list of the 10% of the
population that would be shot summarily.

12.  From July 1936 to February 1937, the victims
from the Republican side are executed in
application of war edicts. Thousands of
people would be inscribed in the civil
registries with the following cause of death :
“application of war edict” (that is,
executed). The problem is that, according to
Espinosa Maestre, one of the most respected
specialists on the subject, only 30 to 50 % of
the executions were inscribed in the registry.

14.  About gang rapes, John T. Whitaker, reporter
of ¨The New York Herald Tribune¨ wrote:
¨They never denied to me that they had
promised the Moors white women when they
reached Madrid. I sat with these officers in
bivouac and heard them debate the
expediency of such a promise. Some
contended that a white woman was Spanish
even if red. This practice was not denied by
El Mizian, the only Moroccan officer in the
spanish army. I stood at the crossroads
outside Navalcarnero with this Moorish
major when two Spanish girls, not out of
their teens, were brought before him…

15.  After questioning them for military
information, El Mizian had them taken into a
small schoolhouse where some forty Moorish
soldiers were resting. As they reached the
doorway an ululating cry rose from the
moors within. I stood horrified in helpless
anger. El Mizian smirked when I
remonstrated with him. “Oh, they’ll not live
more more than four hours”, he said. I
suppose Franco felt that women had to be
given to the Moors. They were unpaid”

16.  From march 1937 the wild repression linked
to the war edicts is replaced by court
martials, following the summary trial
procedure. Under an appearance of legality
the objective is to impart quick justice and
the guarantees for the defendants practically
non-existant (the counsel for the defense are
military officers under hierarchic discipline)
 An ironic fact is that the defendants are
accused of “help to the rebellion” when in
fact the Civil War resulted from a failed
military coup

17.  After the immediate and frequently fatal
repression associated with war edicts and court
martials, the Law of Political Responsibilities
(February 1939) establishes a second wave of
repressive measures, adressed against those who
“contributed to create or aggravate the
subversion of every kind inflicted to Spain since
October 1st, 1934 and those who, since July
18th, 1936 opposed the National Movement with
concrete actions or grave passivity”
 These Tribunals could impose penalties of total
disqualification, banishment, exile, total or
partial loss of assets and loss of nationality

18.  The penalties apply event if the defendant
had died, extending to the descendants.
 The repressive effects of this law had an
enormous effect for the professional and
economic annihilation of the vanquished.
Until September 1941 the regional Tribunals
had initiated 229,549 cases

19.  The ¨Causa General¨ (General Proceedings)
initiated in april 1940 by the Attorney
General to enquire “on the criminal activity
committed during the Red Domination”.
These Proceedings build on previous ones
conducted since 1937 by the francoist
occupation army as they are gaining
republican territory.
 The objectives were both repression and
propaganda. ¨Causa General¨was going to
establish the official truth about what
happened in Spain during the Civil War.

20.  This official truth established the number of
victims of the “red terror”: 85,940 (The latest
and most authoritative book on the subject –Red
and Blue Violence, 2010- has reduced the
number to 49,272)
 The victims of the red terror gained status as
¨fallen for God and for Spain¨, their names were
remembered in monuments and their families
received pensions. On the other hand , the
silence of ¨Causa General¨ on the people
executed by the francoist side is conspicuous…
 The francoist historiography acknowledged (Salas
Larrazabal, 1977) 57,808 people were executed
by their side. The current studies duplicate the
amount: 130,199

21.  Established by the law of March 1, 1940 its
objective is to face “the terrible atheist,
materialistic, antimilitarist and antispanish
campaign that attempted to make our Spain a
satellite and slave to the criminal soviet
tiranny”
 Since April 1937, the OIPA (Office of Investigation
and Antimarxist Propaganda) in Franco´s HQ was
charged with “recovering, analyzing and
cataloguing all the propaganda material used by
the communism and sidekick organizations”.
Since May 1937, the DAE (Delegation of Special
Affairs) was in charge of countermason
propaganda.

22.  Since April 1938 the DERD (Special Delegation
for the Recovery of Documents) is in charge
of “unifying and intensifying the collection,
custody and arrangement of all those
documents useful to obtain information on
the actions of the State enemies”
 Barcelona is an excellent example of their
“modus operandi”. The searchs lasted from
January to June 1939, by 6 different teams
with a total of 1,800 places searched to
“collect” records.

23.  Until the last shipment in February 1940 a
total of 3,500 sacks (165 tons of records)
were shipped to Salamanca, that was the
siege of the Special Tribunal for Repression of
Masonry and Communism
 The “Socio-Political” Section has over 3
million index cards with the references of
republicans that were requested by other
bodies or by the Tribunal in their prosecution
tasks.

