Plummeting prices are being blamed alternatively on speculation and on an excess of supply
elpais.com/elpais/2019/07/19/inenglish/1563550166_050699.html?ssm=FB_CM_EN&fbclid=IwAR1sBSw_C-PG2n8oozWIqHPFRkTntAdmM4ZyIw64itLH6EcIzAnvIRlIZXM

Spain remains the world’s top exporter of olive oil, and 52% of domestic production is sold abroad. Paradoxically, Italy is the biggest buyer of Spanish oil: it has purchased 107,000 tons so far this year. Much of that is bottled and sold to third countries with labels suggesting an Italian origin for marketing purposes.

Meanwhile, the Spanish Association of Distributors, Self-service and Supermarkets (ASEDAS) denies that there is anything odd influencing the price of olive oil, and insists it complies strictly with the contracts signed with the producers. This association – one of three in charge of Spain’s olive oil distribution – also blames the drop in prices on the products’ global position.

Despite the huge outcry at the demonstration in Seville, the sector remains divided. The Food and Agriculture Cooperatives federation and the ASAJA union did not join the demonstration, and they believe the collective protest was a mistake. Jaime Martínez, managing director of the federation of 350 cooperatives, leans towards measures in partnership with the authorities in order to revert the situation.

In a move in this direction, the Spanish minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Luis Planas, aims to draft a proposal that would encourage a self-regulated supply – in other words, the seasonal storage of oil, a measure that is already being implemented in the wine sector. And the government will ask for updated baseline thresholds to set this private storage in motion.

This measure would apply to harvests that produce an excess of oil and a resulting drop in prices, allowing the additional oil to be taken off the market, with Brussels paying the growers for the surplus. The baseline threshold is currently fixed at €1.80 per kilo, an indicator that has not been changed in the last 20 years. The olive producers want it to be bumped up to €2.50, which would at least cover the cost of production.

CRISTIAN LÓPEZ
El Pais in English, 24 July 2019
English version by Heather Galloway.

Sidelining of Podemos leader paves way for administration headed by Socialist Workers’ leader Pedro Sanchez

Spain is likely to install a leftwing government this week after Pablo Iglesias, leader of the anti-austerity Podemos, agreed to step aside to enable a coalition between his party and the Socialist Workers’ party, led by Pedro Sánchez.



Months of wrangling since April’s general election came to a head last week when Sánchez said he was prepared to form a coalition on the condition that Iglesias did not have a ministerial position. He said Iglesias was “the principal obstacle” to agreeing on a coalition, adding that other Podemos members would be offered cabinet positions. Among those tipped to join the government is Irene Montero, the party’s number two, who is also Iglesias’s partner.


“We are convinced we are going to reach an agreement in response to the millions of people who voted on 28 April for a progressive government,” Adriana Lastra, the Socialist party spokeswoman, said.


“Over the next few days we will work with discretion and loyalty with the aim that next week the country will have a functioning government,” she added. “We are going to talk about the program and the reforms the country needs.”


Sánchez’s stated reason for not wanting Iglesias in the government is the latter’s support for a referendum on Catalan independence and his insistence that the leaders who have been in custody for nearly two years while on trial for their part in the unilateral declaration of independence in 2017 are political prisoners.

Last week the Catalan president, Quim Torra, said his party would support Sánchez’s investiture only if he promised to hold a referendum, to which Sánchez reiterated that a referendum would be unconstitutional. Sánchez, dismissed by many as a handsome guy in a suit, has proved a much wilier politician than most suspected. First, he took everyone by surprise when his vote of no confidence brought down Mariano Rajoy’s corrupt government last year. Now, after he risked dragging the nation into its fourth general election in four years, the Podemos leader ended up the first to blink.

The Socialists won 123 seats in the election, 38 more than in 2016, while Podemos won 42. This leaves the coalition 11 seats short of the 176 needed for an absolute majority. Sánchez is hoping to make up the numbers with Basque nationalists and independents, without having to rely on Catalan separatist parties.

The first vote on the investiture will be held on Wednesday. If Sánchez fails to secure an absolute majority there will be a second vote the following day. On that occasion he only needs a simple majority in order to form a government.

Assuming it all goes ahead, the coalition government will have to deal with a country that is still hauling itself out of recession. Overall unemployment stands at around 14%, and more than twice that for 18-24-year-olds. Meanwhile, there is growing unrest in Madrid and Barcelona over soaring rents, street crime and over-tourism, not to mention the perennial and intractable Catalan question.

