Spain's civil-war wounds still aren't healed

MADRID — On the morning of July 19, 1936, a small aircraft landed at the airport of Tétouan, capital of the then-Spanish protectorate in northern Morocco.

It carried a man who was to rule over Spain with an iron fist for nearly the next four decades: Francisco Franco.

The general, who at that time was military governor of the Canary Islands, arrived in North Africa in order to take the helm from there of the military uprising that had begun two days earlier.

The insurgency staged by Franco's conservative nationalists against the leftist republican government plunged Spain into a three-year civil war that claimed more than half a million victims.

As Spain marks the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the fratricide conflict this month, its wounds are still far from having healed.

There are people who still foster "the hatred," said British historian Paul Preston — author of a new book on the Spanish civil war — in a reference to far-right groups and websites.

The war was officially sparked by the killing on July 13, 1936, of monarchist politician Jose Calvo Sotelo by leftist gunmen taking revenge for the slaying of a republican lieutenant.

But its deeper causes were related to the failure of Spain's Second Republic, proclaimed in 1931.

In the 1930s, Spain spiraled deeper into chaos and anarchy amid violence between rightists and leftists, fascists and communists, monarchists and socialists.

Today, some conservative historians and analysts will still argue that the nationalist uprising restored order to the country, but Preston and others disagree.

The republican government was taking measures to relieve the staggering poverty among groups such as miners or farm laborers, but the political right rejected such policies as revolutionary, the historian said in an interview with the daily El Pais.

Irreconcilable enemies

As a former nationalist fighter, Jose Maria Saenz de Tejada, summed up the situation: "There were two absolutely irreconcilable Spains which hated each other. We were enemies."

Not only did the civil war reflect Spain's rigid class structures, but it also acted as a prelude to World War II.

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany backed Franco, with German planes even bombing the Basque town of Guernica in 1937. Its destruction was made famous by Pablo Picasso's painting of the same name.

The republican side, meanwhile, received weapons from France and — above all — the Soviet Union.

"International brigades" made up of fighters from other European countries and from as far away as the United States and Australia joined the republicans to combat what they saw as the rise of fascism.

However, the republicans suffered a decisive blow with the loss of Barcelona in January 1939, and in March, Francoist troops took Madrid.

Franco's victory, which was proclaimed officially on April 1, led to his dictatorship, which ended only with his death in 1975.

Past wouldn't stay past

Democratic Spain then decided to leave its divisive past behind, granting amnesty to Franco's collaborators in 1977. Spain did not really begin dealing with the Franco era until the last decade.

Associations representing the dictator's victims have now dug up the bones of thousands of bodies from mass graves, and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's socialist government passed a Law of Historic Memory in 2007.

The law included measures such as the removal of Francoist statues and other symbols from public places, the possibility of financial assistance to groups opening mass graves, and that of granting Spanish nationality to foreigners whose Spanish parents fled into exile to escape Franco.

About 190,000 people — mostly Latin Americans — have already become Spanish citizens.

However, the law was criticized by Spain's conservative opposition People's Party, which has distant links with Francoism.

When Judge Baltasar Garzon tried to investigate Franco's crimes in 2008, accusing the dictator of the deaths of more than 100,000 opponents during the civil war and dictatorship, he soon was pressured into dropping his inquiry.

The republicans and nationalists both committed atrocities during the civil war, conservative analysts emphasize. Their critics see such arguments as a way of trying to whitewash the illegitimate nature of Franco's uprising.

The Zapatero government still has to decide how to deal with the sensitive subject of the Valley of the Fallen, Franco's huge mausoleum, which continues to receive visitors near Madrid.