Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Actually, Serrano Suñer may have had a narrow escape from having his name dragged into court. The people at the Amical de Mauthausen had been plotting to bring him to trial. They could not do so in Spain. So they hoped to have him tried, for crimes against humanity or war crimes, in France. It was from France that thousands of Spanish Republicans, the so-called Rotspanier, the ‘Red Spaniards’ who had fled Spain at the end of the Civil War, were picked up by the Germans during the Second World War and deported to Mauthausen. Here the formula was Erschöpfung durch Arbeit – prisoners should work until they dropped. It was, presumably, an idea that Serrano Suñer and Franco were happy to have applied to their own countrymen. Of 7,000 Spaniards, only 2,191 survived. Brutality, overwork, executions, the gas chamber, suicide, hunger and disease all took their toll. Spanish prisoners sent to work at a nearby mine managed to sneak out official SS camp photographs before the Allies arrived and the camp paperwork was destroyed. The photographs showed, amongst other things, visits by Serrano Suñer’s friend Himmler. They were later used at Nuremberg, where one of the prisoners forced to work as a photographer, the Catalan Francesc Boix, was the only Spanish witness. They helped secure the death penalty for the Austrian SS leader, Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

  Would the French courts, sixty years after the event, really have thought there was enough evidence against Serrano Suñer to try him? In 1998 they had tried and convicted eighty-eight-year-old Maurice Papon, a former senior Vichy official and, later, French cabinet member, for the more clear-cut crime of deporting Jews to German death camps during the Second World War. Did Serrano Suñer know thousands of his countrymen were being sent, mostly to their death, to Nazi prison camps? Did he agree, even suggest, that they should be? Did he care? The questions seem banal when compared to the figures for the number of people killed by Franco’s regime while Serrano Suñer was helping run it. Those numbers are constantly argued over, but they are always counted in the tens of thousands. The most recent estimates, starting in 1936, range from 85,000 to 150,000 (with the correct figure, starting in 1936, considered to be up to 100,000). With Serrano Suñer dead, the people from the Amical admit they did not have much evidence, barring the Himmler meetings, linking him directly to Mauthausen. But nailing Serrano Suñer was not the only, or even main, point of trying to put him on trial. ‘We always thought that, through him, we could have put the whole dictatorship on trial,’ explained one member of the Amical’s committtee.

  Francoism never has been placed on trial (unless the varied judgements of historians count). Silence was at the heart of Spain’s transition to democracy – enshrined in the pacto del olvido. The past, and men like Serrano Suñer, were to be left alone. There were no hearings, no truth commissions and no formal process of reconciliation beyond the business of constructing a new democracy. This was no South Africa, no Chile, no Argentina. The mechanics of repression – police files on suspects and informers – would not be made public, as they would be in East Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic. Nor was Franco’s Spain a defeated Germany or Japan, forced to confront its own guilty past. In fact, it was Franco’s own men who would, largely, oversee and manage the Transición. They would do so in a way that made sure neither they, nor those who came before them, could be called to account for anything they had done on behalf of el Caudillo. ‘The political class turned into angels, proud of the almost mafioso omertà when it came to talking about themselves,’ wrote one of the handful of critics of that transition, Gregorio Morán.

  While the Amical de Mauthausen was plotting to try Serrano Suñer, I found myself, as a journalist, constantly called on to follow the attempts of Spain’s celebrated and controversial Judge Baltasar Garzón to pursue other military strongmen who had killed and tortured. The men being chased by Judge Garzón, an investigating magistrate at Madrid’s powerful Audiencia Nacional, were not, however, Spanish. They were Chilean, Argentine and from several other Latin American countries. Garzón’s pursuit of the military thugs who ruled much of South America in the 1970s and 1980s is a cause célèbre in Spain. He has declared himself competent to pursue them, and is backed by higher courts, because these are ‘international crimes’. The alleged perpetrators had declared amnesties for themselves, thus preventing trials in their own countries.

