Spanish Historical Memory in the European Union: “De Las Palabras a Los Hechos?”, from Words to Action?
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Spanish historical memory in the European Union: “de las palabras a los hechos?”, from words to action? MA Thesis in European Studies, Graduate School for Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam S.J.A Oostenbrink, 8 March 2018. Supervisor Drs. Chiara de Cesari 1 Quotation in the title is taken from the letter to Vice President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, written in april 2016 by Spanish members of the European Parliament who form an (informal) working group of historical memory: Marina Albiol, Izaskun Bilbao, Josu Juaristi, Ernest Maragall, Josep María Terricabras, Ramón I Ballcels, Miguel Urban. Ernest Urtasun. 2 List of Contents Preface Introduction: “un hueso de mi padre”. 8 Chapter one. Spain within Europe’s 20th century. 1.1 Victims of Francoism turn to Europe: “Thank you for listening, because in Spain we are not heard.” 11 1.2 A shared European past of crimes against humanity. 13 1.3 From post- war Nuremberg to negotiated transitions, shifting priorities on human rights. 16 Chapter two. Spain within a European and global memory &human rights frame. 2.1 Social movement of historical memory in Spain within a global culture of memory and human rights. 24 2.2 Spain’s state of exception? 34 Chapter three. Spain’s impunity brought before the EU 3.1 European Commission’s politics of memory. 44 3.2 Jornadas de la memoria in the European Parliament: testimonies of repression. 50 3.3 Violation of Europe’s fundamental rights: “Es justicia que pido.” 53 3.4 EC’s procedural approach: “Declare inadmissible.” 57 Chapter four. 4.1 Spain’s impunity: (not) europe’s business? 65 4.2 Conclusion. “El clamor international”, Europe’s silence. 70 Appendices and bibliography. 73 3 Preface. Patio of the old cemetery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, march 2, 2018. Photo: posted on https://twitter.com/hashtag/EuropaPorLaMemoriaHist%C3%B3rica?src=hash This photograph was taken on 2 march during a visit of a delegation of members of the European Parliament to San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a town situated at some 50 kms from Madrid in the mountains of the Sierra de Guadarrama. It’s aim: to show and raise attention to Spain’s enduring impunity and glorification of Francoism. This visit condensates everything with which the following chapters are concerned. A lucky twist of faith allows me to include it in the last minutes by means of this preface. The trip included a visit to the monastery /monument/ mausoleum of Cuelgamuros, the largest fascist symbol in Europe. Better known as the Valle de los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen, designed to outlast time as a “magnum monument destined to perpetuate the memory of the Fallen in the Glorious Crusade of Liberation”, to celebrate Franco’s victory and the peace that he had brought to Spain. The location for this monument was not chosen in vain. A few miles down the road stands the Monastery and Real Sitio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the enormous palace/monastery of Felipe II whose catholic fervor inspired Franco to create his catholic-nationalist dictatorial regime. In the enormous catacombs underneath lie buried Spain’s lineage of royal rulers. As an echo of these royal vaults, Franco was buried in the Valle de los Caídos as what seems to be his personal mausoleum. Since 1975, he has remained there, unaltered, on the altar, each day with fresh flowers on his tomb. The founder of the fascist party, Primo de Rivera, close to him, equally honoured. This monument has remained unchanged since it was finished in 1958 after 18 years. No information is given on the human cost of this construction, built by thousands of forced labourers, as a means to reduce their sentences and to cleanse their souls of their sins; no 4 explanation of the civil war or the dictatorship; the fact that it is the largest massgrave in Spain that houses over 33.000 victims. Many of the anonymous victims were transported to the Valle, the last person in 1983, without the consent and knowledge of their familymembers. The monument is part of a ‘Imperial Route’ and receives hundreds of foreign visitors each day. It is no relict of the past, it is maintained by the abby, a daily mass is held, there is a guesthouse on the terrain, the whole complex is maintained and financed as part of the national heritage of the state. It receives adherents of Franco who come to pay their respect to the dictator. Especially on 20 november. The members of the delegation got threatened during their visit, one of them with gestures of a hand, like a knife, along a throat . Later on, the group visited the cementery of San Lorenzo where they were awaited by the victims who have remianed invisible for 80 years: portraits of the victims were held by familymembers. Underneath the small patio of the cementery lie the remains