Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain

Exhuming the Past, Understanding the Present

Ofelia Ferrán, Lisa Hilbink, Ofelia Ferrán, Lisa Hilbink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317532941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the multiple legacies of Francoist violence in contemporary Spain, with a special focus on the exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War and post-war era. The various contributions frame their study within a broader reflection on the nature, function and legacies of state-sanctioned violence in its many forms. Offering perspectives from fields as varied as history, political science, literary and cultural studies, forensic and cultural anthropology, international human rights law, sociology, and art, this volume explores the multifaceted nature of a society's reckoning with past violence. It speaks not only to those interested in contemporary Spain and Western Europe, but also to those studying issues of transitional and post-transitional justice in other national and regional contexts.

Part I
Mass Graves

“Unearthing” the Memories of Violence

1 Afterlives

A Social Autopsy of Mass Grave Exhumations in Spain¹

Francisco Ferrándiz

What things were interred and sacrificed amid magic incantations! What horrible cabinet of curiosities lies there below, where the deepest shafts are reserved for what is most commonplace! In a night of despair, I dreamed I was with my first friend from my school days, whom I had not seen for decades, and had scarcely ever remembered in that time, tempestuously renewing our friendship and brotherhood. But when I awoke it became clear that what despair had brought to light, like a detonation, was the corpse of that boy who had been immured as a warning: that whoever one day lives here may in no respect resemble him.

Walter Benjamin, “Souterrain,” One-Way Street and Other Writings
(Based on the translation by Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter)

Subterrados²

How can we define the corpses being exhumed in twenty-first-century Spain?³ The concept of subtierro, which I use in this text, aims to extend the semantic field of the experience of defeat in the Spanish Civil War, placing the emphasis on the historical, social, political, and symbolic profile of the tens of thousands of people executed by the insurgent army and associated paramilitary groups in the rearguard of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and subsequently in Francoist postwar Spain, who ended their lives piled up in mass graves all over the country. In the context of the “knowledge and information society” (Castells 2000), the contemporary opening of these mass graves and the public exhibition of the cadavers they contain, removed from the historical moment in which the executions occurred, have forced Spain into a painful confrontation with victims of repressive violence who were not only part of the justification shoring up the Francoist dictatorship, but who were then deprived of legitimacy and recognition during the transition to democracy and the subsequent years.

The condition of subtierro, therefore, refers to a kind of subterranean exodus, perhaps an extreme form of interior exile, which may share a historic origin with those who were exiled, banished, or forced to abandon Spain after the war (Gaos 1953; Monclús 1989),⁴ but whose conditions of production and whose social, political, symbolic and judicial history have their own specificity. I refer, in particular, to its relationship with the experience of violent death in the context of a policy of extermination of the adversary and to the successive regimes of political and social oblivion suffered by the series of cadavers that were strewn, by way of example, in mass graves across the country.

The graves that have been opened in Spain since the year 2000 are, for the most part, the result of irregular burials derived from what prominent historians have dubbed the exterminating fury of coordinated cleansing actions by the rearguard of the insurgent army, which then continued afterward during the dictatorship (Casanova 1999; 2002; Juliá, 1999, 19). The historiography of recent years, written both in Spain and elsewhere, has taken major strides in documenting and analyzing the multiplicity of overlapping forms of violence that took place during the Civil War and its aftermath, where there was less mortality on the battlefield than in the repressive action taken away from the fronts (Rodrigo 2008, 25). More specifically, it has enabled a better mapping of the nature and scale of the rearguard exterminatory machinery on both sides, as well as their evolution, forms, regional variants, and spatial characteristics.

In contrast to the theories on the repressive balance and tragic insanity of the two Spains, authors such as Casanova (2002), Rodrigo (2008, 21–29), Preston (2011) and others, have pointed to asymmetries between some rearguard structures and dynamics of violence and others. In the prologue to his influential book Víctimas de la guerra civil, for instance, Santos Juliá established that, as the historiography available to date demonstrates, while “in the insurgent zone, repression and death were connected with the building of a new power,” the major massacres of the Republic “occurred as a result of the collapse of the State and abated as the State was reconstructed” (1999, 25–27).⁵

As to the figures regarding this rearguard repression, the same book estimates that the number of civilians executed by Francoist troops during and after the war was far in excess of 100,000 (72,527 executed in just twenty-four provinces)—a figure also used by Casanova (2002, 19–20)—whereas the number executed by the Republican side is reduced to about 50,000 (Juliá 1999, 407–12). More recently, authors such as Rodrigo (2008) and Preston (2011) have produced estimates of 55,000 in the Republican rearguard and over 150,000 in the rearguard of the insurgent army.