  The Argentines, looking for a way to pacify their own military, found a perfect description when they named their ‘Ley de Punto Final’, ‘Full Stop Law’, in 1986. The ‘full stop’ was meant to put an end to the story of repression and torture started when the military juntas took over ten years earlier (1976). Spaniards, especially those on the left, condemned Argentina’s punto final law. Few stopped to think, or even realised, that their own amnesty had, in effect, also been a ‘full stop’ law.

  Picking up El Mundo newspaper one morning as Garzón struggled to get government approval for his extradition petitions for thirty-nine presumed Argentine torturers, I found an editorial entitled ‘The laws of impunity continue to benefit the repressors.’ The newspaper was angry that the Argentines might not be extradited, thus ‘creating a serious risk that impunity will triumph’. A few days later it repeated the message: ‘While the criminals remain free, able to rub shoulders with the victims and their families, we must applaud any initiative that seeks to condemn them and reestablish justice.’

  Argentina has since struck down the Punto Final law. Nothing similar happened in Spain. There was no public outpouring of guilt, no formal attempt at naming and shaming – though there is now belated pressure for the creation of a truth commission. The same Brigada Político-Social police agents who regularly beat and tortured their detainees were not only free of any guilt, but could carry on their careers uninterrupted. Infamous Brigada Político-Social torturers – like Roberto Conesa in Madrid or the brothers Creix in Barcelona – continued their careers and went into comfortable retirement. Some even went on to become important police chiefs under Suárez or the Socialist governments that took over in the 1980s. The writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was one of those to fall into the hands of brothers Juan and Vicente Creix in the cells at Barcelona’s Vía Laietana. ‘We, their victims, did not do anything to shine a light on them. The political reforms had already absolved those who owned the Creixes. Would it have been right to pursue their servants?’ he asked. In 2001 one of the more notorious Brigada bosses, Melitón Manzanas, was awarded a posthumous medal. This was gained for having been killed by Basque terror group ETA.

  In some cases the perceived need for wiping out the past was taken literally. In 1977, Interior Minister Rodolfo Martín Villa, a former Francoist civil governor and Movimiento leader in Barcelona, sent out instructions to some civil governors of Spain’s provinces. These were also, still, the regional bosses of the Movimiento Nacional. He told them to destroy the Movimiento’s records.

  The details of exactly what was destroyed, and how, are sketchy. A Civil Guard officer once told me – on second-hand information – that a team of three officers was sent to the central archive of the Civil Guard police in Madrid, sorting out the documents to be burnt. In Barcelona, a truckload of papers – the entire archive – was taken from the Movimiento’s headquarters in the Calle Mallorca to a disused industrial oven in Poble Nov and incinerated. The then civil governor, Salvador Sanchez-Teran, says he contemplated the historical import of what he was doing but decided it was best to destroy the archive. ‘Those archives smelt of the remote past,’ he explains in his memoir of the time. It was 1977, Franco had died less than two years earlier. The Movimiento itself had only just been disbanded. The paper-burners left behind holes that historians, presumably, can no longer fill. These sorts of decisions were no impediment to career-making. Sanchez-Teran is went on to head the popular, church-owned, right-wing COPE radio station.

  I went to Gijón, the port city on the Atlantic coast in Asturias, to hear a story of how some papers had, temporarily, slipped through the net. The man who told the story to me was a retired Civil Guard officer who, from the way he spoke a
bout them, had no sympathy for left-wingers. Fermín had been posted to the Asturian town of Colunga in the late 1980s and had found the records there still intact. His story – uncheckable, but convincingly told – gave me a glimpse of how Francoist repression had worked. There, in different coloured files – white, blue and red – ranking them in degrees of ‘danger’ were the records on those deemed to be subversive. They were written on super-thin papel cebolla, literally ‘onion paper’, which enabled them to make multiple copies. Leafing through them, even Fermín was amazed at just how much information was kept. ‘Some included everything from the person’s wedding day to their first arrest,’ he said.

