Ghosts of Spain Read online

  The only release from Franco was death by natural causes. The Caudillo died in a hospital bed on 20 November 1975. Spaniards did not free themselves, as the Portuguese had done the year before with their peaceful Carnation Revolution. Nor did they achieve freedom with the sort of people’s power demonstrations that swept through eastern bloc Communist countries later in the century.

  Depending on where a Spaniard lived, the Caudillo had ruled over their life for anything between thirty-six and thirty-nine years. It was time enough for children to become grandparents. I have always found it difficult, despite a recent flood of novels and films on the subject, to imagine the impact he had on each individual Spaniard’s existence. I got some idea, however, when I travelled four thousand miles across the Atlantic to report for the Guardian newspaper on the world created by another long-living military strongman of Galician origin – Cuban leader Fidel Castro. ‘You must understand that it has been my whole life. I haven’t had the chance to know or see anything else,’ said – in an empty, sad voice – a fifty-year-old woman to whom I gave a lift during a tropical rainstorm outside Havana. A whole generation of Spaniards must have felt the same emptiness, the same sense of waste or lost opportunity.

  Even those who, like King Juan Carlos, had spent fifteen years appearing at the Caudillo’s side, claimed they had been forced to keep their mouths firmly closed most of the time. ‘Why did I never say anything? Because it was a period when nobody, not even me, dared speak,’ he said later.

  Franco’s final message to Spaniards was read out on television by his weeping prime minister, the devoted Carlos Arias Navarro, hours after his death. It called on them to be loyal to Juan Carlos. They were warned not to forget, however, that ‘the enemies of Spain and of Christian civilisation are on the alert’.

  The message also contained a rare, if perverse, apology to his legion of victims – to that part of Spain known simply as los vencidos, the defeated: ‘I beg forgiveness of everyone, just as with all my heart I forgive those who declared themselves my enemies.’ The apology was offered, as Spaniards describe those talking through clenched teeth, con la boca pequeña – with a small mouth. His victims had ‘declared themselves’ enemies. It was, in other words, their own fault. Franco, of all people, was not about to go to the grave admitting he had been wrong.

  Democracy did not appear in Spain overnight – though the period in which it emerged is often viewed through rose-tinted glasses. If Franco expected, or wanted, democracy to happen he forgot to tell anyone. Juan Carlos was, in the words of one historian, meant to ‘continue Francoism after Franco’. This proved to be ‘the Caudillo’s most serious political and personal miscalculation’.

  King Juan Carlos’s first prime minister was the same Arias Navarro who had wept so copiously for Franco. Arias Navarro – known as the Carnicero de Málaga, or the Butcher of Málaga, because of his time as a military prosecutor during the Civil War – vowed he would be ‘a strict perpetrator of Francoism’. It took three years of intense and difficult work to get to a point where a new constitution could be written and voted on. Franco may have been dead, but Francoism was still very much present as Spain tottered unsteadily into democracy.

  When Juan Carlos was officially proclaimed king he spoke of ‘a dynamic moment of change’ and of integrating ‘distintas y deseables opiniones’ – ‘different and desirable opinions’. That could, or could not, have meant democracy. A few days later he issued a royal decree naming the deceased Franco, in perpetuity, general-in-chief of the army, navy and air force.

  For fifty hours Franco’s body lay in the Sala de Columnas of Madrid’s Palacio de Oriente. Hundreds of thousands queued to see his corpse. He was buried at the Valle de Los Caídos after a frantic search for the stone which had been set aside years earlier to cover his grave. One of the waiting mourners fell into the grave a few hours before and had to be removed, unconscious, from what was due to be the Caudillo’s last resting place. The ceremony was presided over by a red-eyed, visibly moved, Juan Carlos.

  By the time of his death Franco was an international pariah, except to a US which had signed deals for military bases and used him as a Cold War bulwark against communism. The only world leader of any significance to turn up for his funeral was Chile’s General Augusto Pinochet – a dictator with similar ideas about his role in delivering the world from communism and atheism. Attempts made, twenty-five years later, by a Spanish court to try Pinochet for genocide, terrorism and torture show just how fast and far the country travelled after Franco had been lowered into his grave. They also highlight, however, the immense contrast between Spain’s attitude to those who tortured, killed or repressed in Franco’s name and those who did the same elsewhere.

