Poised to confront the past

Spain will take a major step in confronting its past today when parliament unveils legislation aimed at granting justice to hundreds of thousands of long-neglected victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.

Debated fiercely for more than a year, the bill contains the most explicit formal condemnation to date of Gen. Francisco Franco’s four-decade-long regime. Among other things, it requires the removal of statues, plaques and other symbols that honor the deceased dictator.

But facing the past has inflamed passions in this polarized society.

Conservatives bitterly oppose the legislation, saying it only reopens wounds better left undisturbed, while some victims and their families are unhappy that the measure does not go further.

Thirty-two years after Franco died, and 71 years after the fascist general took part in a coup against an elected leftist government, igniting a devastating civil war, Spain is undergoing an unprecedented examination of that period’s brutalities.

Across the country, families have begun exhuming long-dead relatives from clandestine common graves where many of the losers in the war or the opponents of the regime ended up. New books, seminars and art exhibits have aired stories and events that were kept under wraps for years.

And now, the Law of Historical Memory, which is virtually assured of passage today, is the landmark contribution to this process from Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and his Socialist government. Zapatero’s grandfather was executed by Franco loyalists.

Under its terms, some of which may be amended before today’s scheduled vote in parliament, Franco-era political courts that jailed thousands of dissidents will be declared illegitimate, along with the sentences they handed down; guerrillas who fought the dictatorship will be recognized; and it will be made easier for victims to apply for indemnification.

The law declares that the gigantic Valle de los Caidos monument outside Madrid, where Franco is buried, be used to salute all who were killed in the war, not as a place to pay homage to fascism.

All sanctions, judicial sentences and personal violence “produced for reasons of politics, ideologies or religious belief” during the civil war and the dictatorship “are recognized and declared as radically unjust,” the draft of the proposed law states.

The government argues that it is important to honor and provide a catharsis for those who suffered under the dictatorship and those who fought the losing battle against Franco and his mutinous army.

The Spanish Civil War, in which historians estimate about half a million people were killed, was widely seen as the precursor to World War II. Franco’s fascist forces, backed by Nazi Germany and the powerful Roman Catholic Church, fought and defeated the elected Second Republic, a leftist government with support from the Soviet Union.

Both sides committed atrocities in the war, but the government argues that right-wing victims and Franco supporters were years ago given reparations, proper burials and ample recognition. Those from the other side, it says, were relegated to ignominy.

“We want acknowledgment for the people who fought Franco, the people who died in a war that should not have taken place,” Esperanza Martinez Garcia, an 80-year-old former guerrillera who spent 15 years in jail as a political prisoner, said in an interview Tuesday.

“I always kept my dignity, and I’ve never been ashamed of my being in jail . . . but there are people whose entire life was taken away, because they were killed or because they spent so many years in prison.”

To guarantee Spain’s peaceful transition to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975, politicians (many of whom were themselves Franquistas) agreed to put aside the past. There were none of the truth commissions or judicial inquiries common in other postwar societies.

Dredging up the past now, conservatives say, will undermine that spirit of reconciliation and further divide the nation.

“You are dividing Spain into the good victims and the bad victims,” said Jorge Fernandez Diaz, a member of parliament for the right-wing Popular Party, the largest opposition group, which ruled Spain for eight years until being unseated by Zapatero and the Socialists in 2004. “This is not correcting injustice but reopening history and rewriting it in the manner that Mr. Zapatero sees fit.”

The right did not object to Sunday’s beatification at the Vatican of 498 priests, nuns and other pious Catholics who were killed by pro-leftist forces in the civil war, saying the elevation of the church’s martyrs to the road to sainthood was a religious and not political matter.

Zapatero’s leftist government dismisses critics of the bill, suggesting the right is nervous about scrutinizing its complicity in the dictatorship.

“We are not reopening wounds; we are, in fact, finally attempting to close the wounds,” said Juan Antonio Barrio de Penagos, a Socialist legislator and a sponsor of the measure.

Victims and their descendants, many of whom lived for years in silence, even shame, say they have longed for recognition and vindication.

Fermin Sanchez, 45, helps families in Salamanca who are looking for the secret graves of their relatives as a way to honor his grandfather, also named Fermin Sanchez.

The elder Sanchez was a leftist city councilman in the southern city of Cordoba. On a Sunday in August 1936, as he ate paella with his family, fascist forces swept into their neighborhood and took him away. He was executed days later with a shot to the back of the head. His daughter Maruja, 8 at the time, to this day has nightmares in which her father’s eyes are gouged out.

The younger Fermin Sanchez says the proposed law is insufficient because it merely gives moral recognition to the victims and their descendants, not a legal status that would make it easier to mount court cases.

“The impression is being given that everything is being fixed here, but in fact these families are being left unprotected,” Sanchez said. “These are humble families, with few economic resources, sometimes without much education. They’ve reconstructed their lives from hardship, but they are fragile. They have not been allowed to mourn. That is what’s missing.”

Angel Serrano, 36, had to break through communal taboos and family secrets to find out why he had only one grandfather. He pored through archives and asked questions until he learned that Victorino Pereda Ortega, a Republican soldier who went underground to fight the dictatorship, was killed in 1945, his body dumped near a cemetery in a small town called Roturas. The family was never told of his death, and public records listed him as a criminal.

“We want the name cleared, because he was the ultimate patriot, fighting for his country,” said Serrano, who last year was able to find his grandfather’s resting place and remove the remains for a proper burial.

“It is a strange way to get to know your grandfather. You are happy and sad at the same time. It’s 60 years later, and you are not only recuperating the body but the memory.”

Like others, Serrano says the proposed law falls woefully short of establishing true justice.

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wilkinson@latimes.com

Special correspondent Cristina Mateo-Yanguas in Madrid contributed to this report.