According to this critical historiographical tendency, the mass graves that would later become those of the defeated side are a crucial part of an investment in terror associated with a planned blood pedagogy that had already been staged in the colonial wars in Morocco (Rodrigo 2008; Preston 2011), which was key to the insurgent army’s military strategy in rearguard regions as they came under its control. As places of exemplifying memory, or fear memorials, the presence of the mass graves of defeat on the national landscape contributed—not only physically but also politically, symbolically, and socially—to the shoring up of the dictatorial regime imposed on the country after the war under the rule of General Francisco Franco. This wartime investment in terror—prolonged by further executions, penal servitude, forced labor, purges, public humiliations, and other repressive methods after the war was over—undoubtedly bore fruit in the dictatorship, although its bitter legacy evolved and transformed with the Francoist regime, their original efficacy declining as the broad and heterogeneous social body of those defeated in the war absorbed the impact. Even so, the contemporary reappearance in the national and international debate on the war, Francoism, and repression shows that the wounds left in the social and political body were very deep and affected several generations.

These differences in rearguard violence, highly conditioned by developments in the war, directly correlate with the policies of propaganda and memory of the war that were implemented and which gained hegemony during Francoism—a highly complex issue we will not deal with here (Aguilar 2008; Box 2010; Molinero 2005). For the purposes of this text, which is the historical and political handling of the war cadavers, there is sufficient empirical evidence in Spain of two clearly differentiated spaces of death (Taussig 1992). The bodies accepted as “belonging” to the victors—for which legislation was introduced, retrieval and reburial guidelines were drawn up, a heroic and martyrial account was constructed, and diverse forms of visibilization, tribute, and dignification established—received a privileged treatment from the outset that was radically distinct from that meted out to the cadavers of the vanquished. These were, on the one hand, held up as an example of the potential fate of those dissenting from the regime and, on the other, abandoned to their lot, marking the start of a long odyssey of subtierro lasting several decades.

Although Spain’s Official Gazette (BOE: Boletín Oficial del Estado) refers to diverse initiatives that show how the side attributed to a body was decisive in its symbolic, legal, and political treatment, let us consider a single illustrative example of how this was expressed in funerary legislation. In July 1946, once it was confirmed that the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen)—final destination for the “sacred remains of the martyrs of the Crusade”⁶—would take some time to build, the government found itself forced to modify a prior funerary arrangement that required the definitive burial of corpses within ten years after death, as this began to affect those who had died in the earliest days of the military uprising of 1936. To achieve this, it issued an order in the BOE “so that the temporary burial of the remains of the fallen in our War of Liberation [be] extended indefinitely,” until the Valley’s crypt was ready to give them “dignified burial.” This was provided that the process involve

interment of remains of the fallen who either perished in the ranks of the National Army or were murdered or executed by the Marxist hordes during the period between 18 July 1936 and 1 April 1939, or subsequently, in the event that the deaths were the direct consequence of war wounds and prison suffering.⁷

This made it clear that the bodies to which this legislation applied were exclusively those of the “fallen, heroes and martyrs of the Crusade,” leaving in limbo those excluded from the funerary legislation and, consequently, from the legitimate community of the dead who had sacrificed their lives for the nation, namely the Republican corpses and, by extension, the mass graves containing them.