But Sánchez is ambitious, both for himself and his country, which he wants to position as a leading force in southern Europe. After years of stagnation, Spain is now waiting to see if his campaign slogan “make it happen” has any substance.

​www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/21/spain-socialist-government-sanchez-iglesias-catalonia?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3d7UuIZDuUgrymQV09lYTkQQNCiEEw0QcW4UQZDIqabk6cUuoQ-wB3xBI

Raising wage floors is one way to reduce inequality and stimulate recovery in Europe. A big uplift in the Spanish minimum wage this year provides a test bed.

The Socialist-led Spanish government which emerged last summer approved by the end of 2018 a hike in the statutory minimum wage. This was agreed with the left-wing Podemos party, as part of an attempt to secure the parliamentary support needed for the passing of the proposed 2019 budget—although failure to do so issued in the April election.

The new minimum wage came into force on January 1st, rising from 14 monthly payments of €735.90 per year to €900 for those in full-time employment. This entailed an increase of 22 per cent—the highest in more than four decades in Spain and the most  significant among EU countries in 2019.

Loss of purchasing power
The elevation was framed as a tool to counterbalance the loss of purchasing power among those employees who had suffered the worst consequences of the economic crisis. Although there had been prior increases in 2017 and 2018, the rise implemented in 2019 constituted a more determined policy approach.

The crisis had a strong and protracted impact on the Spanish labour market. Real wages had progressed much less among those employees with the lowest wages during the boom and after the crisis they were worst hit—especially the lowest quintile, whose wages continued to decline until at least 2016 (Figure 1).









Figure 1: Evolution of average real wages by wage quintiles (index: 2004=100)
Spanish minimum wage
Source: EU-SILC

Is the Spanish statutory minimum wage high? It does not seem so even at its new level (Table 1). Spain ranks eighth among the 22 EU countries which implement a statutory minimum wage and would occupy a more intermediate position if those countries which do not were included—since they have relatively high wage floors negotiated by social partners.

Table 1: Statutory minimum wage across EU countries (prorated over 12 monthly payments)
€ (2019) Percentage of the average wage (2017)
Luxembourg 2,071 42.7
Ireland 1,656 38.3
Netherlands 1,616 39.3
Belgium 1,594 39.8
Germany 1,557 42.5
France 1,521 49.9
UK 1,453 44.2
Spain 1,050 33.9
Slovenia 887 48.0
Malta 758 44.4
Portugal 700 43.5
Greece 684 32.8
Lithuania 555 43.4
Estonia 540 35.2
Poland 523 43.6
Slovakia 520 38.2
Czechia 519 35.4
Croatia 506 41.5
Hungary 464 40.2
Romania 446 43.6
Latvia 430 38.7
Bulgaria 286 43.4
Sources: Eurostat and OECD

Spain is at the bottom in terms of the proportion the minimum wage represents of the average wage. Apart from the fact that its minimum wage level is not high, this is explained by Spain being one of the EU countries where a smaller proportion of employees receive wages around the level of the statutory minimum wage, due to higher collectively-agreed minima in various sectors. Therefore, while the recent increase brings Spain more in line with other advanced EU economies, it does not directly affect large swaths of the workforce.

Estimated impact
The impact of the new minimum wage on the wages of the different types of Spanish workers can only be estimated for now using prospective analysis, as done here using the latest available pan-European wage microdata (the 2017 wave of the EU-SILC survey). These show that in 2016 only 7 per cent of employees earned wages falling between the statutory minimum wages of 2018 and 2019. Since Spain had almost 16 million employees, this means approximately 1.13 million would have been directly affected by the 2019 rise (the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility, using recent national statistical sources, estimated that 8 per cent of employees, around 1,2 million, would be affected).

The new Spanish minimum wage
by Carlos Vacas-Soriano on 16th July 2019

 SPAIN SECOND ONLY TO CAMBODIA FOR MISSING PERSONS AS MASS WOMEN’S GRAVE IS SET TO BE OPENED IN ANDALUCIA


By Heather Galloway,  The Olive Press, 6 July 2019

www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2019/07/06/remembering-the-roses-spain-second-only-to-cambodia-for-missing-persons-as-mass-womens-grave-is-set-to-be-opened-in-andalucia/?fbclid=IwAR3o65cd3JsHwjRDUFxO7chvP8f3k2a7nWjGKPsbHt_yeQyzDLow618tbr0

 -
6 Jul, 2019
MEMORIAL: To women killed under Franco regime


The 16 mothers, daughters and grandmothers rounded up that day were never seen again.

