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.
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.
While the Amical de Mauthausen was plotting to try Serrano Suñer, I found myself, as a journalist, constantly called on to follow the attempts of Spain’s celebrated and controversial Judge Baltasar Garzón to pursue other military strongmen who had killed and tortured. The men being chased by Judge Garzón, an investigating magistrate at Madrid’s powerful Audiencia Nacional, were not, however, Spanish. They were Chilean, Argentine and from several other Latin American countries. Garzón’s pursuit of the military thugs who ruled much of South America in the 1970s and 1980s is a cause célèbre in Spain. He has declared himself competent to pursue them, and is backed by higher courts, because these are ‘international crimes’. The alleged perpetrators had declared amnesties for themselves, thus preventing trials in their own countries.
The Argentines, looking for a way to pacify their own military, found a perfect description when they named their ‘Ley de Punto Final’, ‘Full Stop Law’, in 1986. The ‘full stop’ was meant to put an end to the story of repression and torture started when the military juntas took over ten years earlier (1976). Spaniards, especially those on the left, condemned Argentina’s punto final law. Few stopped to think, or even realised, that their own amnesty had, in effect, also been a ‘full stop’ law.
Picking up El Mundo newspaper one morning as Garzón struggled to get government approval for his extradition petitions for thirty-nine presumed Argentine torturers, I found an editorial entitled ‘The laws of impunity continue to benefit the repressors.’ The newspaper was angry that the Argentines might not be extradited, thus ‘creating a serious risk that impunity will triumph’. A few days later it repeated the message: ‘While the criminals remain free, able to rub shoulders with the victims and their families, we must applaud any initiative that seeks to condemn them and reestablish justice.’
Argentina has since struck down the Punto Final law. Nothing similar happened in Spain. There was no public outpouring of guilt, no formal attempt at naming and shaming – though there is now belated pressure for the creation of a truth commission. The same Brigada Político-Social police agents who regularly beat and tortured their detainees were not only free of any guilt, but could carry on their careers uninterrupted. Infamous Brigada Político-Social torturers – like Roberto Conesa in Madrid or the brothers Creix in Barcelona – continued their careers and went into comfortable retirement. Some even went on to become important police chiefs under Suárez or the Socialist governments that took over in the 1980s. The writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was one of those to fall into the hands of brothers Juan and Vicente Creix in the cells at Barcelona’s Vía Laietana. ‘We, their victims, did not do anything to shine a light on them. The political reforms had already absolved those who owned the Creixes. Would it have been right to pursue their servants?’ he asked. In 2001 one of the more notorious Brigada bosses, Melitón Manzanas, was awarded a posthumous medal. This was gained for having been killed by Basque terror group ETA.
In some cases the perceived need for wiping out the past was taken literally. In 1977, Interior Minister Rodolfo Martín Villa, a former Francoist civil governor and Movimiento leader in Barcelona, sent out instructions to some civil governors of Spain’s provinces. These were also, still, the regional bosses of the Movimiento Nacional. He told them to destroy the Movimiento’s records.
The details of exactly what was destroyed, and how, are sketchy. A Civil Guard officer once told me – on second-hand information – that a team of three officers was sent to the central archive of the Civil Guard police in Madrid, sorting out the documents to be burnt. In Barcelona, a truckload of papers – the entire archive – was taken from the Movimiento’s headquarters in the Calle Mallorca to a disused industrial oven in Poble Nov and incinerated. The then civil governor, Salvador Sanchez-Teran, says he contemplated the historical import of what he was doing but decided it was best to destroy the archive. ‘Those archives smelt of the remote past,’ he explains in his memoir of the time. It was 1977, Franco had died less than two years earlier. The Movimiento itself had only just been disbanded. The paper-burners left behind holes that historians, presumably, can no longer fill. These sorts of decisions were no impediment to career-making. Sanchez-Teran is went on to head the popular, church-owned, right-wing COPE radio station.