The action of the new Francoist state with respect to those considered the war victims of preference stands in direct correlation to the practices and policies of exhuming cadavers of the conflict implemented in Spain after the war. It is therefore important to understand the contemporary exhumations in this historical perspective, in other words, as the most recent episode in the different sequences of exhumation of the war, each with its own necropolitical regime (Mbembe 2003). To put it succinctly, the cycles of disinterment and reburial in Spain that have taken place (and at times overlapped) include, in the first instance and during the postwar period, a project for the generalized—albeit in no way complete given the huge scale of the war, the high level of mortality, and the state’s organizational difficulties—recovery and dignification of heroes and martyrs on the winning side, fully and officially endorsed by the dictatorship in ad hoc administrative procedures, ritualization, and a legitimizing account within the political-religious framework of national Catholicism (Aguilar 2008; Box 2010). The second wave of exhumations includes the political, administrative, and symbolical hauling of more than thirty thousand bodies to the Valle de los Caídos from the 1950s onward (Olmeda 2009; Solé 2009; Ferrándiz 2014). A third kind of exhumation consists of the twentieth-century excavation of Republican graves, carried out by families in a secret, dispersed manner during Francoism. These exhumations continued to occur in a domestic, local way devoid of any technical support and with little repercussion in the media during the Transition and democracy (Aguilar and Ferrándiz 2016). Much research remains to be conducted on these cycles (Ferrándiz 2014), which we shall later consider in more detail. The graves being opened in the twenty-first century add another new layer of exhumation and reburial onto these war cadavers, and this process is now being approached in a more decisive manner on a large number of the bodies, subterrados and improperly buried, of those executed in the rearguard of the insurgent army and during the early years of the dictatorship.

Bodies That Are Desvelados:⁸ A Social Autopsy

The work of Walter Benjamin represents a crucial vantage point from which to understand the dialectic relationship between past and present in the modern day. In his epistemological proposition, the historical knowledge required to produce critical awareness of the present comes not from major milestones in the history of the victors, but from ruins and fragments, from remains that can be found buried, hidden, or half-forgotten in the interstices of culture (Buck-Morss 1991, x–xi; Zamora 2008, 110–11). For Benjamin, it is precisely the vestiges of the oppressed or the vanquished that demonstrate that, in industrial society and culture and, by extension, in the information society, the state of emergency is not the exception but the rule. (Benjamin 2005, Thesis VIII; Agamben 2004). In this context, those below ground irrupt unexpectedly into contemporary life as the marginal remains of hegemonic accounts, like ruins that progress has left in its wake, like fragments of a memory that flashes suddenly, like lightning at a moment of danger, like a part of the doom-mongering vision of Benjamin’s angel of history.⁹ And this irruption turns the skeletons, inscribed with the violence depicted earlier, into a fundamental starting point for a critical reinterpretation of the historical process of the past century in Spain. It does so, on the one hand, from the heart of a repression and, on the other, from the sideline of historical awareness of the war.

In the twenty-first century, the darkness or penumbra in which these dead bodies have existed for years, indeed decades, defying the oblivion in the interstices of modernization, has given way to a regime of public presence and visibility unthinkable a few years ago, in a sudden transition from ghosts to war cadavers. Diverse contemporary authors have resorted to the metaphors and beliefs in ghosts to refer to the traumatic memories that are trapped in social contexts impregnated by an unresolved, violent past (Gordon 1997; Ferrándiz 2006; Kwon 2008). Gordon, for instance, highlights the importance of analyzing the obsessive haunting by ghosts and specters in order to understand social life, both in the individual and the collective realm. The social tension provoked by ghosts of the past “is neither a premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great importance” with obvious effects. The tension and uncertainty caused in society by this kind of pursuit are a powerful form of knowledge that offers a privileged space for analysis of the relationship between “power, knowledge and experience” (1997, 7–23). In the case of mass burials resulting from war, the deliberate confusion of unidentified bodies in unmarked graves has the potential to inject disorder, anxiety, and division into the social fabric for decades, as in Spain (Robben 2000). It introduces a social and symbolic anxiety in the face of mass death expressed through different kinds of characters or rhetorics of memory and mourning depending on the cultural, social, political, and historical context—specters, apparitions, paranormal occurrences—as shown, for instance, by Winter’s 2006 study on the reappearance of the belief in ghosts experienced by soldiers in the wake of the First World War (1995) or Kwon’s work analyzing popular beliefs linked to mass graves and exhumations in the Vietnam War.

We have seen, then, how exhumations like those taking place in Spain are the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Prologue: Opening Graves to Restore Memory
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Legacies of Violence in Contemporary Spain
• Part I Mass Graves: “Unearthing” the Memories of Violence
• Part II Political, Legislative, and Judicial Responses to Past Violence
• Part III Cultural Representations of Violence
• Part IV Interview with Baltasar Garzón
• Epilogue: Memory Walks, Justice Awakes
• Contributors
• Index