The end of reconciliation: politization of recent past in Spain

Abstract

At the end of the 1990s, Spain saw the emergence of a new sociopolitical movement that fought for an official recognition of the victims of the civil war (1936-1939) and the dictatorship of General Franco (1939-1974). The main issue at stake is the elucidation of the fate of more than 30,000 republicans who fell victim to political repression and who are still today regarded as “disappeared”. The emergence of this movement coincided with the second government of the conservative Jose Maria Aznar, who rejected the claims of the civic associations as being contrary to the politics of reconciliation that had conditioned the return to democracy in the late 1970s.  However, in 2004 and after having won the general elections, Spanish socialists proposed a draft law to indemnify all the victims of Francoist repression. The article analyses the circumstances and the political process the socialist draft law went through until it finally passed the Spanish parliament in the end of 2007.