I went to Gijón, the port city on the Atlantic coast in Asturias, to hear a story of how some papers had, temporarily, slipped through the net. The man who told the story to me was a retired Civil Guard officer who, from the way he spoke about them, had no sympathy for left-wingers. Fermín had been posted to the Asturian town of Colunga in the late 1980s and had found the records there still intact. His story – uncheckable, but convincingly told – gave me a glimpse of how Francoist repression had worked. There, in different coloured files – white, blue and red – ranking them in degrees of ‘danger’ were the records on those deemed to be subversive. They were written on super-thin papel cebolla, literally ‘onion paper’, which enabled them to make multiple copies. Leafing through them, even Fermín was amazed at just how much information was kept. ‘Some included everything from the person’s wedding day to their first arrest,’ he said.
There was also a separate section of files on all the police informers, he explained, be they paid soplones, snitches, or members of the then illegal parties and trade unions such as the Communist Comisiones Obreras or the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores. Fermín burned the lot. ‘They were meant to have done it years earlier,’ he said. I wonder how many reputations he, and the other burners, saved.
The destruction of documents has made reconstructing the mechanisms of Francoist repression much more difficult. It has, especially, helped keep the names of those who took part in it out of the public eye. ‘The active or passive participation of sectors of Spanish society in the repression was more important than we care to remember,’ recall Nicolás Sartorius and Javier Alfaya, two former political prisoners, in a recent study.
One of the few to have been named as a regime collaborator, however, is none other than Spain’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Camilo José Cela. Cela, the cantankerous and controversial author of The Family of Pascual Duarte and The Hive, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989 for his ‘rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man’s vulnerability’. He died in 2002. Shortly after his death, historian Pere Ysàs unearthed papers showing that Cela had snitched to the information ministry on those who attended a Spanish writers’ conference in 1963. He told officials that 42 of the 102 signatories of a letter denouncing police violence against striking miners in the northern region of Asturias – which he himself had signed – were members of the Spanish Communist Party. He apparently suggested that some dissident writers could be bribed, tamed and reconverted by the generalísimo’s regime. Cela’s views were contained in an internal report written by an official working for the then information minister. This was the same Manuel Fraga who would become interior minister and, later, head of the Galician government when Spain was a democracy. The novelist claimed, according to the report, that some fellow signatories were ‘totally recoverable [for the regime], either through the stimulus of publishing their work or through bribes’. He suggested the regime should target Pedro Laín Entralgo, a leading intellectual, on the basis that he was a weaker character than others in the group.
Spaniards argue over exactly when the Transición came to an end. Some say it still has not done so. They point out that the 1978 constitution was written to the ruido de sables, the sound of sabre-rattling from army officers threatening to rebel if too much of Francoism was ditched. The Transición, they say, will not properly be over until it is rewritten.
One moment that is a candidate for the end of the Transición, however, is the day the sabres stopped being rattled and were actually drawn in anger. Spaniards simply call it ‘El 23-F’. Proof that the ruido de sables was no joke was provided by the comic-looking, but distinctly unfunny, figure of Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero on 23 February 1981. Dressed in the winged, shiny, tricorn patent leather hat of the Civil Guard, a walrus moustache bursting over his upper lip, Tejero stormed Las Cortes that day with 200 men. The deputies were in the middle of an important parliamentary debate that was due to elect Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo to replace Suárez as prime minister for his centre-right party. They took almost all Spain’s deputies hostage.
The American magazine Time dubbed Tejero ‘the tricorned coupster’. It was a clumsy sort of a coup attempt, and one that has never been fully, or satisfactorily, explained. The ‘coupsters’ failed to turn off one of the television cameras – thus conserving a valuable record of what happened. Tejero’s men peppered the ceiling of the debating ceiling with gunfire while most deputies cowered on the floor in response to Tejero’s shouts of: ‘¡Al suelo!’, ‘To the floor!’ They also, however, shouted ‘¡En nombre del Rey!’, ‘In the King’s name!’
