Ghosts of Spain (12 page)

The shame, if that is the case, is only now lifting. At the end of the third decade without Franco, the dam holding back the
gorier
details of Francoism has finally burst. One publishing house has set up an entire series that seems dedicated to nothing else. There is still resistance, however. The People's Party went as far as it would in recognising the Francoist right's historic guilt in the same parliamentary motion in which it permitted local councils to spend money digging up Civil War graves. The motion
recognised
the existence of victims of ‘the repression of the Francoist dictatorship' and denounced ‘the violent imposition of
ideologies
'. But the People's Party – which speaks for more than a third of Spanish voters – has so far refused to go any further. It was the only one of eleven parties in Las Cortes, the Madrid parliament, to boycott a parliamentary homage to Franco's victims in 2003. Its habitual claim is that the left is indulging in ‘mothball politics' whenever it brings the issue up.

The details of what happened come, anyway, too late for most of the victims – who are dead. But studying, in any rigorous detail, what actually happened remains a Herculean task. A
disturbing
number of archives, be they military, prison, police or Church, are an impenetrable mess, with some left rotting,
unclassified
, in warehouses dotted around the country. Like the statues, they have been shoved to the back of the cupboard by ministries or government departments. In some archives, especially those run by the Church, investigators are not allowed to dig randomly but must say precisely what they are looking for – a question many of them, following vague clues, are unable to answer. Others, such as those of the Francisco Franco Foundation, a drab
Madrid apartment that holds many of his papers and receives state funding, have proven almost impossible for non-friendly historians to access.

How, I wondered as I went seeking the Generalísimo, would a young Spaniard, a child of today, first encounter the man who dominated his country's history in the previous century? An answer to that came from an unexpected source. When he was six, my eldest son came back from his Madrid primary school singing the following ditty to the tune of the Spanish national anthem: ‘
Franco, Franco que tiene el culo blanco, porque su mujer lo lava con Ariel
' (‘Franco, Franco, his arse is very white, and that is because his wife washes it with Ariel'). Children have a special knack for taking the sting out of scary, authority figures by lampooning them. Generations of schoolchildren, I am told, have learnt the same song. Part of the joke, today, is that Spain has one of the few national anthems in the world with no words to it. The old
Francoist
words were purged after his death, and nothing replaced them.

The fact that he knew the ditty did not mean my son knew who Franco was. We had to explain that to him. It was a rare sighting, though, of Franco in modern Spain. For a moment he had escaped from the storeroom or from the inside of a history book. He had lived on in the playground, a buffoon-like, but still threatening, figure. It was a sign, however, of the old Caudillo's potency that he should survive here as a modern bogeyman, as unrealistic to the children singing about him as Guy Fawkes is to British children.

LaTransición
– as Spaniards called their transition to
democracy
– had returned to Spain its pre-Francoist wordless national anthem. It had also laid down, it seemed, many of the unwritten rules of silence that were now being broken. Spaniards, and
foreigners
who observed this transition, had generally described it in glowing terms. It certainly achieved its overall aim of converting Spain to democracy. I was beginning to wonder, however, whether it was quite as perfect as it had been described. The
Transición
, clearly, was the key to many of the things I was coming
across. If I wanted to understand it all, I would have to move on and find out some more about one of the most exciting – and unique – moments in Spanish history.

I will call him Don Heliodoro, though we knew him simply by his nickname as ‘
el hueso
', the bone, because, someone told us, he was ‘so hard to digest'. He was an elderly Madrileño, an old-fashioned Francoist into whose company I was forced as I set about buying an apartment. He was also a man who, as Spaniards say of those who speak their minds,
no tiene pelos en la lengua
– has no hairs on his tongue. One day, as we shared a taxi, we began talking about Spain's monarch, Juan Carlos I. ‘The king?' he bellowed. ‘He is a
traidor
[a traitor].'

‘You know what I am talking about, don't you,
señor taxista
,' he shouted over the seat at the taxi driver, a man in his late fifties. The
taxista
smiled nervously and kept his mouth firmly shut. It must have been a while since he had had someone like this – one of the last, few diehard followers of Franco and the Falange
leader
José Antonio Primo de Rivera – in his cab.

Don Heliodoro was a reminder of two things. First, that when Franco died and a young prince called Juan Carlos stepped into the shoes of the head of state, people like this occupied many of the key positions of power. The Don Heliodoros of this world were convinced that democracy would bring with it the evils of
communism
, divorce, freemasonry, pornography and homosexuality.

The other was that Juan Carlos was Franco's hand-picked heir. Spain has, uniquely in modern Europe, a king elected by a
dictator
. The rightful heir to the Spanish throne had been the king's father, Don Juan. He had gone into exile with his own father, King Alfonso XIII, when the latter was chased out by Republicans in 1931.

