The failure of Spain’s much-heralded 2007 Law of Historical Memory to satisfy Republican victims’ and their descendants’ grievances caused organisations for the recuperation of Republican memory – one of which was the ‘Stolen Babies movement’ – and regional governments to adopt the Argentine judiciary system as a source of possible transnational justice. The intervention of an Argentine Judge, María Servini de Cubría, threatened to diminish the role of the central Spanish state in determining the future of memory in Spain, and measures were enacted to curtail her investigations. Concurrently, the recession created a new memory narrative that was inspired by both the Argentine memorialisation of the dictatorship of General Jorge Videla, and the memory of the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1936. This article seeks to trace and analyse these developments in Spanish memory culture and, relatedly, to assess the globalisation of Spanish memory culture.
In regard to the latter aim, Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘multidirectional memory’ is instructive insofar as it enlightens the interrelationship between different memory cultures. Rothberg defines ‘multidirectional memory’ as a process of ‘ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing; as productive, and not privative.’Reference Rothberg 3 He posits memory cultures as reciprocal, syncretic entities who enrich each other by their exchange of mnemonic elements. His theory discounts any vision of memory cultures as engaged in a competitive struggle for supremacy in inevitably limited discursive and material spaces. According to Rothberg, memory cultures have a fluid, reciprocal interaction, which enable them to assimilate aspects of each other’s trajectory. In his words: ‘Memories are not owned by groups nor are groups owned by memories’ (Ref. Reference Rothberg3, p. 3). The cooperative nature of globalised national memory cultures and traditions has been hotly debated among scholars, who have issued caveats reproaching the tendency to overestimate its emotional and affective traction. For Duncan Bell, memory is inherently personal and communitarian, produced and sustained by ‘thick relations’, in effect, interaction within a bounded temporal and spatial domain, and hence an amorphous global memory, premised on ‘thin global relations’, cannot be expected to exercise a similar moral authority or elicit an equivalent emotional response.Reference Bell 4 The generic category of humanity is bereft of memory because it does not possess any of its constituent elements, such as ‘history, culture, customary practices, familiar life-ways, and a shared understanding of social goods’ (Ref. Reference Bell4, p. 18). Could global memory be merely the product of idealistic thinking, or as David Rieff so cogently expresses it ‘a kind of moral Esperanto that is beautiful, noble even, but when all is said and done, a waste of hope?’Reference Rieff 5 Citing the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski who posited that humanity’s lack of boundaries makes any classification impossible, Rieff ridicules the idea of a global memory when ‘everywhere common values are under assault’ (Ref. Reference Rieff5, p. 28). Echoing Bell, human rights scholars Michael Humphrey and Estela Valverde posit that the reclamation of national rights within the rubric of international human rights can prove unviable unless a common moral national arena is created.Reference Humphrey and Valverde 6 Can we really have a global memory space? Duncan Bell proffers this answer: ‘memories are too closely bound to, and reproduced by agents of, communities defined by thick relations, when they escape the bounds of community, they lose much of their form and potency’ (Ref. Reference Bell4, p. 28). Societies, he states, are constituted by distinct memories and members, and Smith notes that there is no sign of the tendency to valorise deep cultures abating. Indeed, the case of Spain proves that while the globalisation of memory has enormously benefited victims, national barriers to global memory enshrined in legal and constitutional frameworks are not so indissoluble and continue to present formidable obstacles to the implementation of globally sanctioned measures on the national scale. As we shall see, commonalities may exist between victims and foreign memory cultures, but not necessarily between two national legal systems.