That is until this month, when a mass grave is expected to be opened in the nearby village of Higuera de la Sierra.

It is the fifth unmarked mass burial site to be opened in Andalucia over the last few years and archaeologists are expecting to find the bodies of women, who were most likely tortured and raped before being killed.

“They were rounded up in 1937, when Franco’s forces made a concerted effort to find the locals who had deserted villages across Andalucia,” explains Cecilio Gordillo, the driving force behind the organisation Todos los Nombres.

For the last 13 years he has been investigating the fate of the ‘disappeared’ victims of the Civil War, a third of whom were buried in Andalucia.  

“There was a wave of repression against the women who lived in Andalucia,” the former bus driver told the Olive Press.

“Western Andalucia is the only place in Spain where they have found graves filled exclusively with women and Zufre will be the fifth such grave, though it is suspected there may be a few men in there too.”

However, he warned: “At least two graves believed to have contained the remains of executed women were empty so you never know what you will find until they are opened.”

He, along with the CGT-A Andalucia Working Group for the Recovery of Social Historical Memory were given the go-ahead last year and it is still expected to go ahead from July 15, despite the new right-wing PP-Ciudadanos-Vox coalition proposing to cut the historical memory budget.

However the dig will be highly controversial and emotive, as they usually are.

“We are having a meeting this Thursday to discuss the exact timescale,” confirmed local Higuera archaeologist Jesus Roman, who is involved in the dig.

The move comes just weeks after the five judges in Madrid postponed moving the body of General Franco from Spain’s huge Valle de los Caidos memorial, which is meant to be for victims of both sides of the war.

It would be something of a disaster to not afford these women a decent proper burial, believes Gordillo.

He explained that most of the 16 women knew this was to be a one-way ticket, despite their innocence.

One of them, 62-year-old Alejandra Garzón Acemel, aka La Pistola, turned to embrace a friend, whose name was omitted, crying: “Carmen, my dear, we are not going to see each other again.”


Few of them were guilty of anything more than being members of the UGT socialist trade union with some of them having family members already jailed for being linked to it. 

The wave of terror launched on the women of Andalucia however, was a strategy for hunting down their menfolk. 

“They were trying to make them reveal the whereabouts of a brother or a husband,” adds Gordillo.

“Or they believed that by torturing and executing the women, the men would emerge from their hiding places in the sierra.”

As they trudged up the hill to Don Angel’s medical clinic, where the truck waited, some passed their husbands, while others gazed longingly at their children who had gathered as usual around the local fountain to play. 

Apparently, on seeing their mothers’ hands tied and their faces streaked with tears, the children turned their heads away.

Though the truck set off in the direction of Aracena, it apparently drove only as far as Higuera de la Sierra, just 12 km down the road. 

The centre of the town, which like Zufre had around 1,000 inhabitants, was generally lively in the evenings with children playing in the square and elderly men slamming down dominoes and cards.

But by 7pm when the truck drove in, the light was fading fast and many had already gone indoors, leaving few witnesses to the atrocity that ensued more than 80 years ago.

However, Rosario, one living witness, did recall the macabre scene. 

“A truck stopped loaded with women in front of the bar at 7pm,” she explained in her testimony to the association. “Their cries were chilling. They were told to get down and they filed along the street that leads to the graveyard. 

“It’s a short stretch; maybe some of them didn’t know where the street would take them, but others would have known. ‘In line, that way!’ their executioners shouted. 

“The cries of those wretched souls could be heard across the whole town. It gave you goosebumps. The people of Higuera were terrified. 

“The women who refused to climb down from the truck where dragged off it, with kicks and a bayonet. Some may have arrived almost dead. 

“The offloading took place quickly and they shot them at the gate to the cemetery. 

“The old iron gate, which has been painted hundreds of times since, is still marked by the impact of the bullets. 

“They buried them in a very deep grave that was already open, where they had already thrown bodies of others they had executed. They buried them in layers. 

“They scattered soil on the last bodies in, then added more bodies.”

Ironically today at the entrance to the cemetery there is a headstone in memory of Franco’s Civil Guards who lost their lives in the attack on their barracks by the militias in 1936. 

