Antonio Navalón
In four days, it will be fifty years since the death of a dictator. Francisco Franco died between midnight on November 19 and the early hours of November 20, 1975. His death was recorded, made up, dressed up, and solemnly announced to the Spanish people. The message was read, with tears in his eyes, by the president of the government appointed by Franco himself: “Spaniards… Franco is dead.” He wept, and half of Spain wept with him; the other half, those who were not terrified, wept for different reasons. Tears accompanied the end of the dictatorship. And we must acknowledge that the dictatorship remained consistent to the very end.
On September 27, 1975, the regime carried out its last five executions. For those of us who were born and raised under the dictatorship, breaking through those gray areas of memory has been difficult. Many of us understood its meaning through kitchen conversations, family silences, or warnings such as, “We don’t talk about politics in this house; we are law-abiding people.” Children are not aware of what has been lost; they learn about life within the norms they are taught, without knowing any other possibility. Franco’s dictatorship had one constant: there was no Spanish family without a death caused by the war. In some cases, like mine, two had been shot. One by the Nationalists, the victors; the other by the Republicans, the vanquished. All families, for one reason or another, had mourned and learned to hide their memories. In the country’s churches and cathedrals, large murals hung with the inscription “Fallen for God and Spain,” under which appeared only the names of one side, recorded by the regime as national heroes.
The end of dictatorships is always a sad event. I remember that in November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, it was a prelude to the fall of the Eastern European bloc regimes. In Franco’s case, his end was as bloody as his beginning: amid bloodshed, executions, repression, and fear. When he died, Spain had some five million mortgages for a population of thirty million; the middle class was emerging, and with it the hope of social transformation. The years immediately after the war must have been terrible. I have no memory of that. But I do remember the relief with which many thanked “ the God of each one” for having achieved a peace that, although imposed, was perceived as a refuge. It gave peace to have a civil guard on every corner, a guardian angel watching over sleep and collective peace.
For centuries, Europe compared the cruelty of the Spanish people with that of the Turks. It was not clear which of the two could be more brutal. In a way, the Civil War and its aftermath confirmed that judgment. The hundreds of books written about that tragedy are, beyond ideological analysis, in-depth studies of Cainism. In that, Spain earned its doctorate. One million dead: that was the symbolic figure. Of these, 200,000 fell in the trenches on the battlefield; the other 800,000 were executed, died of starvation, or perished in forced labor. The defeated had no rights: no justice, no dignified burial, no memory. Many ended up building the Valley of the Fallen, working under the sun or buried in mass graves.
Without that fear passed down from parents to children, without those silences around the table, the Transition would not have been possible. I remember that period as one of the best of my life, not only because I was twenty-two years old at the time, but because the arrival of freedom produces a cellular euphoria, a vital acceleration that all human beings should experience at some point.
The Spanish Transition was a masterpiece of coexistence. It replaced the era of revolutions with that of dialogue and agreement. While the last left-wing revolutions were still being fought in Latin America—in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala—Spain opted for reform. When Franco died, the country was burdened with a collective fear shared equally by those on the right and those on the left. Everyone had been both victim and perpetrator, and the only way forward was to stop settling scores.
Mexico played a key role in this process. President Lázaro Cárdenas opened his doors to Spanish exiles with a humanitarian and political vision, also ushering in a new wave of intellectualism. Decades later, in the final months of Franco’s regime, the executions of September 1975 and the condemnation of President Luis Echeverría reignited diplomatic tensions: the assault on the Mexican tourist office in Madrid served as a reminder that Mexico was, symbolically, part of the enemy.
The Transition was exemplary precisely because it was not a revolution. The most skillful and intelligent way was found to transform an authoritarian regime into a democracy. King Juan Carlos I, Franco’s heir and protégé, was a pivotal figure: he renounced his loyalty to Francoism’s principles and committed himself to democratic legality. Two men, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda and Adolfo Suárez, managed to make the transition, in their words, “a reform without betrayal.” Today, when Spain seems determined to judge and prejudge its own history, it is worth remembering that, whether out of skill or necessity, the King—Franco’s heir—was essential in bringing the country out of dictatorship and into democracy.
Fear was a key element: without it, the transition would have been impossible. So was forgiveness. Santiago Carrillo, secretary general of the Communist Party, understood that only by reaching an agreement with the executioners and reconciling with the victims could peace be guaranteed. That gesture made it possible to close a cycle of barbarism and open one of coexistence. Since then, Spain, for the first time in four centuries, has become a fully integrated part of modernity and the Enlightenment.
Now, half a century later, the government is promoting an interactive map with more than 6,000 mass graves to remember what happened and to remember what never happened, which was an explicit condemnation of the dictatorship. However, this exercise also reveals something disturbing: how easy it is to destroy the history that took so long to build. Memory should not be used to fuel old hatreds, but to understand that Spanish Cainism—that curse of dividing us over the bones of the dead—only serves to repeat what already destroyed us once.
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