by Paul Preston
After the war came the third and most enduring stage. By dint of totalitarian control of the education system and of all the means of public communication, press, radio and the publishing industry, the Franco regime made a powerfully sustained attempt to brainwash its population. An entirely homogeneous and impermeable version of the long-and short-term origins of the Civil War was imposed upon the Spanish people. Through endless reiteration in the press, in schools, in children’s textbooks and from church pulpits, a single historical memory was created and disseminated over three and a half decades. The rewriting of history – and denial of the experiences and recollections of both victors and victims – absolved the military rebels of guilt and sanitized the regime abroad. The process inflicted great long-term damage on Spanish society. To this day, its powerful residual effects hamper the ability of mainstream contemporary society to look upon its recent violent past in an open and honest way that could facilitate the necessary social and political closure.
During the years of the dictatorship, the defeated in Spain had no public right to historical memory, living as they did in a kind of internal exile. Only after the death of Franco and the slow reconstruction of democracy did it become possible for there to be a process of recovery of their historical memory. Of course, there were many historical memories among the defeated Republicans and their descendants, differing according to whether their politics were liberal Republican, Socialist, Communist or anarchist but always with some with elements in common deriving from the suffering and loss imposed by the Francoist repression, whether through execution, imprisonment or exile.
When the grandchildren of the victims of the Francoists finally initiated a nationwide movement for the recovery of historical memory in the year 2000, it provoked a near-hysterical rejection by those who denounced their quest as merely ‘raking up the ashes’. In the first instance, that was understandable because the coming of democracy, quite properly, had not silenced those who had either benefited from the dictatorship or merely been educated to accept its monolithic version of the nation’s historical memory. However, the ferocity of the denunciation of the quest for the recovery of memory reflected something else, something very profound. This is the principal consequence of the process of brainwashing, what in Spain is called sociological Francoism, and it lives on in the democratic Spain of today just as sociological communism exists in the countries of the old Soviet bloc. The venom of the denunciations of the quest for the truth about the repression derives from the fact that there were also many historical memories among the victors and their descendants that have had to be repressed by the need to safeguard a false memory. The recovery of memory is distressing because it challenges the integrity of the reassuringly unified but ultimately false memories upon which the regime was reliant for its survival.
Despite the massive operation to justify the innocent blood shed because of the military rebellion, some of the Caudillo’s collaborators seem to have slept uneasily after the war. Inevitably, there is little evidence of the psychological repercussions of all that went before. It is especially difficult to know anything regarding the mental state of those who committed atrocities in the Republican zone. Those who did not escape into exile were either tried during the war itself by the Republican authorities or else afterwards by the Francoists. In the confessions extorted under torture by the Francoist police, such as that of Felipe Sandoval, there are declarations of remorse. However, taking into account the murderous repression which encompassed virtually everyone still in Spain who might have been guilty of something (as well as many who had done no wrong), it is not surprising that there is so little by way of free expressions of guilt. Nevertheless, it would be reasonable to suppose that at least some of those responsible for crimes on both sides might have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder or guilt.