In 2010, two descendants of Francoist victims, Dario Rivas, the son of a Republican mayor shot in 1937, and Inés García Holgado, daughter of an Argentine doctor who died fighting for the Republican in the war, denounced Francoist crimes committed from 1936–1977 in the courtroom of Judge María Servini de Cubría in Buenos Aries. Their denunciation was supported by a plethora of Spanish and Argentine human rights organisations, such as the Argentine League for Human Rights, 7 The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 8 and the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights, 9 as well as the ARMH (Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory). Their case was premised on the inapplicability of the 1977 Law of Amnesty to crimes involving the ‘disappeared of Francoism,’ which victims’ lawyers contended were ongoing unresolved crimes that fell within the rubric of international human rights legislation. However, in 2010, their arguments failed to convince Judge Servini de Cubría, who concluded that an ongoing judicial process was underway in Spain. Despite this initial setback, the case had significant ramifications for the trajectory of Republican memory on several counts. First, the groundswell of popular support, openness, and professional expertise which the associations and victims encountered in Buenos Aires energised a movement in the doldrums: Santiago Macías, vice-president of the ARMH, 10 went as far as to say that ‘la justicia argentina ha hecho bastante más que la española’ (‘the Argentine judicial system has done far more than the Spanish one’).Reference Junquera 11 Second, their collaboration with lawyers experienced in navigating the intricacies of bringing Argentine perpetrators of human rights abuses to justice, furnished them with a successful precedent, and moreover, with direction. Carlos Slepoy, the Argentine human rights lawyer,Reference Junquera 12 reassured them that ‘in Spain, investigations into Francoist crimes have been paralysed, and the Argentine courts can intervene to reverse this impunity.” 13 His words transpired to be prescient: in September 2010, the Argentine Federal Criminal abrogated Judge Servini de Cubría’s dismissal, and re-opened the case. Ostensibly, the sudden salience of the Argentine judicial system in 2010 corresponded to an ironic reversal of the Spanish-Latin American relationship established by Judge Garzón’s 1998 indictment of General Pinochet and his 1995 detention of General Ricardo Scilingo; in effect, that of the European coloniser providing tutelage to its former colony. However, it was essentially the culmination of a twelve-year cross-fertilisation between the two memory cultures. The enthusiastic implication of the Argentine human rights lawyers in the defence of Spanish victims was attributable, in no small measure, to the professional respect Judge Baltasar Garzón inspired in Argentina. In the words of Carlos Slepoy, one of the lawyers who aided the Spanish victims:
I remember the emotion of the Argentine victims who testified before Judge Garzón. They said: ‘for the first time in my life, a judge has listened to me.’ Here, in Buenos Aires, the same thing is happening. 14
In the same interview, Slepoy lauded Garzón’s intervention to ‘a utopia, which had not only repudiated Argentine presidents Carlos Menem and Fernando de la Rúa’s passivity, but had also precipitated the 2003 re-opening of the cases by Nestor Kirchener. 14
Undoubtedly, both the 1998 Spanish indictment of Pinochet, and the Argentine intervention in the Spanish case, were grounded in a universal human rights discourse that positioned the victim at the centre of judicial actions. Implicit in this victim-centred view of the legal system is a conception of it as a therapeutic entity that grants a type of catharsis to victims by its provision of a discursive forum in which they can articulate suppressed discourses and obtain validation from a prominent member of another judicial, and hence moral, community. Garzón’s intervention in South American memory politics had signalled the limits of national sovereignty and the coextensive annulment of impunity accorded to Argentine elites. It was a powerful message that imbued members of the Argentine judiciary and legal profession with a new vision of the power of transnational justice, which they would subsequently implement in their defence of Francoist victims.