  A political prisoner sitting in a Spanish jail could have been forgiven for looking at the future with pessimism at the end of 1975. Franco was dead. But the people appointed by Juan Carlos to run the country were the same lot as before. The Butcher of Málaga was in charge of the government. The upper echelons of the army, meanwhile, were populated with generals who had earned their spurs fighting for Franco in the Civil War or, later, for Hitler with the volunteer División Azul. The parliament was used to rubber-stamping Franco’s legislation, the judges to carrying out his laws and the police to applying them, often brutally. Almost everybody in a position of power was, at least in theory, some sort of Francoist.

  In fact, the thirst for democracy was enormous. Fortunately it was, at least by now, shared by Juan Carlos. The undergroundleft-wing press did not, however, see any signs of this. ‘¡No al Rey fran-quista!’, ‘No to the Francoist King!’, ‘¡No al Rey impuesto!’, ‘No to an imposed King!’ they cried.

  There were only two ways of achieving democracy. One was a complete – and potentially violent – break with the past. In that scenario the police and army, where the hardliners were, would have the upper hand. The other was ruptura pactada – an agreement, between Francoists and opposition democrats, to break with the past. That, however, meant letting the Francoists themselves, led by Juan Carlos, carry out the changes. For the left, there was no real choice. The Francoists, if they were prepared to, would have to do it. Fortunately, enough of them were. One of the great ironies of recent Spanish history is that many of the fathers of democracy were Francoists. Inevitably, however, they were going to do it their way – or as much their way as possible.

  Luis María Anson, a conservative, monarchist journalist, had already spotted the manoeuvres going on in the background before Franco’s death. ‘The rats are abandoning the regime’s ship … The cowardice of the Spanish ruling class is truly suffocating … Already it has reached the beginnings of the sauve qui peut, of the unconditional surrender,’ he wrote six months before el Caudillo died.

  Prominent Francoists reinvented themselves, almost overnight, as diehard democrats. Spain went for what one well-known psychiatrist of the time called ‘a world-record in jacket changing’. The jacket-changers were led by Adolfo Suárez, a brilliant young Falangist who replaced Arias Navarro. He persuaded the Francoist deputies in Las Cortes to commit hara-kari by passing a law allowing free elections. He then went on to win those elections with a ‘centrist’ party that included many former regime apparatchiks.

  The Transición was a time of high political drama. Its protagonists are treated as heroes. Spaniards often forget, however, quite how violent it was. In the five years after Franco’s death, more than a hundred demonstrators, left-wing activists, students and separatists were killed by the police or the ‘ultras’, the far right. Many more were killed by ETA and other left-wing or separatist terrorist groups.

  The people in charge may have considered themselves ex-Francoists, but some of the tactics they used showed little sign of change. Although some of the killing was done by police – sometimes by shooting straight into demonstrations – the men pulling the triggers were rarely, if ever, brought to justice. Five people were killed in one demonstration in the Basque city of Vitoria in 1976 after
police had lobbed smoke grenades into a church. The relatives of the dead are still, today, waiting for the killers to be identified. Two of the Francoists-turned-democrats who were in charge of the interior ministry at the time have gone on to enjoy enormous success. Manuel Fraga Iribarne founded what would become the People’s Party, which governed the country under José María Aznar for eight years until 2004. He himself was president of the Galician regional government until 2005. Rodolfo Martín Villa served several governments as a minister and went on to become chairman of Spain’s main satellite broadcaster, Sogecable.

  The negotiating strength of those who held power and those who did not was obviously unequal. Manuel Fraga had opposition leaders arrested. He once boasted to the young Socialist leader Felipe González that it could take eight years to legalise his party while the Communists might always remain banned. ‘Remember that I am the power, and you are nothing,’ he told him.