Of the poor women who died, there is precisely nothing to remember them by.

The youngest of the women was 30, the oldest 62. 

Only seven of the 16 gunned down by the firing squad were officially recorded as dead. 

It would be another 42 years before the fate of the others was even registered.

“My father was just seven when they took his mother,” explains Josefa Salguero, the granddaughter of Carlota Garzón Núñez, who was just 47 at the time of her death.

“I live in America and hope I will soon be able to visit the grave where my grandmother is.”

Higuera de la Sierra’s Culture Councillor, Maria del Prado confirmed the town hall had conceded permission to look for the grave.

“We are not otherwise involved. But it is hoped that if the grave is found it will bring peace to the families,” she said.

Certainly, it will address a painful chapter in the history of both Higuera and Zufre, closing this historic chapter in the history of the area.

“People have been saying when we open the first mass grave, you’re going to start another Civil War,” says Gordillo. 

“Well, a lot of these graves have already been opened and absolutely nothing has happened.”

He continues: “We have a Christian culture and burying bodies is a Christian ceremony is the right thing to do.”

Spain is said to be second only to Cambodia when it comes to ‘missing’ persons. 

By July, Todos los Nombres will have 100,000 names of the estimated 114,000 on its website.

As Gordilla points out: “We send a special division of the Guardia Civil to search for bodies in Yugoslavia and Guatemala. 

“We have budgets for archaeologists seeking Pharaohs in Egypt, but what about our own grandfathers? It is time to deal with this once and for all.”

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006dss













A must listen to  radio programme, part of the Melvyn Bragg series "In our time" .
Three Lorca experts discuss the poetry, the plays, the liife and the times of Federico Garcia Lorca

In Our Time
​
​Lorca
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), author of Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, who mixed the traditions of Andalusia with the avant-garde. He found his first major success with his Gypsy Ballads, although Dali, once his close friend, mocked him for these, accusing Lorca of being too conservative. He preferred performing his poems to publishing them, and his plays marked a revival in Spanish theatre. He was captured and killed by Nationalist forces at the start of the Civil War, his body never recovered, and it's been suggested this was punishment for his politics and for being openly gay. He has since been seen as the most important Spanish playwright and poet of the last century.

With

Maria Delgado
Professor of Creative Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London

Federico Bonaddio
Reader in Modern Spanish at King’s College London

And

Sarah Wright
Professor of Hispanic Studies and Screen Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

LINKS AND FURTHER READING
Maria Delgado at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London

Federico Bonaddio at King's College London

Sarah Wright at Royal Holloway, University of London

‘Memory, Silence and Democracy in Spain: Federico García Lorca, the Spanish Civil War and the Law of Historical Memory’ by Maria M. Delgado - Theatre Journal, vol. 67, May 2015

Federico García Lorca – Wikipedia

 

READING LIST:

Reed Anderson, Federico García Lorca (Macmillan, 1984)

Paul Binding, Lorca: The Gay Imagination (GMP Publishers, 1985)

Federico Bonaddio (ed.), A Companion to Federico García Lorca (Tamesis, 2007)

Gerald Brenan, The Face of Spain (first published 1951; Serif, 2010), especially the chapter ‘Granada’

Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca (ed. Christopher Maurer), Sebastian’s Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Maria Delgado, Federico García Lorca (Routledge, 2008)

Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: The Theatre Beneath the Sand (Marion Boyars, 1980)

Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: Living in the Theatre (Peter Owen, 2003)

Ian Gibson, The Assassination of Federico García Lorca (Penguin, 1983)

Ian Gibson, The Death of Lorca (J. P. O’Hara, 1973)

Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life (Pantheon Books, 1989)

Federico García Lorca (ed. Christopher Maurer), The Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)

Federico García Lorca (trans. Christopher Maurer), Deep Song and Other Prose (Marion Boyars, 1982)

Jonathan Mayhew, Lorca’s Legacy: Essays in Interpretation (Routledge, 2018)

Paul McDermid, Love, Desire and Identity in the Theatre of Federico García Lorca (Tamesis, 2007)

Rafael Martínez Nadal, Lorca’s The Public: A Study of His Unfinished Play (El Publico) and of Love and Death in the Work of Federico García Lorca (Calder & Boyars, 1974)

Paul Julian Smith, The Theatre of García Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Leslie Stainton, Lorca: A Dream of Life (Bloomsbury, 1998)

Sarah Wright, The Trickster-Function in the Theatre of García Lorca (Tamesis, 2000)

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006dss

ilva believes that the lack of funding is no excuse and asks that, besides visiting the grave of Manuel Azaña and commemorating the exiled Spaniards, a tribute should be organized within Spain to the people who fought against the dictatorship.

