Author: Alasdair Fotheringham
Published on: 20/11/2025 | 00:00:00
AI Summary:
Fermin Roldan Garcia was one of tens of thousands killed by General Francisco Franco’s death squads in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War. His remains were found in a ravine in the village of Viznar, a few kilometres outside Granada. “My brother Juan called me. He’d been the family contact with the archaeological team carrying out the excavation,” Marina said. “When Juan told me my grandfather had been found, my first thoughts were for my [late] father,” Franco began a right-wing military rebellion on July 18, 1936, to put an end to its political and social reforms. The republic finally surrendered on April 2, 1939, leading to his regime. Since the earliest days of the war, a brutal repression of suspected civilian rivals had begun in the Franco-controlled areas of Spain. Spain is grappling with the steady rise of a far-right party, Vox, and nostalgia for the ideals of the dictatorship among young people who did not endure it. A recent CIS poll suggested that 20 percent of those aged 18 to 24 believed the era’s dictatorship was “good” or “very good” Political analysts said Vox’s attitude to the Franco dictatorship shows sympathies for the former regime without any sense of embarrassment. Vox lawmaker Manuel Mariscal boasted in parliament that “thanks to social media, many young people are discovering that the post-Civil War era in Spain was not some dark time but a period of reconciliation towards national unity” Oriol Bartomeus, a research professor at the Institute of Political and Social Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, noted a generational shift in the right-wing electorate towards Vox. On the other side of the political spectrum, left-leaning voters have a critical stance towards the regime. They are the generation who argue the dictatorship can’t be ignored. They’re the ones who say, ‘Let’s open up the roadside graves’ Spain is only now taking concrete action to ban the Francisco Franco National Foundation. In 1975, married women had equivalent legal status to the mentally ill and illiterate. By 1981, there was a divorce law. By 1985, abortion was decriminalised and by 2005 same sex marriage was legalised. Franco himself was exhumed from his own specially built mausoleum outside Madrid. This month, architectural plans were approved for Franco’s former tomb to be remodelled as a politically neutral Civil War heritage museum. Archaeologists are concerned that at some point, a new right-wing government would cut off financing and threaten projects that reckon with the past. “My own great-grandparents were executed against the walls of the city cemetery” About 3,400 people in the early part of the Civil War were reportedly executed against Granada’s cemetery walls. The latest series of excavations this autumn produced 12 more bodies, Carrion says. Marina Roldan’s only impression of her grandfather for years was from the portrait in the bedroom she shared with her grandmother. “I always had the impression that if I did something wrong, in my head he’d tell me off”, she said with a laugh.
Original: 2176 words
Summary: 497 words
Percent reduction: 77.16%
The stunning for dictatorship from ones who never lived through it is simply incredulous to me.
When visiting Leipzig I saw a note in a DDR-museum visitor book where a Spanish visitor wrote that the ddr regime was aan inspiration to them.
I hope they visited the Stasi museum too, but I don’t really think so.