In contrast to the paucity of evidence from the Republican side, perhaps because the victors were able to enjoy the fruits of their work for decades after the war, rather more of them seem to have reflected on what had happened and others seem to have suffered qualms of conscience. The most significant recognition by a Francoist that what was done, starting long before the military coup, might have been wrong came from Ramón Serrano Suñer, both in numerous interviews and in his memoirs where he described the trials in the rebel zone during the war and in all of Spain after 1939 as ‘back-to-front justice’ (la justicia al revés).2
One of the most celebrated cases of remorse was that of the poet Dionisio Ridruejo, who was a friend both of Serrano Suñer and of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and one of the founders of the Falange. In the late 1940s, he became disenchanted with the corruption of the Franco regime and reneged on his past. In the 1960s, he began to write critically about what had happened in the Civil War. He then formed a political association in timid opposition to the regime. An erstwhile comrade, Eugenio Montes, said to Ridruejo: ‘When someone like you has led hundreds of compatriots to their deaths, and then reaches the conclusion that the struggle was a mistake, it is just not enough to found a political party. A believer should become a monk; an agnostic should shoot himself.’3
A faster change of heart than Ridruejo’s came about in the case of Father Juan Tusquets. In the autumn of 1938, on the eve of the great rebel offensive against Catalonia, Franco and Serrano Suñer asked Tusquets to suggest names to head the institutions to be set up by the occupying forces. His advice led to the selection of the future Mayor of Barcelona, Miquel Mateu, and other important appointees.4 Despite such influence, after the Civil War, Tusquets surprisingly turned his back on preferment, declining both Serrano Suñer’s offer of the post of Director General of Press and Propaganda and Franco’s invitation for him to become religious adviser to the Higher Council of Scientific Research.5 Since, in previous years, Tusquets had revelled in his closeness to the epicentres of power and had shamelessly sought to accumulate salaries, the refusal of two such important and well-paid posts is noteworthy.
There are reasons for suspecting that the brutality of the Francoist occupation of Catalonia provoked some remorse in Tusquets for his part in fomenting the hatred that drove it. He began to construct a highly sanitized account of his role in the war and claimed later that he had tried to get people he knew out of concentration camps. This may be true but no evidence has come to light. Moreover, he maintained that he prevented major Catalan treasures such as the Archive of the Crown of Aragon and the Library of Catalonia from suffering the fate of so many other Catalan institutions whose books, documents and papers were seized and taken to Salamanca, a process which he had encouraged.6 Most implausibly of all, he alleged that it was not himself but his side-kick, Joaquim Guiu, who had been obsessive about Freemasonry.7 He denied any participation in the repression, claiming mendaciously that he had refused to let his lists of names be used by the military authorities. He denounced his wartime collaborator Mauricio Carlavilla as ‘a passionate Nazi’ who invented his material.8 In the light of these untruths, is not unreasonable to speculate that he was ashamed and horrified by the practical consequences of his anti-Masonic and anti-Jewish campaigns. Instead of accepting official preferment, he returned to religious education.
There is some second-hand evidence of the perpetrators of atrocities suffering some sort of psychosomatic illness or other distress as a result of repressed guilt. One of the men involved in the murder of Lorca, for instance, suffered in a way that suggested an element of remorse. Juan Luis Trescastro Medina died as an alcoholic in 1954 having spent years tormented by the memory of the atrocities in which he had been involved.9 In Lora del Río, one of the town’s three most prominent assassins had to leave his home because of the collective hostility of neighbours. When a second died, no one from the town was willing to carry his coffin. The third used to recount with guffaws how those that he shot in the stomach would first jump and then be doubled over. He himself died, doubled over in pain, from stomach cancer. Many fellow citizens decided that this was a form of divi
ne retribution. They saw the same in the case of a trigger-happy assassin who later lost his thumb and trigger-finger in an industrial accident. There were popular claims that other perpetrators, on their deathbeds, were to be heard screaming, ‘They’re coming to get me!’ In Uncastillo in Zaragoza, it was believed that the Falangist who mutilated the corpse of Antonio Plano, the Mayor, lived in similar torment, terrified that he would be murdered in his bed in revenge for what he had done.10