In Castelldefels, a beachside Barcelona dormitory town, I met a one-legged musician who told me he had taken part in the events of 23-F. His story added an element of comedy to the coup. The musician still had two legs at that time and was doing military service in Madrid. ‘One day we were called out into the parade ground and ordered to get into lorries. We had no idea where we were going. We ended up pulling up in front of Las Cortes. We sat there doing nothing, unsure of what was going on and awaiting orders. I had run out of cigarettes so, when the sergeant wasn’t looking, I sneaked off to buy some. When I got back my unit had disappeared. I asked a policeman where they had gone. He pointed a finger to Las Cortes and said: “In there.” So I went and joined the rest of them.’ I was never sure whether the musician had been part of the coup or part of the forces who took control of the building after Tejero gave himself up. But it was a sign of the confusion that reigned over two days in Madrid, in what was, in reality, a very unfunny episode.
King Juan Carlos stopped the coup. He ordered wavering generals to stay loyal. He told those who had backed the coup to take their men back to their barracks. In a famous broadcast to the nation he wore the uniform of the commander-in-chief of Spain’s armed forces. He told Spaniards he would not tolerate ‘actions or attitudes of anyone who wants to interrupt by force the democratic process that was decided when, by referendum, the constitution was voted on by the Spanish people’.
Tejero was soon abandoned to his fate by his fellow plotters. He had no option but to surrender. He and two dozen other plotters were sent to jail. These included General Alfonso Armada, who had been one of the king’s closest advisers, and General Jaime Milans del Bosch, a swaggering hero of the Civil War siege of El Alcázar barracks in Toledo. As military commander of Valencia, he had ordered his tanks out onto the streets. Milans del Bosch was, thankfully, the only one of Spain’s regional military commanders to do so. But it is clear that these were not the only conspirators. A whole raft of other figures, be they military, political or civilian, were simply waiting to see what happened. It was never clear who they were. The plotters obviously believed they had Juan Carlos on their side. There were even rumours that opposition politicians had been ready to form a ‘government of national unity’ under the guidance of a mysterious, and unidentified, coup leader codenamed Elefante Blanco – White Elephant. The coup remains, to this day, one of the great mysteries of recent Spanish history. It has sparked dozens of theories about who was really behind it. ‘I do not understand why this has not been talked about in depth, why all the facts on it have not been published. Because the civilian part has remained silenced,’ ex-El País editor Juan Luis Cebrián says, and Felipe González agrees, in a co-authored book. The Socialist leader, having been held hostage by Tejero, would, indirectly, become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the coup. He won a landslide electoral victory the following year.
Another question that has not been fully answered is why the plotters believed they were operating on the king’s orders. Did they delude themselves entirely? Or did the king give them reasons to do so? Armada and Milans del Bosch both seemed convinced they had the king’s backing to form a government of national unity led by Armada. ‘I had spoken to the monarch by phone several times and had even visited him,’ Milans del Bosch later claimed in a prison conversation with a controversial former army colonel, Amadeo Martínez Inglés. ‘He always told me I should trust Armada.
Armada’s mistake was to let the fanatical and excitable Tejero lead the assault on the parliament. He ignored Armada and, instead of negotiating the formation of a government of national unity, demanded the creation of a military junta. Armada, an old tutor and friend of the king’s, was sentenced to thirty years in prison in 1983. Five years later he received a pardon. This was justified on grounds of ill-health. He went on, however, to enjoy a sprightly old age.
Phone conversations between the king and Armada show that, whatever might have been said before, Juan Carlos never wavered in his opposition to the coup once it started. ‘I think you’ve gone mad,’ he told him. Juan Carlos told Milans del Bosch the plotters would have to shoot him if they wanted to achieve their aims.
It was one of various coup plots since Franco’s death, but the only one to make it out of the barracks. There would be rumours of further, later plots, too, that would only come to light much later. But the 23-F attempt finally spelt the end of the pronunciamientos – the uprisings and takeovers by generals – that had wracked Spanish history for 170 years. It is unthinkable, today, that the military could ever rise up in arms again.
The Tejero coup, which also embarrassed much of the army, had one major effect. It helped catapult the Socialist Party of Felipe González into power and, eventually, provoked the disappearance of Suárez’s UCD party.
