Ghosts of Spain (13 page)

The people in charge may have considered themselves
ex-Francoists
, but some of the tactics they used showed little sign of change. Although some of the killing was done by police –
sometimes
by shooting straight into demonstrations – the men pulling the triggers were rarely, if ever, brought to justice. Five people were killed in one demonstration in the Basque city of Vitoria in 1976 after police had lobbed smoke grenades into a church. The relatives of the dead are still, today, waiting for the killers to be identified. Two of the Francoists-turned-democrats who were in charge of the interior ministry at the time have gone on to enjoy enormous success. Manuel Fraga Iribarne founded what would become the People's Party, which governed the country under José María Aznar for eight years until 2004. He himself was president of the Galician regional government until 2005. Rodolfo Martín Villa served several governments as a minister and went on to become chairman of Spain's main satellite broadcaster, Sogecable.

The negotiating strength of those who held power and those who did not was obviously unequal. Manuel Fraga had opposition leaders arrested. He once boasted to the young Socialist leader Felipe González that it could take eight years to legalise his party while the Communists might always remain banned. ‘Remember that I am the power, and you are nothing,' he told him.

Felipe González, who helped negotiate the reforms and would later govern as Spanish prime minister for thirteen years, admits the left had to pay for change with, amongst other things, silence.
‘What we have is a change that is agreed between people coming from the old regime and the opposition,' explains González. ‘That was very positive but it excluded, for example, an explanation (not to mention any demand that people be held responsible) for what had happened under Francoism, through truth
commissions
, as other countries have done. There was not sufficient strength to demand either justice or, even, any explanation for the past.'

Within days of Franco's death, demonstrations were being held demanding amnesty for the political prisoners still in jail. These were the days of running battles between demonstrators and the grises, the grey-uniformed riot police, which marked the youth of a generation of, mainly, left-wingers. Franco, unforgiving to the end, had ordered the execution of five prisoners in his last year. Political activists were still being beaten and tortured by the police's Brigada Político-Social in some police stations. Asked to order his police to be gentle with amnesty protesters in Valencia, Fraga replied: ‘
Les voy a moler a palos
' (‘I shall beat them black and blue').

The last prisoners were finally released after a general amnesty was granted at the end of 1977. The amnesty was agreed by a parliament elected, a few months earlier, in the first democratic vote for forty-one years. Some of those released were members of ETA and would simply get straight back to the business of terror. Others, though, had spent years going in and out of Franco's prisons for organising peaceful protests. To them, it was a form of victory. Marcelino Camacho, a trade union leader who had spent years in jail, told Las Cortes that the amnesty was the only way to ‘close this past of civil wars and crusades'. A Socialist deputy agreed, saying it was ‘the fruit of a desire to bury the sad, past history of Spain'. Another deputy gave the best description, however: ‘The amnesty is simply a forgetting … an amnesty for everyone, a forgetting by everyone for everyone.' The proposal was not just amnesty, but also amnesia.

Spaniards called the unwritten part of the amnesty
agreement
the
pacto del olvido
. It underpinned the entire transition.
If silence about the past was the price to be paid for the
successful
self-dissolution of Francoism, the opposition was prepared to sign up to it. Those who negotiated the pact, men like Socialist prime minister-to-be Felipe González, still feel that way. It allowed Suárez to reform the regime from within, using its own rules to do so.

More than twenty-five years later, however, the amnesty law begins to look different to some Spaniards – especially to a younger generation that did not live through Franco's final days. Its second article covered crimes ‘against the rights of people' committed – prior to 15 December 1976 – by: ‘authorities,
functionaries
and agents of public order'. Franco's henchmen, in other words, would not have to pay for their crimes.

In an attempt to understand the consequences of that
pacto del
olvido
, I found myself walking up the Carrer Josep Anselm Clavé. This leads off the end of Barcelona's famous Ramblas boulevard into what used to be the city's port district. During the 1992 Olympics, I bumped into two lost Atlanta cops here – doing groundwork for their own Olympics four years later – and acted as interpreter. ‘I wouldn't go down there, not without my gun anyway,' said one, a big black lieutenant, peering down a dark alley.

