Thirty Years Ago Today...

... Franco died. Amnesty International has calculated that about 30,000 people disappeared and were buried in mass graves either during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) or under Franco’s long rule.

I was in boarding school in England in 1975. I remember worrying about my family in Madrid, about whether there would be some kind of violence. I remember wondering how many people would emerge from the woodwork, people who had been in hiding pretty much since the War. About who’d return from exile.

The running joke of course was that nobody was ever really sure if Franco was dead, or when he had died, or whether he’d be coming back in some grotesque parody of the resurrection (a book did in fact appear a couple of years later entitled Y el Tercer Año Resucitó.) The war memorial he built (well, his prisoners of war built) into a mountainside northwest of Madrid was his own mausoleum. His tomb lies just below the mosaic image of Christ Triumphant in the cupola, which is a few centimeters smaller in diameter than St. Peter’s (lest the Caudillo be accused of being bigger than his boots).

There was a huge mass yesterday in the Valle de los Caídos for Franco. Hundreds of arms raised in fascist salutes. They are upset, it seems, with the Socialist government’s systematic dismantling of the temporal power of the church in Spain.