The day Felipe González and his wily, some would say Machiavellian, number two, Alfonso Guerra, leant out of a window at the Hotel Palace, waving a red rose to salute their victory in the 1982 general election, Spanish democracy hit a new gear. González would stay in power for thirteen years. It was a period in which most residues of Francoism were left to die off from natural causes. By the end of it, the Transición really was over.
Of all the angry words about Franco poured onto pages and pronounced in speeches in the years since his death, none have come from King Juan Carlos. Some modern-day Republicans see this as proof that he does not deserve to reign. In a country where former Franco officials often either gloss over, or completely ignore, their years of loyal service to the Caudillo, Juan Carlos’s attitude is, at least, refreshingly coherent.
Juan Carlos is an outwardly pleasant man and a genuinely popular monarch. He is credited with having converted a whole generation of the Spanish left from republicans into juancarlistas, Juan Carlos fans. His opponents are, however, not only those on the extreme right who point out that those ‘permanent and inalterable’ Movimiento Nacional principles he had sworn to uphold included a pledge to keep Spain in strict observance of ‘the doctrine of the Holy, Roman and Apostolic Church’. The anti-monarchical right has its equivalent, more numerously, amongst those who have remained Republicans. These have become increasingly visible in recent years, with the republican flag now a fixture at left-wing demonstrations. These republicans cannot see why Spain, having expelled three of their five monarchs over 150 years, should have replaced a dictator with a king – especially one hand-picked by the same dictator.
Within three years of Franco’s death in 1975, the king had not only buried the Movimiento Nacional principles that he had once sworn to uphold, he had buried the Movimiento altogether. By the end of 1978 Spain had become a democracy. Francoism was dead, the Movimiento had been dissolved and the voters were happily piling earth on the graves of both. It was a remarkable transformation. It saw Juan Carlos himself shed almost all his powers to become the largely ornamental head of a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. He is, in that sense, Europe’s last true king – the last monarch to have held the powers of a ruler. No other living European monarch has enjoyed such power, or given it all up. His supporters like to claim that he is also that rare thing, an elected king. When Spaniards approved their constitution in 1978, they voted for parliamentary monarchy.
Yet Juan Carlos himself is also subject to a dose of Spanish silence. For Spanish journalists freely admit that the king – along with his family – is their last great taboo subject. ‘There is freedom of speech on everything, except the king and the monarchy,’ Cebrían tells González in their book. Journalists talk of autocensura, self-censorship. It is not something they are proud of. As one of Spain’s most prolific royal writers, Juan Balansó, put it (despite being a fervent Juan Carlos fan): ‘There is one thing worse than censorship, self-censorship.’ Juan Carlos is not easily criticised. His past in Franco’s shadow – even as his temporary replacement when the Caudillo was ill – is glossed over. His finances are not scrutinised. His private life is, well, private.
‘There was always a timid editor, prepared to suspect that behind this or that affair [involving royal advisor Manuel de Prado] one might find the king himself,’ wrote Pilar Urbano, a prominent journalist, after a financial scandal hit those close to the king in the 1990s.
Spaniards generally give two explanations for this royal reverence. One is that the king deserves it, having seen through the Transición and squashed the 1981 coup. Another is that, given its history, the Spanish monarchy needs all the help it can get. ‘The fragility of the monarchy is greater than it may seem at first sight,’ warned Tusell. ‘In the Spanish case, the repetition of cases such as we have seen in other latitudes would have far more devastating effects … After all, the interruptions in our tradition of monarchy in contemporary times are far more pronounced.’
In a rare breaking of ranks, Vicenç Navarro made a list of royal-related affairs which television journalism – in a country where only one in ten people buy a newspaper – had chosen to ignore completely. They included four ‘economic assessors of the Royal household’ who ended up in jail ‘without anybody investigating the relationship between them and the king’. There were, he said, a list of presents that went from yachts and palaces to luxury cars from ‘business groups and people who try to influence’ the king. ‘None of them have been commented on by our television stations, which is where most citizens garner their basic information on political life. Such silence would be unthinkable in other democracies.’ When the satirical magazine El Jueves brought out a book of royal cartoons called Tocando los Borbones, the editor complained that two privately owned television stations, Canal Plus and Telecinco, refused to run its advertisements. ‘The fact is that we worry that the monarchy is not well enough rooted, and that anything might finish it off,’ says a former El País editor, Juan Luis Cebrián.