Coming back, I found this street had, like so much of this ever-evolving city, changed. Gift shops, including a hammock boutique, gave way to a street of bars and small businesses, with immigrants from Africa, Morocco and China bustling around. Turning up towards Escudellers street, I veered off into a
narrow
, featureless and slightly sinister alleyway. I had come here to the offices of a group of people who were keeping a small flame alive for the 5,000 Spaniards who died during the Second World War in a Nazi prison camp at Mauthausen, in Austria. A strange piece of news had driven me here to meet the people from a group called the Amical de Mauthausen. For, a few months earlier, I had been surprised to discover that a man called Ramón Serrano Suñer had just died. The surprise was not his death, but the fact that he had still been alive.

Aged 101, the man known to Spaniards as
el Cuñadísimo
, ‘the super-brother-in-law', for his relationship with
el Generalísimo
, had proved to be a survivor in numerous ways. For, at one of the bloodiest and most vengeful moments of Spanish history,
Serrano
Suñer had been his brother-in-law's right-hand man and the second most powerful man in the land. While Spaniards were dying in Mauthausen, Suñer was one of Nazi Germany's most impassioned backers in Madrid. ‘Russia is to blame!' he had shouted to the crowds when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and Franco decided to send his division of volunteers, the División Azul, to help him.

Some of the obituaries I read of him bore little relationship to the picture I carried in my head of an ardent pro-fascist who held such power in the first, and most extreme, few years of Francoism. They were glowing accounts of a charming, intelligent man who saved Spain from the Second World War and went on to oppose Franco. They described him as a fine writer, a successful
businessman
and a free thinker. Others were not so kind. They used words like
totalitario
and
fascista
. It was difficult to imagine they were writing about the same man.

Serrano Suñer had, I read, spent much of the last few years of his life in the glitzy southern resort of Marbella. A black,
chauffeur-driven
Mercedes with white blinds would take him almost daily to the same beach. Out would step the chauffeur and a
distinguished-looking
, very elderly gentleman with a walking stick, a hat, a cashmere jacket and, often, a dark tie knotted around his neck. Serrano Suñer, whose admirers said he conserved a keen eye for young women and who went for his first spin on a water scooter when he was ninety-six, would take the sun for a while. Then he would return to his car and be driven back to his summer house, bought off a former British ambassador, on the hillside above the town.

As a younger man, Serrano Suñer's tall, thin and elegant figure, combined with his stylish, quick-witted manner, provided an unflattering contrast to his ponderous, pot-bellied brother-
in-law
. ‘Beside the Don Quixote of his brother-in-law, the Caudillo
often appears to be Sancho Panza,' France's Marshal Pétain once observed. In the bloody, hate-fuelled days of the late 1930s and early 1940s, he helped Franco design his new state. At one point in 1940 he controlled the interior ministry, the foreign ministry and the Falange. Serrano Suñer – whose brothers had been shot by the
rojos
in Madrid – thus helped oversee one of the most brutal, vengeful periods of internal repression. He admired, met and negotiated with both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The
latter
was, he thought, ‘a genius' of the kind history threw up only ‘once every two or three thousand years'. A man who hated Britain and France, he played host to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in Madrid in 1940. The city's streets were decorated with swastikas. The Gestapo chief, not a man famous for compassion, expressed amazement at the scale of the repression unleashed by Franco's Nationalists. He would, nevertheless, agree to send a number of prominent Republicans captured in France back to Spain – where they would be shot.

As foreign minister, Serrano Suñer helped strike a secret deal with Hitler. It was negotiated at a meeting between Hitler and Franco in a railway wagon at Hendaye, southern France. The agreement saw Spain promise to join the Second World War on the Axis side at a time of ‘common agreement' and when it
considered
itself materially ready to do so. Serrano Suñer later claimed personal credit for making sure that never happened. Wild demands made by Franco for a new empire in North Africa were, according to many historians, what really turned the
Germans
off. Mussolini's foreign minister, nevertheless, considered the
Cuñadísimo
to be the Axis's firmest ally in Spain.

Serrano Suñer, like his brother-in-law, died peacefully of
natural
causes. Had Franco fulfilled his pledge to join Germany, the two brothers-in-law might have ended up facing some sort of Nuremberg-style trial or, like Mussolini in Milan's Piazzale Loreto, hanging upside down in a public square. But, even though he lived his last quarter of a century in a democratic country, no one ever tried to bring Serrano Suñer to task. Justice was never called for and, some say, was never done.

