Breaking the Silence: Historical Memory
Grandchildren of the Civil War's victims begin opening mass graves, and the state slowly follows with laws, exhumations and the removal of Franco from his monument.
- Ley 20/2022, de 19 de octubre, de Memoria Democrática — Jefatura del Estado, Boletín Oficial del Estado (2022)
- Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting — Omar G. Encarnación, University of Pennsylvania Press (2014)
- Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past — Giles Tremlett, Faber & Faber (2006)
In 2000 the journalist Emilio Silva searched for his grandfather, shot by Falangists in 1936, and the excavation of his grave in León launched the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. Volunteer exhumations spread across Spain. A 2007 law under Zapatero recognised victims and ordered Francoist symbols removed; in October 2019 Franco’s remains were moved out of the Valley of the Fallen; and the 2022 Democratic Memory Law made the state responsible for locating the disappeared, annulled the dictatorship’s political sentences and renamed the valley Cuelgamuros.
- Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past — Giles Tremlett, Faber & Faber (2006)
- Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting — Omar G. Encarnación, University of Pennsylvania Press (2014)
- Ley 20/2022, de 19 de octubre, de Memoria Democrática — Jefatura del Estado, Boletín Oficial del Estado (2022)
Why it matters today
Memory is a live political fault line: the left sees it as justice long delayed, the right often as reopening wounds the Transition had closed. Regional and national governments have repealed or rewritten memory laws as power changes hands.