Also undergirding the Argentine involvement in the Spanish memory debate was the syncretic merging of two maternal cultures whose gendered memories had been dismissed, and actively vilified, by elites in both Spain and Argentina. During the dictatorship of General Franco, 30,000 children were forcibly taken away from their Republican families, and in the early post-Civil War period, 1940–1944, they were then either put in orphanages or adopted by pro-Francoist Nationalist families. Depriving Republican mothers, frequently political prisoners, of their children was an institutionalised castigatory process, which sought to extirpate from the Francoist state the ‘Republican gene’. The Regime’s psychiatrist, Antonio Valleja Nágera, theorised that an affiliation to the antithetical ideologies of Communism and Masonism was biologically rooted, symptomatic of aberrant breeding, poor intellect, and envy of social superiors.Reference Ryan 15 The persecution of oppositional motherhood had also formed a cornerstone of General Jorge Videla’s annihilation of his ideological adversaries during the Argentine ‘Dirty War’, 1976–1983. The iconic Argentine human rights group, The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, inscribed the memory of their ‘disappeared’ sons and daughters into the public space by their weekly 3:30 pm Thursday protests in the central Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Donning white handkerchiefs, mothers of ‘the disappeared’ had unified in these organisations, which transcended class differences. Drawing on deeply ingrained Catholic images of ‘mater dolorosa’, the mothers viscerally articulated the micro-social consequences of General Videla’s cleansing of the body politic, and in so doing, kindled a spirit of resistance in the general population, while simultaneously attracting the attention of international human rights organisations. Interestingly, since the 2010 deterritorialisation of the victims’ quest for justice, the Group against Francoist impunity 16 had gathered every Thursday in the Puerta de Sol in the centre of Madrid in an evident homage to The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.Reference Marra 17
The President of The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto, had lost her 23-year-old daughter, Laura, along with her grand-daughter in 1977. She participated in the First Conference for Francoist Victims in 2012, 18 held in Rivas-Vallecas, Madrid, where she encouraged the mothers of ‘los niños robados del franquismo’ to persevere with their incipient fight to obtain justice. Interestingly, Carlotto recalled the experience of young Spanish grandchildren asking her for advice on how to locate their grandfathers, issues shrouded in secrecy in homes where the grandmothers refused to speak about the subject.Reference Junquera 19 The common experience of Roman Catholicism, a Judeo-Christian necessity for mourning, and the centrality of the family as a social nucleus buttressed the complicity between these two maternal memory cultures. During her speech, Carlotto inspired delegates by her recounting of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’s role in ending the impunity conceded by Raúl Alfonsín and Carlos Menem. The transmission of this advice attempted to validate the reinscription of a distinctly gendered memory of Francoist repression, of a mother’s searing pain at the loss of her child, into the collective consciousness. It amounted to a syncretic merging of two maternal cultures that had been denied the opportunity to exercise their nurturing functions due to their perceived political deviancy. In September 2013, Soledad Luque, president of the Spanish Association All stolen children are also my children, 20 travelled to Buenos Aires to present her case before Judge María Servini de Cubría, and she also gave a press conference in the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo’s headquarters. 10
This symbiosis was further evidenced by the Buenos Aires presentation of Montse Armenegou’s documentary Return my son to me on 4 March, 2012. 21 Since the turn of the millennium, Armenegou has visualised historical memory in a series of documentaries: The Lost Children of Francoism, 22 The Graves of Silence, 23 and The 927 Convoy: the Train that took Spanish dissidents to Mauthausen. 24 The documentary in question was dedicated to the ‘memoria compartida’ of the stolen babies, which as Armenegou astutely pointed out, is usually associated with Argentina and Chile, and not with a supposedly democratic European nation. The panel was composed of Elsa Pavón, the grandmother of the first recuperated grandchild in Argentina, and Mar Soriano, the coordinator of the associations for stolen babies in Spain.Reference Berlanga 25 The documentary had been shown on Catalan, Basque, French, and Swedish television, and it had inspired English language versions shown on the BBC and NBC. In facilitating the diffusion of a documentary that had yet to be shown on Spanish state television, the consolidated network of mothers and grandmothers in Argentina was enabling the incipient ‘stolen babies’ victim groups in Spain.
