Spanish academy refuses to revise official Franco “hagiography”

Conflicting versions of the country's dictatorial past continue to bedevil Spain.

The shadow of Francisco Franco hangs heavy still over Spain. The bloody history of the dictatorship most recently was thrust back into headlines with the conviction last week of Balthasar Garzón, the controversial judge who has been found guilty of illegally monitoring conversations between lawyers and clients in an anti-corruption investigation.

But many suspect the motives for the prosecution. This from a Financial Times editorial:

The relentless pursuit of Mr Garzón, whose troubles began when he ignored a national amnesty to investigate atrocities during the Franco dictatorship, bears the mark of politically-inspired vengeance.

Meanwhile, and implicitly related, the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights has said that Spain is obliged under international law “to investigate past serious human rights violations including those committed during the Franco regime and to prosecute and punish those responsible if there are any still alive”, adding that its amnesty law is “not in conformity with international human rights law” and should be repealed.

The national anguish over its ugly past is also returning to the surface with news that a much-criticised official historical dictionary entry on Franco will not, after all, be revised.

Seven months after the Spanish Royal History Academy acknowledged “legitimate criticisms” over a number of entries in the Spanish Biographical Dictionary, saying that “historical and editorial revision … may need to be incorporated quickly into the digital edition and later paper editions”, not a comma has been changed, writes Peio Riaño in El País.

At the centre of the row is the entry covering the life of Franco, written by Luis Suárez, an 86-year-old Franco apologist who says Franco “became famous for the cold courage which he showed in the field” while a young officer in Africa, adding that his brutal years in power saw him “set up a regime that was authoritarian, but not totalitarian”.

The historian failed to mention the tens of thousands of people killed during the Franco era and at no point did he describe him as a dictator.

Suárez is a compromised author, Riaño argues:

Suárez is a friend of the Franco family and a senior figure in the Brotherhood of the Valley of the Fallen, a group that takes its name from the basilica where the generalísimo, as Suárez prefers to describe him, was buried in 1975.

The group is actively opposed to attempts over the last decade to identify the mass graves of the victims of Franco’s death squads. Historians have estimated that half a million people were killed during the Civil War sparked by Franco’s insurgency against the democratically elected leftwing Republican government.

For many years, Suárez was one of the few historians allowed by Franco’s family to study the personal papers of the man most Spaniards recognise as having been the country’s dictator for 36 years from 1939. In 2005, Suárez published a biography of the dictator.

The head of the Academy has now risked rekindling the national uproar by telling Peio that they “will not censor authors involved in the national biography project”; for “it is very difficult to achieve absolute objectivity.”

And the problem is not limited to the Franco “hagiography”, argues Peio in a piece headlined “R is for refusal, not rectification”:

In other entries consulted in the 20 volumes so far available (up to the letter F), the atrocities committed in the Civil War by Franco’s forces are systematically omitted, while those committed in the Republican zone are given minute attention.