  Felipe González, who helped negotiate the reforms and would later govern as Spanish prime minister for thirteen years, admits the left had to pay for change with, amongst other things, silence. ‘What we have is a change that is agreed between people coming from the old regime and the opposition,’ explains González. ‘That was very positive but it excluded, for example, an explanation (not to mention any demand that people be held responsible) for what had happened under Francoism, through truth commissions, as other countries have done. There was not sufficient strength to demand either justice or, even, any explanation for the past.’

  Within days of Franco’s death, demonstrations were being held demanding amnesty for the political prisoners still in jail. These were the days of running battles between demonstrators and the grises, the grey-uniformed riot police, which marked the youth of a generation of, mainly, left-wingers. Franco, unforgiving to the end, had ordered the execution of five prisoners in his last year. Political activists were still being beaten and tortured by the police’s Brigada Político-Social in some police stations. Asked to order his police to be gentle with amnesty protesters in Valencia, Fraga replied: ‘Les voy a moler a palos’ (‘I shall beat them black and blue’).

  The last prisoners were finally released after a general amnesty was granted at the end of 1977. The amnesty was agreed by a parliament elected, a few months earlier, in the first democratic vote for forty-one years. Some of those released were members of ETA and would simply get straight back to the business of terror. Others, though, had spent years going in and out of Franco’s prisons for organising peaceful protests. To them, it was a form of victory. Marcelino Camacho, a trade union leader who had spent years in jail, told Las Cortes that the amnesty was the only way to ‘close this past of civil wars and crusades’. A Socialist deputy agreed, saying it was ‘the fruit of a desire to bury the sad, past history of Spain’. Another deputy gave the best description, however: ‘The amnesty is simply a forgetting … an amnesty for everyone, a forgetting by everyone for everyone.’ The proposal was not just amnesty, but also amnesia.

  Spaniards called the unwritten part of the amnesty agreement the pacto del olvido. It underpinned the entire transition. If silence about the past was the price to be paid for the successful self-dissolution of Francoism, the opposition was prepared to sign up to it. Those who negotiated the pact, men like Socialist prime minister-to-be Felipe González, still feel that way. It allowed Suárez to reform the regime from within, using its own rules to do so.

  More than twenty-five years later, however, the amnesty law begins to look different to some Spaniards – especially to a younger generation that did not live through Franco’s final days. Its second article covered crimes ‘against the rights of people’ committed – prior to 15 December 1976 – by: ‘authorities, functionaries and agents of public order’. Franco’s henchmen, in other words, would not have to pay for their crimes.

  In an attempt to understand the consequences of that pacto del olvido, I found myself walking up the Carrer Josep Anselm Clavé. This leads off the end of Barcelona’s famous Ramblas boulevard into what used to be the city’s port district. During the 1992 Olympics, I bumped into two lost Atlanta cops here – doing groundwork for their own Olympics four years later – and acted as interpreter. ‘I wouldn’t go down there, not without my gun anyway,’ said one, a big black lieutenant, peering down a dark alley.

  Coming back, I found this street had, like so much of this ever-evolving city, changed. Gift shops, including a hammock boutique, gave way to a street of bars and small businesses, with immigrants from Africa, Morocco and China bustling around. Turning up towards Escudellers street, I veered off into a narrow, featureless and slightly sinister alleyway. I had come here to the offices of a group of people who were keeping a small flame alive for the 5,000 Spaniards who died during the Second World War in a Nazi prison camp at Mauthausen, in Austria. A strange piece of news had driven me here to meet the people from a group called the Amical de Mauthausen. For, a few months earlier, I had been surprised to discover that a man called Ramón Serrano Suñer had just died. The surprise was not his death, but the fact that he had still been alive.

  Aged 101, the man known to Spaniards as el Cuñadísimo, ‘the super-brother-in-law’, for his relationship with el Generalísimo, had proved to be a survivor in numerous ways. For, at one of the bloodiest and most vengeful moments of Spanish history, Serrano Suñer had been his brother-in-law’s right-hand man and the second most powerful man in the land. While Spaniards were dying in Mauthausen, Suñer was one of Nazi Germany’s most impassioned backers in Madrid. ‘Russia is to blame!’ he had shouted to the crowds when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and Franco decided to send his division of volunteers, the División Azul, to help him.