It is impossible to say whether some of the exiguous evidence that exists derives from popular fantasy. The construction of the popular memory/mythology of those who suffered the repression may well have been fuelled by a desire to see the later misfortunes of the perpetrators as their just deserts on the basis of ‘the punishment fits the crime’. For instance, regarding Fuente de Cantos in Badajoz, there is a persistent belief that two of the men who played a particularly vicious part in the repression died with their consciences tormented by what they had done and by the hatred felt towards them in the town. One was a man notorious for denunciations which led to executions. He lived happily, apparently, during the entire period of the Franco regime, but when it became clear that the dictator was on his deathbed, he began to fear that the left was going to seek revenge and he committed suicide. The other case concerns the local head of the Falange, Sixto Castillón, the man that detained the Mayor José Lorenzana who was shortly afterwards ritually murdered in the town square. The popular recollection of Castillón is of a bestial individual who had killed many people including a child. After the war, he died in Seville. According to the popular legend, he died in an agony of remorse, tortured by fears of reprisals and by visions of the ghosts of his victims, constantly calling out the name of Lorenzana and unable to sleep because of hearing the persistent crying of the child that he had murdered.11
More dramatic was a case in Ubrique (Cádiz). Local legend recounts a particularly gruesome tale of apparently psychosomatic illness provoked by guilt. A few days after the military coup, a group of Falangist assassins shot a number of Republican prisoners on the outskirts of the town. Among the first was the twelve-year-old son of a Gypsy named Diego Flores. One of them mocked Flores’s distress at witnessing the murder of his son, saying: ‘What now? Are you going to put the Gypsy’s curse on us?’ To which Flores replied: ‘Yes, you bastard, I am. May your flesh fall from you in pieces and may you die in atrocious pain.’ This man, who became rich from the properties that he stole from his victims, died in the late 1970s from a hideously painful form of leprosy.12
In Cantalpino, a village twenty-five miles north-east of Salamanca, where there had been no incidents before the war, rightists murdered twenty-two men and a woman named Eladia Pérez, as well as raping a number of other young women. When they came to bury Eladia, the hole in the ground was not big enough and, rather than dig more, the man who had shot her simply cut off her head with a spade. According to villagers, he was Anastasio González, ‘El Cagalubias’, who, years later, died delirious, screaming for Eladia to be pulled off him.13
Another case of repentance in Salamanca was inadvertently triggered by one of José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s friends, Francisco Bravo, who wrote an article in La Gaceta Regional of Salamanca in celebration of the coup of 18 July 1936. A couple of days later, an anonymous reply arrived at the newspaper’s offices. It came from one of Bravo’s collaborators in the repression:
You don’t remember me. I was one of your comrades who swallowed the bait of killing people for the sake of it. I killed only five and I couldn’t continue participating in all that horror. To this day, I have those five brothers on my mind. Yes, even though it might surprise you, I call them brothers; they were human beings, creatures of God that I killed and I still want to believe that I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t kill in that way for God or for Spain. I leave it to you, if you’re able, if you have a conscience, if you are a believer, to choose the correct adjective for those victims … You should have said more in your article about everything that happened just in the area where you were the head of a Falangist militia. Maybe you’ve forgotten all that. Your last breath might be peaceful, without regrets, just like someone who did only good and knew nothing about hatred or revenge. Can you tell me that you are such a person? Comrade, I want a quick death. I live as a wreck, followed by the spectre of those whose memory I have been unable to erase for twenty-seven years. Forgive? I doubt that our victims can forgive us.14