  There was also a separate section of files on all the police informers, he explained, be they paid soplones, snitches, or members of the then illegal parties and trade unions such as the Communist Comisiones Obreras or the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores. Fermín burned the lot. ‘They were meant to have done it years earlier,’ he said. I wonder how many reputations he, and the other burners, saved.

  The destruction of documents has made reconstructing the mechanisms of Francoist repression much more difficult. It has, especially, helped keep the names of those who took part in it out of the public eye. ‘The active or passive participation of sectors of Spanish society in the repression was more important than we care to remember,’ recall Nicolás Sartorius and Javier Alfaya, two former political prisoners, in a recent study.

  One of the few to have been named as a regime collaborator, however, is none other than Spain’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Camilo José Cela. Cela, the cantankerous and controversial author of The Family of Pascual Duarte and The Hive, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1989 for his ‘rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man’s vulnerability’. He died in 2002. Shortly after his death, historian Pere Ysàs unearthed papers showing that Cela had snitched to the information ministry on those who attended a Spanish writers’ conference in 1963. He told officials that 42 of the 102 signatories of a letter denouncing police violence against striking miners in the northern region of Asturias – which he himself had signed – were members of the Spanish Communist Party. He apparently suggested that some dissident writers could be bribed, tamed and reconverted by the generalísimo’s regime. Cela’s views were contained in an internal report written by an official working for the then information minister. This was the same Manuel Fraga who would become interior minister and, later, head of the Galician government when Spain was a democracy. The novelist claimed, according to the report, that some fellow signatories were ‘totally recoverable [for the regime], either through the stimulus of publishing their work or through bribes’. He suggested the regime should target Pedro Laín Entralgo, a leading intellectual, on the basis that he was a weaker character than others in the group.

  Spaniards argue over exactly when the Transición came to an end. Some say it still has not done so. They point out that the 1978 constitution was written to the ruido de sables, the sound of sabre-rattling from army officers threatening to rebel if too much of Francoism was ditched. The Transición, they say, will not properly be over until it is rewritten.

  One moment that is a candidate for the end of the Transición, however, is the day the sabres stopped being rattled and were actually drawn in anger. Spaniards simply call it ‘El 23-F’. Proof that the ruido de sables was no joke was provided by the comic-looking, but distinctly unfunny, figure of Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero on 23 February 1981. Dressed in the winged, shiny, tricorn patent leather hat of the Civil Guard, a walrus moustache bursting over his upper lip, Tejero stormed Las Cortes that day with 200 men. The deputies were in the middle of an important parliamentary debate that was due to elect Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo to replace Suárez as prime minister for his centre-right party. They took almost all Spain’s deputies hostage.

  The American magazine Time dubbed Tejero ‘the tricorned coupster’. It was a clumsy sort of a coup attempt, and one that has never been fully, or satisfactorily, explained. The ‘coupsters’ failed to turn off one of the television cameras – thus conserving a valuable record of what happened. Tejero’s men peppered the ceiling of the debating ceiling with gunfire while most deputies cowered on the floor in response to Tejero’s shouts of: ‘¡Al suelo!’, ‘To the floor!’ They also, however, shouted ‘¡En nombre del Rey!’, ‘In the King’s name!’

  In Castelldefels, a beachside Barcelona dormitory town, I met a one-legged musician who told me he had taken part in the events of 23-F. His story added an element of comedy to the coup. The musician still had two legs at that time and was doing military service in Madrid. ‘One day we were called out into the parade ground and ordered to get into lorries. We had no idea where we were going. We ended up pulling up in front of Las Cortes. We sat there doing nothing, unsure of what was going on and awaiting orders. I had run out of cigarettes so, when the sergeant wasn’t looking, I sneaked off to buy some. When I got back my unit had disappeared. I asked a policeman where they had gone. He pointed a finger to Las Cortes and said: “In there.” So I went and joined the rest of them.’ I was never sure whether the musician had been part of the coup or part of the forces who took control of the building after Tejero gave himself up. But it was a sign of the confusion that reigned over two days in Madrid, in what was, in reality, a very unfunny episode.

