The Longest Shadow

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.

© 2007