In the town of Pozoblanco in Córdoba, the repression was particularly virulent. Three of those who took part later committed suicide. Juan Félix, ‘El Pichón’, threw himself from a moving train. Another, a lawyer, Juan Calero Rubio, killed himself apparently overcome with guilt about his role in the terror. Acting as a military judge, Calero had been responsible for hundreds of death sentences carried out against prisoners from several towns. He had also ordered the torture of many prisoners and had often taken part in the brutal beatings. In 1940, when the death sentence imposed on the postmaster of Villanueva was commuted, he ordered his immediate execution and then claimed that the pardon had arrived too late. The relative of the condemned man, an army officer, who had arranged the pardon, made an official complaint and, while awaiting trial, Calero poisoned himself on 28 August 1940, aged fifty-three. Another man who had taken part in many executions, a lieutenant of the Civil Guard known as ‘Pepinillos’, shot himself in the head at a dance held in the nearby village of Espiel to celebrate the outbreak of the Civil War.15 Another example of a suicide allegedly motivated by guilt is that of a man called Ortiz who was one of those responsible for much of the repression in San Fernando in Cádiz. Ortiz hung himself.16
The brother of Fernando Zamacola, the leader of the notorious Falangist gang known as the ‘Lions of Rota’ responsible for numerous atrocities in the province of Cádiz, spoke in the 1950s to the psychiatrist Carlos Castilla del Pino. Referring to the social injustice that prevailed in Franco’s Spain, he said: ‘And it was for this that we had to kill. Because I have killed. I’ve left more than one corpse in the ditches at Puerto de Tierra, lots in fact, I don’t know exactly how many, but I have killed and I’ve watched them die, and now those children are driving me mad. I have nightmares about them.’17
Segundo Viloria, the man regarded by the family of Amparo Barayón as the person who had actually killed her, was also denounced by Pilar Fidalgo as guilty of multiple sexual crimes against imprisoned women. According to Miguel Ángel Mateos, the official chronicler of Zamora, Viloria was guilty of horrible crimes and worthy of psychiatric study. The Barayón family claimed that Viloria ‘died insane in a mental hospital’.18
Finally, there is the case of the Conde de Alba de Yeltes, Gonzalo de Aguilera, the landowner from Salamanca who boasted of shooting six of his workers. After the Civil War, he retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel and returned to his estates and his books. He had difficulty readjusting to civilian life, although he became a well-known ‘character’ in Salamanca. He was an assiduous member of a group (tertulia), consisting mainly of doctors, who used to meet at the Café Novelty in the Plaza Mayor. His conversation was considered fascinating even if his irritability did not encourage friendship or intimacy.19 As he got older, he became increasingly abrasive and bad tempered. He neglected his estates and his house, both of which were badly run down.
He developed persecution mania. His wife Magdalena Álvarez, aged seventy-two, became so afraid of his violent rages that, in late 1963, for her own protection, she asked her two sons to come and live at home at the estate near Matilla de los Caños in the province of Salamanca. The elder son, Gonzalo, aged forty-seven, was a retired cavalry captain who had been seriously wounded in the Civil War. While in hospital, he had fallen in love with Concepción Lodeiro López, a nurse at the military hospital in Lugo. Aguilera had reacted furiously to his son’s relationship with a social inferior and had forbidden them to marry. They did so regardless and settled in Lugo, where they had a daughter, Marianela. The younger
son, Agustín, a thirty-nine-year-old farmer, also had a difficult relationship with his father. Leaving home, he had settled first in Zamora, where he had married Angelines Núñez. More recently, they had moved to Jérez de la Frontera with their two daughters and young son. Given the inconvenience for their own families and aware of the irascibility of their father, the two sons reluctantly agreed to spend as much time as possible at the estate watching over him.
After a year, things had not improved. The family reluctantly contemplated having Gonzalo declared mentally incapacitated and placing him in psychiatric care. For fear of scandal and with a natural horror of the head of the household being declared insane, they hesitated. Finally, they put the matter in the hands of a lawyer in Salamanca. Because Gonzalo now suffered bronchial problems and rarely attended the gatherings in the café in the Plaza Mayor, it was possible to fabricate the pretext of a visit of two medical friends in order to have him diagnosed. One, a psychiatrist, and another, a doctor, reached the conclusion that Gonzalo was paranoiac and the process began to have him committed. The legal procedure, however, was lengthy and tortuous.
Gonzalo became so difficult that his sons rearranged the house to provide him with a separate apartment with his own television and his books. They hid all the many guns and knives that, as an assiduous hunter, he possessed. He believed himself to have been kidnapped and imprisoned by his family, even writing a letter to this effect to the judicial authorities in Salamanca, at the beginning of August 1964. He had wild fits of rage, shouting threats and insults from his solitary apartment. He would occasionally find weapons and, in mid-August, his sons took a flick-knife away from him.