Both Silva and Casanova agree that education is fundamental, and that the repression of the Franco regime must be included in textbooks. “If the victims of Francoism go to a high school to give a talk, they call it indoctrination, but nobody argues when a victim of the Holocaust does it in Germany,” they agree.

When Garzón – who was still sitting in the High Court at the time – received the complaints by victims’ associations and he asked for a census of victims to begin judicial proceedings, he was told it did not exist. “It was a real shock,” he says. “It was deeply painful and even now I feel a deep sense of unease about the fact this census does not exist. The administration’s indifference during so many years is outrageous.”

Justice Minister Delgado believes the first step is to recognize the dimensions of what happened. “We have had a very biased version of events and we have to bring a global focus to memory, in a very educational way,” she says. “The end of this process will be normality, when all politicians accept the need to explore that part of our history and when they understand the families who want to recover the remains of their loved ones. The end of this will come when there is a museum of memory that can be visited by people of different political persuasions.”

For now, Franco’s descendants have challenged the State in order to prevent the exhumation of the dictator’s body, which lies in the Valley of the Fallen – a move that would be a first step toward changing the significance of the monument.

Given that the Supreme Court blocked the route to investigate these crimes in Spain, former judge Garzón adds justice to the list of pending issues. And as far as he is concerned, justice comes in many guises, from jail sentences to a truth commission that also figures in the current government’s plans.

“On a small scale, at least I succeeded in enabling some of the victims that I summoned as witnesses to tell their stories in court,” he says. “That has been the only time [they have been able to do that]. But if there is one thing I have learned over the course of my lengthy professional life is that the hearts of the victims never forget. This need to let the truth be known does not dim with time.”

“It makes me feel like walking out of the chamber. I’ve been on the point of going out for a drink and coming back because it all seemed so absurd,” was one comment. Another: “This bill is irrelevant and deceptive. It seriously divides people, revives hatreds, fuels the desire for revenge…”

These remarks and others like them could be heard in 2006 inside Spain’s lower house of parliament during the debate on the Historical Memory Law – which, according to a Popular Party (PP) senator who vetoed it, caused more controversy and sparked more passionate feelings than any other piece of legislation in recent years.

Only the conservative PP and the Catalan Republican Party (ERC) voted against the bill – the former because they did not consider it necessary, and the latter because they felt it did not go far enough. During a political term in which parliament greenlighted anti-tobacco laws, immigrant naturalization, same-sex marriage, assisted reproduction and equality legislation, the bill that trumped the rest for controversy, as far as the PP is concerned, is one about the past. And the controversy rages on.

Not a day goes by when some member of the PP or Vox does not use the Historical Memory Law to attack the Socialist Party (PSOE), which brought the bill to Congress. “They are a bunch of mossbacks who are stuck in their grandfather’s war and constantly going on about this grave or that,” said Pablo Casado shortly after becoming the PP party leader. “There are no more tombs left for them to visit, or more divisions to open among the Spanish,” he said of Pedro Sánchez after he had visited the grave of Manuel Azaña, the last president of the Spanish Republic between 1936 and 1939.
The PP leader believes the law is “harmful” and a “partisan rewriting of history.” He has entrusted a counter bill, called the Concord Law, to Adolfo Suárez Illana, the eldest son of Adolfo Suárez, who served as prime minister during the transition to democracy following Franco’s death in November 1975. Suárez Illana has said that the Spanish owe some of their democracy to Franco because “if he had not wanted the Transition to be done as it was, it would not have been done that way.”

Politicians on the right are basing their issues with historical memory legislation on three premises: that it means the “annihilation of the Transition;” that it divides the Spanish people, and that it is trying “to rewrite history.”

However, the first paragraph of the Historical Memory Law is a tribute to the transitional period between the death of Franco and the adoption of a constitutional democracy; reinstating the rights of the losing side and their descendants began with the Transition. In response to their other arguments, hundreds of war graves have been opened since the year 2000 without a single incident – in some cases with members of the PP present and even on occasion with that party’s financial backing. For now, the closest thing to the rewriting of history has been the controversial paragraph in which the Supreme Court referred to Franco in a legal decision as “the head of state in 1936,” the year the Civil War began, when Franco was still the leader of the military coup.