It is questionable, in fact, whether Spaniards would have
chosen
Juan Carlos, or any other monarch, to lead them had they been
given a free choice immediately after Franco's death in November 1975. Spain had not had a king for forty-four years. Neither the political left nor the more Falangist sectors of Franco's regime were natural monarchists. Spaniards generally had lost their respect for monarchs long before. They had not only pushed out Alfonso XIII. They had also forced the abdication of two of his three predecessors.

Juan Carlos felt real affection for the Generalísimo, his
biographers
say. Don Juan had initiated a tug-of-war with the Caudillo over his son's future by sending him to Madrid on his own at the age of just ten. It was the first time the future king had been to his own country. Franco oversaw his education after that. After
thirty
years of watchful vigilance, the Caudillo would eventually see in Juan Carlos – as one biographer of both men put it, attributing the observation to Queen Sofía – ‘the son that he had never had'.

When the Caudillo publicly named the young prince as his
successor
, six years before his death, Juan Carlos was effusive in his praise. He also publicly pledged to uphold the principles of
Franco's
Movimiento Nacional. In his acceptance speech, Juan Carlos lauded not just Franco's dictatorship, but also the 1936 uprising that sparked the bloodbath of the Civil War. ‘I receive from his Excellency the Head of State, Generalísimo Franco, the political legitimacy that emerged from July 18, 1936, amidst so much sad but necessary sacrifice and suffering so that our
Patria
could rejoin the path of destiny. The work of setting it on the right road and showing clearly the direction it must go has been carried out by that exceptional man whom Spain has been immensely
fortunate
to have, and will be fortunate to have for years to come, as the guide of our policy,' Juan Carlos said. ‘My hand will not tremble to do all that is necessary to defend the principles [of the Movimiento] and laws that I have just sworn.'

It was reasonable to think, therefore, that Juan Carlos would bring more of the same. ‘This is not a restoration of monarchy but the establishment of a new Francoist monarchy,' one of Franco's diehard supporters had claimed. The Don Heliodoros of this world certainly hoped for that. What they got was something
completely different. In fact, Juan Carlos had been secretly
meeting
the pro-democracy opposition for some time. Over the next four years, he would help lead Spaniards to write themselves a democratic constitution, freely elect a parliament and – at a
referendum
– choose to have a constitutional monarch, himself, as head of state. It was a time of breathless change, intrigue and excitement. It marked the life of a whole generation of Spaniards who, as they now see their children reaping the benefits of what they sowed, are, largely, proud of what they achieved.

Spaniards, mostly, got what they wanted from the
Transición
. Age-old conflicts were resolved with words, not violence. A stable, working democracy was put in place. They can be extremely touchy about criticism of this period, or claims that some
questions
were left unresolved. ‘Spain's
Transición
is envied the world over,' one angry newspaper editorial told Amnesty Internationsl in 2005 when it demanded that justice be handed out to Franco's victims.

The
Transición
, however, was a change in which silence – that apparently alien Spanish quality – would play a key role. Events of the previous fifty years were deliberately pushed into a dark corner as Spaniards observed what came to be known as the
pacto del
olvido
, the pact of forgetting.

The only release from Franco was death by natural causes. The Caudillo died in a hospital bed on 20 November 1975. Spaniards did not free themselves, as the Portuguese had done the year before with their peaceful Carnation Revolution. Nor did they achieve freedom with the sort of people's power demonstrations that swept through eastern bloc Communist countries later in the century.

Depending on where a Spaniard lived, the Caudillo had ruled over their life for anything between thirty-six and thirty-nine years. It was time enough for children to become grandparents. I have always found it difficult, despite a recent flood of novels and films on the subject, to imagine the impact he had on each
individual
Spaniard's existence. I got some idea, however, when I travelled four thousand miles across the Atlantic to report for the
Guardian
 
newspaper on the world created by another long-living military strongman of Galician origin – Cuban leader Fidel Castro. ‘You must understand that it has been my whole life. I haven't had the chance to know or see anything else,' said – in an empty, sad voice – a fifty-year-old woman to whom I gave a lift during a tropical rainstorm outside Havana. A whole generation of Spaniards must have felt the same emptiness, the same sense of waste or lost opportunity.

Even those who, like King Juan Carlos, had spent fifteen years appearing at the Caudillo's side, claimed they had been forced to keep their mouths firmly closed most of the time. ‘Why did I never say anything? Because it was a period when nobody, not even me, dared speak,' he said later.

Franco's final message to Spaniards was read out on television by his weeping prime minister, the devoted Carlos Arias Navarro, hours after his death. It called on them to be loyal to Juan Carlos. They were warned not to forget, however, that ‘the enemies of Spain and of Christian civilisation are on the alert'.

The message also contained a rare, if perverse, apology to his legion of victims – to that part of Spain known simply as
los
vencidos,
the defeated: ‘I beg forgiveness of everyone, just as with all my heart I forgive those who declared themselves my enemies.' The apology was offered, as Spaniards describe those talking through clenched teeth,
con la boca pequeña
– with a small mouth. His victims had ‘declared themselves' enemies. It was, in other words, their own fault. Franco, of all people, was not about to go to the grave admitting he had been wrong.