In fact, he had plenty of time to rewrite his own history, as he was sacked by Franco in 1942. Politically speaking,
el
Caudillo
roundly ignored him after that. Some said he got too big for his boots, others that he was punished for cuckolding
el
Caudillo
's wife's sister. One historian claims there were signs that he was
trying
to turn the Falange into ‘a fully-fledged Nazi Party for his own purposes'. Some said that his passion for fascism, Hitler and Mussolini became a problem when the tide of war began to change. Whatever the reason, he went on to paint himself as a force for moderation and, ultimately, as a Franco opponent. ‘He could not bear his own past and fought vainly to reconstruct it,' historian Javier Tusell said. The truth was that he had been ‘an indispensable instrument in the construction of Franco's
dictatorship
in its most totalitarian, fascist moment,' Tusell said.

Actually, Serrano Suñer may have had a narrow escape from having his name dragged into court. The people at the Amical de Mauthausen had been plotting to bring him to trial. They could not do so in Spain. So they hoped to have him tried, for crimes against humanity or war crimes, in France. It was from France that thousands of Spanish Republicans, the so-called
Rotspanier
, the ‘Red Spaniards' who had fled Spain at the end of the Civil War, were picked up by the Germans during the Second World War and deported to Mauthausen. Here the formula was
Erschöpfung
durch Arbeit
– prisoners should work until they dropped. It was, presumably, an idea that Serrano Suñer and Franco were happy to have applied to their own countrymen. Of 7,000 Spaniards, only 2,191 survived. Brutality, overwork, executions, the gas chamber, suicide, hunger and disease all took their toll. Spanish prisoners sent to work at a nearby mine managed to sneak out official SS camp photographs before the Allies arrived and the camp
paperwork
was destroyed. The photographs showed, amongst other things, visits by Serrano Suñer's friend Himmler. They were later used at Nuremberg, where one of the prisoners forced to work as a photographer, the Catalan Francesc Boix, was the only Spanish witness. They helped secure the death penalty for the Austrian SS leader, Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

Would the French courts, sixty years after the event, really have thought there was enough evidence against Serrano Suñer to try him? In 1998 they had tried and convicted eighty-eight-year-old Maurice Papon, a former senior Vichy official and, later, French cabinet member, for the more clear-cut crime of deporting Jews to German death camps during the Second World War. Did Serrano Suñer know thousands of his countrymen were being sent, mostly to their death, to Nazi prison camps? Did he agree, even suggest, that they should be? Did he care? The questions seem banal when compared to the figures for the number of people killed by Franco's regime while Serrano Suñer was helping run it. Those numbers are constantly argued over, but they are always counted in the tens of thousands. The most recent estimates, starting in 1936, range from 85,000 to 150,000 (with the correct figure, starting in 1936, considered to be up to 100,000). With Serrano Suñer dead, the people from the Amical admit they did not have much evidence, barring the Himmler meetings, linking him directly to Mauthausen. But nailing Serrano Suñer was not the only, or even main, point of trying to put him on trial. ‘We always thought that, through him, we could have put the whole dictatorship on trial,' explained one member of the Amical's committtee.

Francoism never has been placed on trial (unless the varied judgements of historians count). Silence was at the heart of Spain's transition to democracy – enshrined in the
pacto del olvido
. The past, and men like Serrano Suñer, were to be left alone. There were no hearings, no truth commissions and no formal process of reconciliation beyond the business of constructing a new
democracy
. This was no South Africa, no Chile, no Argentina. The mechanics of repression – police files on suspects and informers – would not be made public, as they would be in East Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic. Nor was Franco's Spain a defeated Germany or Japan, forced to confront its own guilty past. In fact, it was Franco's own men who would, largely, oversee and manage the
Transición
. They would do so in a way that made sure neither they, nor those who came before them, could be called to account
for anything they had done on behalf of
el
Caudillo
. ‘The political class turned into angels, proud of the almost mafioso
omertà
when it came to talking about themselves,' wrote one of the
handful
of critics of that transition, Gregorio Morán.