Not long after he took office in March 2004, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero created a commission charged with the treacherous task of figuring out a way for Spain to come to terms with its violent and repressive modern history. Two years later, advice in hand, he proposed to honor the victims of the Spanish Civil War with a law of historical memory, a seemingly straight-forward idea that would for the first time officially, morally and financially acknowledge those who died in the Civil War and were persecuted during Francisco Franco's dictatorship.
Yet the law, which must be passed by Nov. 1, has stalled in debate over the benefits of exhuming the past. The political left says the law doesn't go far enough. The political right argues the law is unnecessary and divisive and will only lay the groundwork for more fighting. "The majority of Spaniards don't want to return to talking about the republic, nor Franco, nor do they believe it will serve anyone anything," Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy has argued.
If the law fails, as expected, Spain will remain one of the few democratic nations that have yet to have a reckoning with their past. Germany put Nazis on trial after the war, and subsequent generations have agonized over the Nazi era. South Africa gave those affected by apartheid a mechanism to redress their grievances. Argentina began investigating the extrajudicial assassinations of a decadelong "dirty war" soon after it ended. Even Chile, slow to take on the Augusto Pinochet regime, last year elected as president a victim and daughter of victims, Michelle Bachelet, in a symbolic act of resolution. But the Spanish law is an attempt to redress grievances without opening old wounds. It is not an attempt to punish perpetrators but to simply acknowledge the victims.
Unlike Nazism or, to a lesser extent, Stalinism, franquismo was never actually vanquished or rejected. It just died one day, along with Franco, in 1975. Three years of civil war and four decades of dictatorship were swept under an agreement known as the "pact of forgetting." A collective amnesia was coupled with a general amnesty for both those who served with Franco and those who fought against him. Overnight, many street names honoring the "Generalissimo" were changed, fascist monuments came down, and Spain became a fully functioning democracy and a vibrant member of the European community.
But Spain's failure to come to terms with Franco's legacy has meant that many Spaniards remain in a seemingly interminable battle with the memory of the dictator. When Franco died, those in the regions suppressed by his effort to create a unified Spain—the Catalans and the Basques in particular—were soothed by generous autonomy agreements in the new Constitution. Now education, health, policing and, in the Basque Country, taxation are all controlled by the regions rather than Madrid, and each of Spain's 17 regions is demanding even greater autonomy.
Franco's attempt to dilute cultural and linguistic differences still ripples through the Spanish economy. He invested heavily in Catalonia and the Basque Country in an effort to build up industry and encourage inward migration. Today those regions are among the strongest economically in Spain. Catalonia, with 15.8 percent of the population, generates 20 percent of Spain's economic output; its own economy is growing faster than the country's as a whole. In the Basque region a mere 5 percent of the Spanish population contributes more than 6 percent of GDP. But far from being integrated into Spain, as Franco wanted, these regions, as well as Galicia and Valencia, continue to rebel against the dictator's goals by encouraging children to study in their local language and learn Spanish as a foreign language, a policy that has made it increasingly difficult for Spaniards from elsewhere to move in and find work.
Even the seemingly mundane has been touched by this history: in 2005, Catalonia successfully applied for its own Internet domain—".cat" for Catalonia, instead of ".es" for España—and has lobbied, unsuccessfully, to have its football team recognized as a national team. But Franco's legacy is most dramatically alive in politics. The bloodiest inheritance of anti-Franco rebellion, the radical Basque separatist group ETA, has left its mark on every election since the transition to democracy. Throughout the '80s and '90s, the Socialists, who ruled Spain from Franco's death until 1996, fought against ETA, but were ultimately brought down at least in part by their own corrupt and often violent efforts to stop the terror. The conservative Popular Party, founded by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a former Francoist government minister, conjured the bogeyman of a divided Spain to stir up the base.
The ghost of Franco also haunted the aftermath of the deadly 2004 bombing of a Madrid-bound commuter train. Popular Party Prime Minister José María Aznar, himself the victim of an attempted ETA attack, blamed the Basque rebels even as evidence mounted that Al Qaeda was the perpetrator. His recalcitrance contributed to his defeat in national elections just days later. His successor, Zapatero, was convinced that an antiterror backlash had weakened ETA, and tried to broker a peace deal. ETA responded with the deadly December 2006 bomb at Madrid's Barajas airport. Ever since, Zapatero has been struggling to heal the reopened wounds.
The Spanish paradox is that while no one has come to terms with Franco-era horrors, no one can quite forget, either. There are now dozens of books crowding store shelves with competing histories of the Franco era, with titles like "The Myths of the Civil War" and "Victims of the Civil War"—the former a revisionist, pro-Francoist text questioning the conventional wisdom on the war's origins; the latter a frank look at the executions, exiles and Spanish concentration camps. Similarly, while some 85-year-olds wait to find their brothers who are buried in mass graves, others still proudly display portraits of Franco in their Madrid apartments. "Atrocities were committed by everyone," says Charles Powell, a history professor at Madrid's CEU San Pablo University. "It's not Germany, where it is much easier to know where one should stand."
In Spain, opinions on the Civil War and its aftermath tend to split fairly evenly along party lines. Even the leadership reflects that dichotomy: Aznar's grandfather was a friend of Franco's; Zapatero's was killed by Franco's troops. So while a band of right-wing extremists recently tore down a monument commemorating one of the last major battles of the Spanish Civil War and spray-painted a sign declaring that Franco's most rabid supporters, the Falange, are "still fighting," the victims of the Falange's old battles still wait to unearth their families. And Zapatero, for his part, looks toward an election campaign next spring with two of his biggest promises to the people—peace and reconciliation—unfulfilled.