Given the British press’s – and newspaper readers’ – surfeit of interest in the UK royal family, there is a healthy side to this silence. If Spaniards and their newspapers are not interested in their politicians’ private lives, why should they intrude on the royal family’s? And if the royal family behaves properly in public, why worry about what it does behind closed doors?
Compared to their British counterparts, the Spanish royals are, at least in public, remarkably modest. When I went to their Zarzuela Palace to see how they lived a few years ago, their press officer proudly showed me the dining room – with seating room for just eighteen. The palace, a former hunting lodge on the outskirts of Madrid, is both relatively small and very unstuffy. Nobody seemed to mind that I took a wrong turning out of the car park and got lost in the royal deer park afterwards. When I eventually found a guard post – pop music wafting out from a radio inside it – I was politely invited to drive myself down a short cut towards the proper exit. The relaxed atmosphere could not have been more distant from the starched surroundings of Britain’s royal family.
Trailing the king and his offspring for a couple of days, I found him easy-going and hard-working. His style was more presidential than regal. Hands were shaken and backs, occcasionally, given a manly slap. Women were kissed on the hand. He was rather like a man seeking votes. ‘The king says they must go out to work daily, to be with the people,’ one staffer explained. The king, in other words, knows he must work to keep his popularity. Given his family’s history, that is obviously a sensible idea.
Not all is perfect, however, in the life of a man who – by eschewing ostentation and getting down to street level – has avoided the spectacular own goals of other royal families. Occasionally, newspapers or journalists have broken ranks, running rumours about the king’s relationships with a number of women.
Does the king’s ‘enthusiasm for beautiful women’ – as one biographer delicately puts it – matter to Spaniards? Not really. Gossiping is a national pastime. In the birthplace of ¡Hola! magazine and a dozen competitors (whose enthusiasm for royal scandals seems limited to those of other countries) it is also a large publishing and television industry. Spaniards enjoy the tittle-tattle but are rarely judgemental. ‘A Borbón will always be a Borbón,’ they say knowingly, referring to the far more colourful lives of previous monarchs. (Isabel II was said to be a nymphomaniac, while Alfonso XIII had three bastard children, one of whom, Leandro Alfonso, was formally recognised as such by a Spanish court in 2003.) It is a different matter, however, when that enthusiasm encourages, in the words of the same biographer, ‘attempts at blackmail by financiers’.
Paul Preston, the professor of Spanish history at the London School of Economics, wrote the biography referred to above. He also sheds light on one of those episodes that Spanish writers generally ignore or skirt around in their – almost unanimously adulatory – descriptions of their king. In one of the most tragic moments of a difficult childhood, Juan Carlos shot his own brother dead. Juan Carlos, then seventeen, and fourteen-year-old Alfonsito were playing with a gun in the exiled family’s home in Portugal. No clear account of what happened has yet been given. The gun, it seems, was in Juan Carlos’s hands when it went off. The bullet from the .22 pistol either bounced off a wall or simply went straight into Alfonsito’s forehead. Juan Carlos’ father, Don Juan de Borbón, tried to keep his son alive. The wound, however, was mortal. He died a few minutes later. His father wrapped the teenage corpse in a Spanish flag. The incident must have been a key moment in Juan Carlos’s life – both in his relations with a father already using him as a pawn in his games with Franco and in the creation of his own personality, which was still in its formative years. ‘The incident affected the Prince dramatically. The rather extrovert figure … now seemed afflicted by a tendency to introspection. Relations with his father were never the same again,’ says Preston.