of at least 85 victims. Their names engraved in small silver plates on the walls, undermeath of which stands a small monument. The dates of their death : february, june 1939, 1940. These dates reveal the improbability of death in combat, but rather of Franco’s systematic use of terror, inversión de terror. Earlier that day, in the town hall of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the group of MEP’s listened to the testimony of Carmen, daughter of Dionosio Fernández- Salinero, mayor of San Lorenzo Abajo, arrested, tortured and executed by the Franco regime. She held his portrait during her intervention. Sitting next to her was Miguel Ángel Capapé, who has been trying for years to exhume from the massgrave of the Valle the remains of Manuel and Antonio Ramiro Lapeña Altabas, grandfather and uncle of his wife, Purificación Lapeña. Purificacion’s mother had, for years, been bringing flowers to where she thought was buried the remains of her husband in the cementery of Calatayud. She did not know that he had been transported to the Valle, togehther with other victims of Calatayud. They had presented their cases to national court, the United Nations, to the European Court of Human Rights, and finally, through civil law they succeeded in obtaining, ad perpetuam memoriam, a positive court decision. However, they have been waiting more than a year now, their court order obstructed by the abbot who refuses to cooperate. They are denied what is the most fundamental of rights that a victim has: the right to truth, justice and reparation. Like the Lapeña family there are so many other familymembers attempting to remove their next of kin from that sinister place and give them a proper buriel. Among them is Silvia Navarro Pablo, familymember of José Antonio Marco, and Fausto Canales, son of Valerico Canales. The visit left a deep impact on the visitors, among them the German MEP Martin Schirdewan, family of victims of the Hitler regime. They were taken aback by the fact that they, like so many others, had not known this reality in Spain. The Portuguese Ana Gomes expressed her incredibility at the fact that a visit by a EU delegation is planned to Cyprus that investigates the cases of the victims of (en)forced disappearance, paid with EU funding, while this is not possible in the case of Spain where there are over 2.000 massgraves, and over 114.000 victims? In 2013, the victim’s organization Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria and the Foro por la Memoria de la Comunidad de Madrid turned to the European Parliament to request their help in their endeavour to remove the fascist symbols in Spain, amongst them the 5 Valle, upon the argument that these symbols are contrary to international justice and incompatible with the principles of democracy and the rule of law. They expressed their concern that the Valle de los Caídos is becoming a place of pelgrimage for fascists from abroad. They have not received an answer. The Spanish state assumes the full responsibility for the exhumation, identification and repatriation of the victims of the Division Azul , the Spanish division that fought along Hitler in Russia. To ask the same state responsibility and dignity for the victims in the massgrave of the Valle, and in the rest of Spain would be too costly… However much of a community of values of human rights and democracy the EU considers itself, it seems blind and deaf to Spain’s reality while the EC commissioner of human rights speaks his words of moral superiority that hollowly echoe within the EU’s walls. Sarah, March 7, 2018. 6 “Porque nosotros estamos aquí, y nosotros somos la memoria de su futuro “ Extract from the inscription on the monument in the cemetery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. A selection of the names of victims buried in the massgrave on the cemetery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial copied from the inscription plates on the patio of the graveyard. 7 Introduction: “Un hueso de mi padre”. 8 In the year 2015, on the occasion of the International Day of the Disappeared, Spanish reporter and sociologist Emilio Silva Barrera wrote the following: The fact that the daughter of a missing person, the result of the repression of a dictatorship, celebrates her 89th birthday on a plane that takes her thousands of kilometers in search of justice, says much about our society, our lack of a human rights culture, on how much we have grown used to the monstrous fact that 114.000 men and women, who all wanted to keep on living in a democratic country, still lay scattered in mass graves without any effort by our institutions to search for them, to investigate who they are, what happened to them, and to persecute those who were responsible of the largest criminal and terrorist crimes of our recent history.9 Ascención Mendieta and other victims had travelled to Argentina in the year 2013 to testify about her missing father, Timoteo Mendieta, and her lifelong struggle for his remains in order to give him a proper burial.