When Franco died, widows who had not received a pension after their husbands’ deaths started to get paychecks. And these same widows began to open the unmarked graves where their husbands lay without the help of scientists, which is how it is done today; instead, they were occasionally aided by priests.

The balance sheet of historical memory in the last 40 years shows, as the United Nations has indicated on a number of occasions, that the basics of historical memory are yet to be tackled, namely recovering the remains of those who were executed by firing squads, and whose bodies still lie in mass graves and roadside ditches. After Cambodia, Spain ranks second as the country with the highest number of ‘disappeared’ people: 114,000 according to historians and relatives’ estimates.

Myth 1. Annihilating the Transition
“It is an attempt at a controlled annihilation of what the Transition stood for,” said the PP during the debate on the historical memory bill, which was passed in 2007.

The fifth word of the bill is in fact “concord” – concordia – the same name the PP has given to its own draft bill, which the conservatives hope will replace the current law. In its first introductory paragraphs, the law says: “The spirit of the Transition gives meaning to the most productive constitutional model of coexistence that we have ever enjoyed, and it explains the various measures and rights that have been recognized from the start of the democratic era in favor of people who suffered the consequences of the Civil War and of the dictatorial regime that followed during the decades prior to the Constitution.”

From the Transition until 2006, when the proposed Historical Memory Law was debated in parliament, the state earmarked €16 billion in compensation for those who were defeated in the war and their descendants. For example, €391 million was spent on compensating prisoners; €3.34 million on deaths or disappearances and €3 million more for soldiers who lost limbs in combat. When the law was passed, the reinstatement of these rights continued: the 1979 pensions for the families of those who lost their lives in the Civil War were increased, while €135,000 was released for families of individuals who had died fighting for democracy between 1968 and 1977.

New restorative measures were also introduced for the victims of Francoism, such as the concession of Spanish nationality to the children of exiles, funding for associations to open mass graves and also for research and educational projects related to the Civil War and Francoism. The total investment since the Transition comes to €21 billion.

Acting Justice Minister Dolores Delgado, who has created a historical memory department, explains that the compensation policies with regard to the victims of Franco’s dictatorship “in no way imply the annihilation of the Transition, but rather return a sense of dignity to those who gave their lives, were imprisoned or went into exile for defending values recognized by the 1978 Constitution.” As far as Delgado is concerned they are “constitutionalist heroes,” “patriots,” and “those who defend and are proud of the Constitution should also defend and be proud of these people.”

Julián Casanova, a professor of contemporary history who, along with Santos Juliá, spearheaded the initial investigations into the victims of Francoism in Spain, says: “The Transition is not a fixed photograph that decrees that the past cannot be spoken about. Taking this political pact as a departure point, investigations such as ours were able to go ahead, financed with public money. There has been a lot worked on since the Transition, but there has not been a basic agreement on how to publicly manage the past and the exhumation of the victims who lie in mass graves and ditches.”

Myth 2. It divides the Spanish people
In 2008, a year after the Historical Memory Law was passed, the Spanish Center for Sociology Research (CIS) carried out a study specific to this issue. The result was that 83.8% said the State should be in charge of recovering and identifying the remains of all the people who continue to lie in mass graves; 11.2% believed that the State should confine itself to offering financial help to families and associations to carry out the task, and only 0.9% said they thought the State should not be financing it at all.

n the same survey, 72.2% agreed that during Francoism, the victims of the Civil War received a different kind of treatment depending on which side they fought, and 40.8% of those who were familiar with the Historical Memory Law considered it a necessary measure because democracy is still indebted to the victims of the Civil War and Francoism.

Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) has witnessed many exhumations, starting with that of his own grandfather in 2000 in Priaranza del Bierzo. That event triggered a wave of petitions from families that wanted to do the same thing, which is how the association was formed. “Many of these families have always known who the assassins were,” he says. “But in all these years, I have never seen conflicts or arguments over the graves.”

On a local and regional level, the PP has supported some of these exhumations. In the Canary Islands, for example, two different administrations – by the PP and the regional party Nueva Canaria (New Canaries) – were behind the opening of wells where the bodies of those executed had been dumped. Previously, these sites had been declared assets of cultural interest in order to protect them.