The Divergence of Memory Cultures: Spain and Argentina
The synchronicity between the Argentine and Spanish memory cultures on the civil and associational levels was not replicated in the Spanish political and judicial terrains, which proved remarkably resistant to judge Francoist crimes. Indeed, the president of Amnesty International in Spain, Esteban Beltrán, affirmed that ‘impunity is guaranteed in Spain, they don’t investigate or co-operate with investigations open in other countries.’ 26 , 27 Certainly, the Spanish government oscillated between evasive and hostile attitudes toward Judge Maria Servini de Cubría’s actions. In March 2013, 150 families approached Judge Servini de Cubría to request the extradition of four prominent members of the Falange, including José Utrera Molina, the father-in-law of the incumbent Minister for Justice, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón. Initially, government officials prevaricated, stating that there was already an ongoing investigation into Francoist crimes in Spain, and they vetoed the videoconference participation of the victims by invoking the 1977 Amnesty Law, which had absolved all Civil War crimes. The Interpol order, sanctioned by the Argentine judge, to detain the aforementioned torturers, two of whom were already dead, took 18 days to implement, when it is normally a question of hours. Relatedly, the Argentine ambassador in Spain, Carlos Bettini, informed Judge Servini de Cubría that the Spanish government felt highly uncomfortable with her initiation of this legal procedure. 28 Her actions were judged by them to violate the bilateral treaty between the two countries, and to jeopardise citizens’ rights, and consequently they threatened to issue a formal complaint to the Argentine embassy. Curiously, they maintained that the witness testimonies would affect the rights of Spanish citizens. Consequently, in March 2013, victims found that the Argentine consulate in Madrid could no longer record their testimonies. In response to the purposeful state blocking of her investigation, Judge Servini de Cubría ordered Argentine consulates all over the world to record the Francoist victims’ testimonies. She also publicly reproached the Spanish State, arguing that they were not investigating the past in an efficient manner, and she designated the confrontation with the past a moral injunction, which the Spanish state should not shirk. On 31 January 2014, the state prosecutor rejected Servini de Cubría’s request for the extradition of the Francoist torturer ‘Billy the Kid’, whom Judge Servini accused of torturing 13 political dissenters during the period 1968–1975. The Spanish prosecutors argued that the ten-year statute of limitations implicit in the 1973 Spanish Penal Code, applicable at the time of his crimes, absolved him. Furthermore, it was argued that the crimes fell within the jurisdiction of the Spanish courts and competence, even though the Spanish courts had always been averse to initiating such investigations. On 17 February 2014, victims communicated with Judge María Servini de Cubría via videoconferencing in the Argentine consulate in Madrid. The hindering of her investigation demonstrated an implacable political will to retain mnemonic sovereignty, while paradoxically perpetuating the very conditions of inaction and stagnation that had forced families to examine foreign judicial options in the first place.
In the aftermath of the state’s attempted truncation of Judge Servini de Cubría’s investigation, regional governments demonstrated their non-acceptance of state inertia, and their advocacy of the Argentine denunciation. On 14 November 2013, the Navarra parliament ratified a law of recognition and reparation for Francoist victims, The Foral Law of Historical Memory, 29 which aimed to correct the deficiencies of the centralist 2007 Law of Historical Memory. Under this law, the Navarra regional government assumed the cost of the exhumations, not only within its own territory, but also beyond, should a Navarran citizen request one. The law obliged Navarra to extend economic, technical and psychological support to the families of the disappeared, and to create a DNA bank. Also, a space was to be reserved in Pamplona cemetery for the remains of the victims, while all honours accorded to Francoists were annulled. Judicial sentences issued by Francoist courts were rescinded. School textbooks were to be revised in order to impart a more balanced history to schoolchildren. Criticising the institutional neglect of the memory of exiled Republicans in Mauthausen, the law pledged to erect a monument in any European concentration camp in which a Navarran citizen had died. 30 Navarra formally presented its case to Judge María Servini de Cubría on 29 January 2014, and 13 members of the Navarran