Democracy did not appear in Spain overnight – though the period in which it emerged is often viewed through rose-tinted glasses. If Franco expected, or wanted, democracy to happen he forgot to tell anyone. Juan Carlos was, in the words of one
historian
, meant to ‘continue Francoism after Franco'. This proved to be ‘the Caudillo's most serious political and personal miscalculation'.

King Juan Carlos's first prime minister was the same Arias Navarro who had wept so copiously for Franco. Arias Navarro – known as the
Carnicero de Málaga
, or the Butcher of Málaga,
because of his time as a military prosecutor during the Civil War – vowed he would be ‘a strict perpetrator of Francoism'. It took three years of intense and difficult work to get to a point where a new constitution could be written and voted on. Franco may have been dead, but Francoism was still very much present as Spain
tottered
unsteadily into democracy.

When Juan Carlos was officially proclaimed king he spoke of ‘a dynamic moment of change' and of integrating ‘
distintas y
deseables opiniones
' – ‘different and desirable opinions'. That could, or could not, have meant democracy. A few days later he issued a royal decree naming the deceased Franco, in perpetuity,
general-in
-chief of the army, navy and air force.

For fifty hours Franco's body lay in the Sala de Columnas of Madrid's Palacio de Oriente. Hundreds of thousands queued to see his corpse. He was buried at the Valle de Los Caídos after a frantic search for the stone which had been set aside years earlier to cover his grave. One of the waiting mourners fell into the grave a few hours before and had to be removed, unconscious, from what was due to be the Caudillo's last resting place. The
ceremony
was presided over by a red-eyed, visibly moved, Juan Carlos.

By the time of his death Franco was an international pariah, except to a US which had signed deals for military bases and used him as a Cold War bulwark against communism. The only world leader of any significance to turn up for his funeral was Chile's General Augusto Pinochet – a dictator with similar ideas about his role in delivering the world from communism and atheism. Attempts made, twenty-five years later, by a Spanish court to try Pinochet for genocide, terrorism and torture show just how fast and far the country travelled after Franco had been lowered into his grave. They also highlight, however, the immense contrast between Spain's attitude to those who tortured, killed or repressed in
Franco's
name and those who did the same elsewhere.

A political prisoner sitting in a Spanish jail could have been forgiven for looking at the future with pessimism at the end of 1975. Franco was dead. But the people appointed by Juan Carlos to run the country were the same lot as before. The Butcher of
Málaga was in charge of the government. The upper echelons of the army, meanwhile, were populated with generals who had earned their spurs fighting for Franco in the Civil War or, later, for Hitler with the volunteer División Azul. The parliament was used to rubber-stamping Franco's legislation, the judges to carrying out his laws and the police to applying them, often brutally. Almost everybody in a position of power was, at least in theory, some sort of Francoist.

In fact, the thirst for democracy was enormous. Fortunately it was, at least by now, shared by Juan Carlos. The
undergroundleft-wing
press did not, however, see any signs of this. ‘
¡No al Rey
fran-quista!
', ‘No to the Francoist King!', ‘
¡No al Rey impuesto!
', ‘No to an imposed King!' they cried.

There were only two ways of achieving democracy. One was a complete – and potentially violent – break with the past. In that scenario the police and army, where the hardliners were, would have the upper hand. The other was
ruptura pactada
– an
agreement
, between Francoists and opposition democrats, to break with the past. That, however, meant letting the Francoists
themselves
, led by Juan Carlos, carry out the changes. For the left, there was no real choice. The Francoists, if they were prepared to, would have to do it. Fortunately, enough of them were. One of the great ironies of recent Spanish history is that many of the fathers of democracy were Francoists. Inevitably, however, they were going to do it their way – or as much their way as possible.

Luis María Anson, a conservative, monarchist journalist, had already spotted the manoeuvres going on in the background before Franco's death. ‘The rats are abandoning the regime's ship … The cowardice of the Spanish ruling class is truly suffocating … Already it has reached the beginnings of the
sauve qui peut
, of the unconditional surrender,' he wrote six months before
el
Caudillo
died.

Prominent Francoists reinvented themselves, almost overnight, as diehard democrats. Spain went for what one well-known psychiatrist of the time called ‘a world-record in jacket changing'. The jacket-changers were led by Adolfo Suárez, a brilliant young
Falangist who replaced Arias Navarro. He persuaded the Francoist deputies in Las Cortes to commit
hara-kari
by passing a law
allowing
free elections. He then went on to win those elections with a ‘centrist' party that included many former regime
apparatchiks
.

The
Transición
was a time of high political drama. Its
protagonists
are treated as heroes. Spaniards often forget, however, quite how violent it was. In the five years after Franco's death, more than a hundred demonstrators, left-wing activists, students and separatists were killed by the police or the ‘
ultras
', the far right. Many more were killed by ETA and other left-wing or separatist terrorist groups.