  Some of the obituaries I read of him bore little relationship to the picture I carried in my head of an ardent pro-fascist who held such power in the first, and most extreme, few years of Francoism. They were glowing accounts of a charming, intelligent man who saved Spain from the Second World War and went on to oppose Franco. They described him as a fine writer, a successful businessman and a free thinker. Others were not so kind. They used words like totalitario and fascista. It was difficult to imagine they were writing about the same man.

  Serrano Suñer had, I read, spent much of the last few years of his life in the glitzy southern resort of Marbella. A black, chauffeur-driven Mercedes with white blinds would take him almost daily to the same beach. Out would step the chauffeur and a distinguished-looking, very elderly gentleman with a walking stick, a hat, a cashmere jacket and, often, a dark tie knotted around his neck. Serrano Suñer, whose admirers said he conserved a keen eye for young women and who went for his first spin on a water scooter when he was ninety-six, would take the sun for a while. Then he would return to his car and be driven back to his summer house, bought off a former British ambassador, on the hillside above the town.

  As a younger man, Serrano Suñer’s tall, thin and elegant figure, combined with his stylish, quick-witted manner, provided an unflattering contrast to his ponderous, pot-bellied brother-in-law. ‘Beside the Don Quixote of his brother-in-law, the Caudillo often appears to be Sancho Panza,’ France’s Marshal Pétain once observed. In the bloody, hate-fuelled days of the late 1930s and early 1940s, he helped Franco design his new state. At one point in 1940 he controlled the interior ministry, the foreign ministry and the Falange. Serrano Suñer – whose brothers had been shot by the rojos in Madrid – thus helped oversee one of the most brutal, vengeful periods of internal repression. He admired, met and negotiated with both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The latter was, he thought, ‘a genius’ of the kind history threw up only ‘once every two or three thousand years’. A man who hated Britain and France, he played host to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in Madrid in 1940. The city’s streets were decorated with swastikas. The Gestapo chief, not a man famous for compassion, expressed amazement at the scale of the repression unleashed by Franco’s Nationalists. He would, nevertheless, agree to send a number of prominent Repub
licans captured in France back to Spain – where they would be shot.

  As foreign minister, Serrano Suñer helped strike a secret deal with Hitler. It was negotiated at a meeting between Hitler and Franco in a railway wagon at Hendaye, southern France. The agreement saw Spain promise to join the Second World War on the Axis side at a time of ‘common agreement’ and when it considered itself materially ready to do so. Serrano Suñer later claimed personal credit for making sure that never happened. Wild demands made by Franco for a new empire in North Africa were, according to many historians, what really turned the Germans off. Mussolini’s foreign minister, nevertheless, considered the Cuñadísimo to be the Axis’s firmest ally in Spain.

  Serrano Suñer, like his brother-in-law, died peacefully of natural causes. Had Franco fulfilled his pledge to join Germany, the two brothers-in-law might have ended up facing some sort of Nuremberg-style trial or, like Mussolini in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, hanging upside down in a public square. But, even though he lived his last quarter of a century in a democratic country, no one ever tried to bring Serrano Suñer to task. Justice was never called for and, some say, was never done.

  In fact, he had plenty of time to rewrite his own history, as he was sacked by Franco in 1942. Politically speaking, el Caudillo roundly ignored him after that. Some said he got too big for his boots, others that he was punished for cuckolding el Caudillo’s wife’s sister. One historian claims there were signs that he was trying to turn the Falange into ‘a fully-fledged Nazi Party for his own purposes’. Some said that his passion for fascism, Hitler and Mussolini became a problem when the tide of war began to change. Whatever the reason, he went on to paint himself as a force for moderation and, ultimately, as a Franco opponent. ‘He could not bear his own past and fought vainly to reconstruct it,’ historian Javier Tusell said. The truth was that he had been ‘an indispensable instrument in the construction of Franco’s dictatorship in its most totalitarian, fascist moment,’ Tusell said.