Association of Victims’ Families 31 gave testimony in the Argentine consulate in Madrid. They presented Judge de Cubría with a report detailing the horrendous conditions of the San Cristobal jail in Navarra, where 2500 prisoners were detained in subhuman conditions, and 800 perished. In June 2013, the Basque parliament passed a law pledging its adhesion to the Argentine denunciation. The statement denounced the 1936 uprising as illegal, and especially criticised the Francoist eradication of the Catalan and Basque cultures, as well as the 1977 Law of Amnesty. On 29 November 2013, representatives of the Basque parliament travelled to Buenos Aires to meet with Judge Servini de Cubría, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, and The Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. 32
The left-wing Catalan party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, approached de Cubría following a series of futile attempts in Spain to investigate the 1940 shooting of the ex-president of the Generalitat, Lluis Companys, which the judge initiated in October 2013. 33 The Asturian parliament, backed by the left-wing parties, UpyD, PSOE and IU, voted to condemn Francoism in a strongly worded denunciation of the dictatorial regime that savagely repressed all vestiges of dissent (‘el régimen dictatorial que reprimió a sangre y fuego todo vestigio de disidencia’). It committed itself to providing victims with all means to tell the truth, to obtain justice and reparation. They expressly affiliated themselves with the denunciation presented by Judge De Cubría in Buenos Aires, and encouraged citizens to denounce abuses to her. They supported her because victims were entitled to what they deemed to be ‘effective justice’ and a ‘dignified reparation’. The Argentine intervention provided a far more appealing and inclusive memory narrative than the centralist one, which receded in importance, discarded by regions who connected directly with a universal ethical memory that was infinitely more responsive to victimhood. Judge de Cubria’s intervention de-authorised national memory by instantiating inclusive discursive and judiciary spaces for regions that had never professed an affinity to the centralist memory narrative, which had a long historical tradition of erasing regional cultures. Furthermore, the Law of Historical Memory’s individualist stance had disillusioned regional groups, who insisted that ‘justice is not limited to individuals, but also to the collective memory of groups that suffered during the Civil War and the Francoist Regime.’Reference Kovras 34 In a world of entitlement to the airing and rectification of historical grievances, the Spanish regions transmuted into global consumers of memory, and the centralist memory narrative was rejected for its failure to render justice.
Recessionary Memory
The synergy between the Argentine and Spanish memory cultures transcended the maternal, as Argentine mnemonic practices seeped into the economic realm in 2012, when outrage at the perceived callousness of Spanish banking and economic elites reached new heights. Unsurprisingly, in a country in which 85.6% of the population considered corruption to be widespread, and 86% believed that the crisis had been mishandled by the government, the present did not serve as a source of inspiration, and, consequently, protestors appropriated international and national memories as sources of inspiration.Reference Hughes 35 In April 2013, a controversy arose when members of the protest movement, Group of Mortgages’ Victims, 36 carried out ‘escraches’ against members of political parties, one of whom was Soria Saenz de Santamaría, the vice-president of the PP government. An ‘escrache’ can be defined as an extreme form of protest, whereby the protestor camps outside the individual’s house, be it a bank manager or government minister. Originating in 1980s’ Buenos Aires, the term ‘escrache’ is a colloquialism that means ‘to show somebody up’.Reference Peregil 37 Acts of violence and fraud are inextricably linked with dominance and status, as they manifest the magnitude of power and concomitant impunity held by the person in question. By rendering visible the morally reproachable acts underpinning the person or institution’s power, the act of shaming significantly diminishes or even altogether nullifies this power. ‘Escraches’, therefore, can be defined as retaliatory acts that have as their primary objective the rectification of the inequitable distribution of power, political dominance and wealth. In the 1980s, two members of the Argentine victim support group HIJOS (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio), Paula Maroni and Carlos Pisoni, applied the concept to enact an urgently needed social justice to colluders and collaborators of the Videla