  King Juan Carlos stopped the coup. He ordered wavering generals to stay loyal. He told those who had backed the coup to take their men back to their barracks. In a famous broadcast to the nation he wore the uniform of the commander-in-chief of Spain’s armed forces. He told Spaniards he would not tolerate ‘actions or attitudes of anyone who wants to interrupt by force the democratic process that was decided when, by referendum, the constitution was voted on by the Spanish people’.

  Tejero was soon abandoned to his fate by his fellow plotters. He had no option but to surrender. He and two dozen other plotters were sent to jail. These included General Alfonso Armada, who had been one of the king’s closest advisers, and General Jaime Milans del Bosch, a swaggering hero of the Civil War siege of El Alcázar barracks in Toledo. As military commander of Valencia, he had ordered his tanks out onto the streets. Milans del Bosch was, thankfully, the only one of Spain’s regional military commanders to do so. But it is clear that these were not the only conspirators. A whole raft of other figures, be they military, political or civilian, were simply waiting to see what happened. It was never clear who they were. The plotters obviously believed they had Juan Carlos on their side. There were even rumours that opposition politicians had been ready to form a ‘government of national unity’ under the guidance of a mysterious, and unidentified, coup leader codenamed Elefante Blanco – White Elephant. The coup remains, to this day, one of the great mysteries of recent Spanish history. It has sparked dozens of theories about who was really behind it. ‘I do not understand why this has not been talked about in depth, why all the facts on it have not been published. Because the civilian part has remained silenced,’ ex-El País editor Juan Luis Cebrián says, and Felipe González agrees, in a co-authored book. The Socialist leader, having been held hostage by Tejero, would, indirectly, become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the coup. He won a landslide electoral victory the following year.

  Another question that has not been fully answered is why the plotters believed they were operating on the king’s orders. Did they delude themselves entirely? Or did the king give them reasons to do so? Armada and Milans del Bosch both seemed convinced they had the king’s backing to form a government of national unity led by Armada. ‘I had spoken to the monarch by phone several times and had even visited him,’ Milans del Bosch later claimed in a prison conversation with a controversial former army colonel, Amadeo Martínez Inglés. ‘He always told me I should trust Armada.

  Armada’s mistake was to let the fanatical and excitable Tejero lead the assault on the parliament. He ignored Armada and, instead of negotiating the formation of a g
overnment of national unity, demanded the creation of a military junta. Armada, an old tutor and friend of the king’s, was sentenced to thirty years in prison in 1983. Five years later he received a pardon. This was justified on grounds of ill-health. He went on, however, to enjoy a sprightly old age.

  Phone conversations between the king and Armada show that, whatever might have been said before, Juan Carlos never wavered in his opposition to the coup once it started. ‘I think you’ve gone mad,’ he told him. Juan Carlos told Milans del Bosch the plotters would have to shoot him if they wanted to achieve their aims.

  It was one of various coup plots since Franco’s death, but the only one to make it out of the barracks. There would be rumours of further, later plots, too, that would only come to light much later. But the 23-F attempt finally spelt the end of the pronunciamientos – the uprisings and takeovers by generals – that had wracked Spanish history for 170 years. It is unthinkable, today, that the military could ever rise up in arms again.

  The Tejero coup, which also embarrassed much of the army, had one major effect. It helped catapult the Socialist Party of Felipe González into power and, eventually, provoked the disappearance of Suárez’s UCD party.

  The day Felipe González and his wily, some would say Machiavellian, number two, Alfonso Guerra, leant out of a window at the Hotel Palace, waving a red rose to salute their victory in the 1982 general election, Spanish democracy hit a new gear. González would stay in power for thirteen years. It was a period in which most residues of Francoism were left to die off from natural causes. By the end of it, the Transición really was over.

  Of all the angry words about Franco poured onto pages and pronounced in speeches in the years since his death, none have come from King Juan Carlos. Some modern-day Republicans see this as proof that he does not deserve to reign. In a country where former Franco officials often either gloss over, or completely ignore, their years of loyal service to the Caudillo, Juan Carlos’s attitude is, at least, refreshingly coherent.