25.  Apart from all these Tribunals, a law from
February 1939 establishes a procedure to
“research the behaviour of civil servants
regarding the National Movement”. The
penalties: forced transfer, deferral,
disqualification for managerial posts and
permanent dismissal.
 These purges took place in all spheres of the
Administration, from the Army to the
University, but they were specially intense in
Public Schools, a field that had been
specially cherished by the Republic.

26.  The foremost expert on the subject, Javier
Rodrigo (Captives. Concentration Camps in the
francoist Spain) writes the following: “half a
million inmates in concentration camps,
thousands of prisoners of war and political
prisoners forced to hard labor for reconstruction
and public works, thousands of people forced to
the exile, the absurd and overwhelming prison
universe of the spanish postwar –with a
minimum of 300,000 inmates- or the bashful
gender repression carried out by the
dictatorship that, beyond cloistering women to
the private space, arrived to cruelty extremes
like child theft in women prisons”

27.  The succesful spanish transition to
Democracy was the result of a silence pact
with the followers of the dictator that was
sealed by the Amnesty Law of 1977 and that
includes “all crimes and felonies that the
authorities, civil servants and law
enforcement agents might have committed”
before 15 December 1976

28.  The interest for recovering the memory of
those who fought and died for the losing side
of this brutal civil war coalesced in 2000 with
the creation of the Association for the
Recovery of the Historical Memory, with the
specific target of exhuming the mass graves
of the victims of the francoist repression.
 Civil society led this movement and with the
return of a socialist government in 2004 the
long standing claim for a Law on Historical
Memory was finally adressed.

30.  One of the major problems that this
movement encountered was the
fragmentation and difficulty to access the
archives about the Civil War. Having been
used for repressive purposes, the holdings
were highly dispersed, managed by several
administrations, insufficiently described and
subject to sometimes capricious access rules.
A veritable labyrinth for those interested in
getting more information.

31.  This was the provocative title of a report drafted
in 2006 by Amnesty International Spain on the
situation of the archives with Civil War holdings:
“The remains of thousands of people are in
clandestine mass graves without having been
identified or in places unknown to their close
relatives. The families of those who were
comdemned to the death penalty and executed
after unfair trials haven’t been able to secure
the repeal of those sentences. The official
information that could establish the truth of
what happened, contained in the numerous
archives distributed by all the spanish State,
continues being difficult to access and, in some
cases, is under risk of dissapearing”

32.  The law approved in 2007 by the Spanish Government
ignores the main requests of the Associations that
had been fighting for this cause:
* The State would assume the finding and
exhumation of mass graves
* The repeal of the sentences dictated by the
francoist military
* The creation of a great repression archives,
centralizing all the military and civilian
records scattered around the country,
frequently in bad state of preservation and
difficult to access
*The transformation of the “Valley of the Fallen”
in a centre for the remembrance of hard labor

33.  Even falling well short of the expectations,
the Law of Historical Memory makes possible
a certain policy on memory, allows the
removal of francoist symbols and relics
(nearly 70 years after the end of the Civil
War!) and transforms the General Archives of
the Civil War in Salamanca (operating from
the same building where the infamous
Tribunal against Masonry and Communism
stood) in the Documentary Centre of
Historical Memory.

34.  In September 2008 , the world renowned Judge
Baltasar Garzon launched a criminal procedure
against the francoist regime that provoked an
irate reaction from the conservative party.
Subjected to enormous pressure and lack of
cooperation by the public attorney, Garzon
finally refrained from the cause.
 In May 2009, the Supreme Tribunal accepted a
lawsuit against Garzon accusing him of judicial
corruption. One of the demanding parties was
Falange, that in fact committed a good part of
the acts that were being investigated.

36.  The half-hearted application of the Law of
Historical Memory, the prosecution against Judge
Garzon for his attempt to indict the francoist
regime and the more than likely victory by
landslide of the conservative party in 2012
elections don´t bode well for those interested in
recovering the Memory of the darkest days of our
history
 As long as there is not a complete review of the
facts that took place during the Civil War and
the long postwar period, in the style of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commissions adopted by
other countries, the wound created by this
savage conflict will remain open and bleeding…

37.  “This is over. It will last at most ten days. By
that date it is necessary that you do away
with all the gunmen and communists of that
place” (Message of General Queipo de Llano
to López-Pinto, highest pro-coup authority in
Cadiz, August 4, 1936
 The war would last until April 1st, 1939,
followed by 36 years of dictatorship until
Franco´s death, November 20, 1975
 Executions by the francoist side at Cadiz
province: 3,071