dictatorship, who seemed to enjoy impunity. The escraches approximated to a form of popular justice, which utilised shaming as a social punishment, and harnessed the power of the community. For example, the ‘escrache’ against Jorge Luis Magnacco, an Argentine doctor who had mistreated women kidnapped by State Security Services, culminated in a complete social boycott, by which he was denied commercial services and ostracised by his neighbours. In 1998, HIJOs implemented an ‘escrache’ against the former dictator, General Videla. Following the Argentine ‘corralito’ of 2001, ‘escraches’ were transformed into modes of economic disputation: in 2012, the Economic minister Axel Kicillof, responsible for the expropriation of Repsol, became the object of one. This transformation was an outgrowth of a new mentality in Argentine society that parenthesised the impunity of the Dictatorship with economic fecklessness, reconceiving it as ‘nothing but the first step to bring neoliberalism to power and subject Argentina and (Latin America) to the new imperial rule of globalisation.’Reference Huyssen 38 Within a short time period, escraches evolved into a very capacious semantic category, which began to be deployed in commemorative events for the Republican victims in Spain. In a 2013 commemorative event in the Almudena cemetery in Madrid, the organiser, a grandchild named Tomás Montero, classified the act as ‘un escrache a la monarquía hereditaria.’ 39 This categorisation implicitly denounced the former king, Don Juan Carlos de Borbón’s Francoist roots by juxtaposing the commemorative act, which placed 180 photographs of victims on the bullet-ridden walls of the Almudena, with the Francoist bias of key Spanish institutions.
The term even percolated into the indignados movement, which, on the 15th May 2012, staged what they termed ‘un escrache al sistema’ in 20 cities, including Madrid, Valladolid, Salamanca, León and Ávila. On 15 May 2011 hundreds of students and activists of the group Democracia Ya, convened by twitter, email and Facebook, congregated in the central Madrid square Plaza del Sol. The movement that arose from this gathering, known as ‘los indignados’ or 15-M, was non-hierarchical, and demanded the transparency and accountability of the governments and banks, which had been proven to be extremely fallible, if not defective.Reference Castells 40 They also demanded an end to corruption, the development of renewable energies, a secular state, the nationalisation of privatised firms, the publication of the names of indicted corrupt officials, and the recovery of historical memory. The self-designation of the movement, Indignados, derived primarily from the frustration and anger of Spanish youth, especially the 18–24 demographic, who had to confront the daunting youth unemployment figure of 56%. The spectre of this ominous future, encapsulated in the frequently repeated aphorism ‘no house, no job, no pension, no fear’, buttressed 15-M’s transformational remit.
The economic instability of debt-ridden Spain has also led to a revaluation of the memory of the Second Republic, 1931–1936, which became increasingly cast as a superlative political precedent, shorn of the corruption and greed that characterised the Spanish economic boom and, in the view of many, culminated in the ongoing recession. Citizen disillusionment with governing institutions has been compounded by the monarchical crisis, in which various scandals (the former King, Don Juan Carlos de Borbon’s elephant-hunting escapade and the fraudulent dealings of his son-in-law, the Duke of Palma, Iñaki Urdangarían), have compelled Spaniards to re-evaluate a once very highly rated institution. Public anger at the corruption scandals has fuelled anti-monarchist sentiment in Spain, emblematised by the Second Republic flag. Iñaki Urdangarían was greeted by a sea of Republican flags at his court appearances in Barcelona and Mallorca for his alleged involvement in the siphoning of public funds through his foundation Instituto Noós. The association of the Second Republic with integrity was again demonstrated in the indictment of Princess Cristina, the sister of King Félipe VI, for her cognisance of her husband’s alleged fraud. Her court appearance in Palma de Mallorca drew 250 protestors who flaunted the flag of the Second Republic in support of the eradication of the monarchy.Reference García 41