On a rainy day in Madrid, I was reminded of the republican blood that seems to boil under the surface of a significant number of Spaniards. I had gone to hire a car. It was a Saturday and much of central Madrid was cordoned off. The king’s son and heir, Prince Felipe, was getting married to a television journalist, Letizia Ortiz. To the disgust of some hard-core conservatives, he had broken ranks with tradition. His bride was not just a commoner – granddaughter of a taxi driver – but a divorcee. The wedding ceremony at the Almudena Cathedral looked set to start under a torrential downpour.
It was a sign of the family’s chequered history as on-off monarchs that this was the first royal wedding Madrid had seen since the prince’s great-grandfather, King Alfonso XIII, married a British princess, Victoria Eugenia, in 1906. That wedding had been marred by an anarchist bomb attack on their carriage that spattered her dress with the victims’ blood. Twenty-five years later, in 1931, she would be forced into exile after the Republic was proclaimed. She did not return until 1968, and then only for the baptism of Prince Felipe. She died the following year. Her remains were eventually taken from Lausanne to the royal pudridero, literally the rotting chamber, at the sombre, imposing, five-hundred-year-old royal monastery in San Lorenzo del Escorial – where they still await final burial alongside those of other members of the Spanish royal family.
Security for the royal wedding was tight. Police helicopters clattered overhead. City centre metro stations had been closed. Madrid was only too aware of what a handful of determined terrorists could do. Just a couple of months earlier Islamist bombers had killed 191 people in simultaneous attacks on four commuter trains into the city.
The heavens had opened, keeping most people at home. They would watch the wedding of their future monarch on the television. His bride, a former newsreader whose voice they used to hear on state television every day, had hardly said a word in public since they got engaged and she disappeared off their screens. (One newspaper previously reported that a special safe had been bought to lock up her divorce papers.)
Three young men in green company uniforms were sitting behind the counter at the car hire place. ‘It looks like the royal wedding is a washout,’ I said, making conversation. They sniggered. ‘¡Qué se mojen!’ – ‘Let them get wet!’ – said one. The others sniggered some more. Spain’s royal family, I was reminded, was not universally loved.
A poll published in 2005 in El Mundo suggested that trouble might be brewing for Spain’s monarchy. Almost a quater of Spaniards declared themselves to be republicans. That was fifty per cent more than five years earlier. Nearly forty per cent of eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds were republicans – slightly more than those who declared themselves to be monarchists. This was despite the fact that very few said they had a poor opinion of the king or his son as individuals.
Juan Carlos oversaw the Transición, stopped a coup and gave up the supremacy handed to him as Europe’s last old-fashioned, power-wielding monarch. His personal trajectory – from declared supporter of Francoism and its principles to diehard democrat – sums up the Transición itself. The pacto del olvido was the price one sector of Spanish society, that of the Civil War vencidos and their heirs, paid so that Juan Carlos could pull the Francoists into democracy. If the pact, and the silence, is being broken now, it is – at least in part – because most of the latter were so thoroughly converted.
The mechanism may have worked, but it was hardly fair. ‘Cancelling out the past was justified as a way of achieving reconciliation. The division born during the Civil War and boosted during the terrible post-war period had to be overcome. Proof that it had not been overcome, and remained latent, was that one side – that of the losers – was forced to forget as a condition for taking part in the new game,’ says Morán.
Most Spaniards now believe democracy was somehow inevitable. Spain had become much wealthier. Its traditional class structure was broken down by the move from the countryside to the city. An urban middle class was in place by the time Franco died, ready to demand democracy and make it work.
Franco’s legacy has not fully disappeared, though.
One of the things that helped prepare Spain for democracy was tourism. This took off, and then boomed, under Franco. It made an indelible mark on the country that persists today. The pink-skinned tourists brought with them not just money but the mores and attitudes of democratic northern Europe. The wind of change that blew south with the first package tourists was symbolised by something that, when first seen on a Spanish beach, shocked and delighted people in equal proportions – the bikini. To find out just how those two little pieces of cloth had changed Spain, and how the hordes who arrive every summer continue to do so, I would have to head for the beach. The Spanish costas, in all their terrible, garish glory, awaited.