The flying of the Second Republic flag indexes the prospect of a Third Republic, a utopia in which an authentic democracy would attenuate the increasing schism between rich and poor, palliate the aggrieved middle-classes, and put an end to corruption. It excises the historical period of Francoism (1939–1975) to instead form a continuum with the Second Republic (1931–1936), a political project that had attempted to create a more egalitarian Spain and to reduce class divides by introducing agrarian reform and democratising education. On 14 April 2013, the 82nd anniversary of the proclamation of the Second Republic, a protest meeting gathered thousands of people in favour of ‘La Tercera República’ (The Third Republic) which was conceived as a new start that would permit Spaniards to experience authentic democracy. The elevated percentage of 25–35-year-old participants was striking: these participants rejected el juancarlismo, the adhesion to the institution of the monarchy primarily based on the popular appeal of Don Juan Carlos de Borbón. They equated the embeddedness of patterns of the distribution of power and financial resources with the monarchy’s Francoist ties, and interrogated the prospect of a republican Spain.Reference Mars 42 The president of the association of the State Federation for Memory Forums, 43 a participant group in the march, conflated the quest for economic equitability with the recuperation of the memories of the Second Republic and Francoism. In his words: ‘We can’t construct a Third Republic without referring to a Second Republic and the Francoist victims who died for the liberty we enjoy today.’ 23 Thus, Spanish democracy was being impugned for its failure to deliver a more egalitarian redistribution of wealth, and to acknowledge the victimisation of a sizeable collectivity in the post-Civil War period. A countervailing exaltation of the Second Republic as an era where genuine democracy existed furnishes disappointed voters with an ethical precedent of Spanish democracy. On 23 March 2014, the March for Dignity 44 occurred, in which various regional plataformas (groups) for mortgage relief, the unemployed, and the elderly and disabled affected by cuts, converged in Madrid, brandishing Republican flags. The prevalence of the flag related the memory of the Second Republic with a concern for the more vulnerable members of society, and categorically rejected the present political scene. The Second Republic flag rapidly became ubiquitous: in the village of Pastores in Salamanca, the PSOE mayoress, Pilar Salazares replaced the contemporary Spanish flag with that of the Second Republic. She was warned by the Guardia Civil that she had violated Law 39-1981 of the Civil Code, and they removed the flag. 45 She had raised the flag in support of the Junta Estatal Republicana, whose annual convention in Madrid reclaimed a Third Republic. Republican flags were also removed from attendees at the coronation of Felipe VI in June 2014. Therefore, in recessionary Spain, the flag morphed into an anti-establishment symbol, a reminder of public discontent with governing institutions, and a potent reminder of another age in which democracy was synonymous with the amelioration of citizens’ lives.
Conclusion
The period 2007–2014 witnessed the Spanish state’s disentanglement from the struggle to recuperate Republican memory to the degree that they became two separate and unrelated entities. Proponents of Republican memory’s recourse to the Argentine judicial system highlighted the Spanish state’s inefficacy, which was reinforced by the regional endorsement of Judge de Cubría’s investigation, and their concurrent bypassing of the state. In contrast to its inactivity with regard to the recovery of memory, the state enacted vigorous measures to block Judge de Cubría’s investigation, thereby demonstrating its resolutely nationalistic ideation of memory, and its disregard for international law. The economic recession compelled protestors to delve into the past and to broaden their temporal and geographical horizons. For disillusioned citizens, the Second Republic flag, omnipresent in the 2011–2014 period, encoded an aspirational political structure, genuinely committed to remedy the profound social inequities with which 1930s Spain was riven, and which have been replicated, albeit with less intensity, in present-day Spain. The Third Republic represented for both economic protestors and victim groups an infinitely more mature and pluralistic form of democracy in which class divides would be attenuated, and victimhood would be acknowledged. Testifying to the internationalisation of Spanish memory culture, the Argentine influence seeped into gender memory and economic protest, and was instrumentalised to inveigh against what Spanish citizens increasingly considered to be a malfunctioning state.
Lorraine Ryan is a Birmingham Fellow (research focused lecturer) in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, UK. She has published extensively on the sociology of memory, cultural and collective memory in Spain, and contemporary women’s writing. Her monograph, Memory and Spatiality in Postmillennial Spanish Narrative, was published as part of the Ashgate New Hispanisms Series in 2014.