Myth 3. Rewriting history
“They are trying to change history in order to look after their own interests,” wrote Suárez Illana referring to the PSOE. “The Historical Memory debate is foul,” said Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right party Vox, before going on to give his own version of events. “The Civil War was triggered by a party that still exists today with the same initials: the PSOE.”

The contemporary history professor Julián Casanova explains from Princeton University, where he is currently working, why introducing compensatory policies for the victims of Francoism in no way implies setting back the clock to let the other side win. “It is true that not all the victims of the ‘Reds’ were found, but those missing were registered as murdered; there was a general cause, tributes and rewards, astounding measures that favored the winners over the losers. What has happened since the Transition is the establishment of compensatory policies for those who were not taken into account during the dictatorship, and this has been established without any accompanying punishment, and this is a unique feature because compared to other countries with dictatorships, Spain did not have a policy of punishment for the persecutors.”
Baltasar Garzón, a former crusading judge at Spain’s High Court (Audiencia Nacional), drew up a list of crimes committed by the Franco regime in a case in 2008. The lawsuit was thrown out and he himself ended up in the dock accused of perverting the course of justice, though he was later absolved. “The argument that there is an attempt to win the war 80 years after the fact is absurd,” he said in a judicial decision. “The only type of person who could make that argument has to be either small-minded, bitter, or fearful of losing a privileged and illegitimate position. You don’t gain anything from a war. There is no possible triumph after pain and death.”

What remains to be done
Since the year 2000, more than 740 mass graves have been opened in Spain, and the remains of 9,000 bodies recovered. It is still not known how many are left to be opened. The government met a number of times with representatives of the various regional governments – Andalusia, Catalonia, the Basque Country, Extremadura, Navarre and the Canary Islands have their own historical memory laws – in a bid to bring the map of mass unmarked graves up to date and establish a national plan for exhumations. The report, drawn up by a group of experts with the government’s backing, estimated that between 20,000 and 25,000 bodies could be recovered by setting up a national council with seven teams of forensics (40 to 50 experts) to resolve the issue in the space of four or five years.

The government’s failed budget had designated €15 million to historical memory measures. Some funding had been released even before the law’s approval, but it was cut abruptly by the PP when it came to power in 2011. The graves of Franco’s victims were then opened with dollars, including the prize money awarded by a US association – and with fundraisers such as the one made by a Norwegian electricians’ union after its members were struck by the neglect of the victims of Franco’s regime following a visit to Spain.

Silva and Casanova insist that the state needs to assume this responsibility, and that it should also recover the archives that are currently in the hands of the Franco Foundation. Silva says that a real law of ‘concordia’ such as the one the PP is proposing would unite all the victims. “My grandfather was killed exactly the same way as Miguel Ángel Blanco [a PP councilor shot by the Basque terrorist group ETA in July 1997). They abducted him and left him in a ditch after being shot twice,” he says.
ilva believes that the lack of funding is no excuse and asks that, besides visiting the grave of Manuel Azaña and commemorating the exiled Spaniards, a tribute should be organized within Spain to the people who fought against the dictatorship.

Both Silva and Casanova agree that education is fundamental, and that the repression of the Franco regime must be included in textbooks. “If the victims of Francoism go to a high school to give a talk, they call it indoctrination, but nobody argues when a victim of the Holocaust does it in Germany,” they agree.

When Garzón – who was still sitting in the High Court at the time – received the complaints by victims’ associations and he asked for a census of victims to begin judicial proceedings, he was told it did not exist. “It was a real shock,” he says. “It was deeply painful and even now I feel a deep sense of unease about the fact this census does not exist. The administration’s indifference during so many years is outrageous.”



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Justice Minister Delgado believes the first step is to recognize the dimensions of what happened. “We have had a very biased version of events and we have to bring a global focus to memory, in a very educational way,” she says. “The end of this process will be normality, when all politicians accept the need to explore that part of our history and when they understand the families who want to recover the remains of their loved ones. The end of this will come when there is a museum of memory that can be visited by people of different political persuasions.”

For now, Franco’s descendants have challenged the State in order to prevent the exhumation of the dictator’s body, which lies in the Valley of the Fallen – a move that would be a first step toward changing the significance of the monument.

Given that the Supreme Court blocked the route to investigate these crimes in Spain, former judge Garzón adds justice to the list of pending issues. And as far as he is concerned, justice comes in many guises, from jail sentences to a truth commission that also figures in the current government’s plans.

“On a small scale, at least I succeeded in enabling some of the victims that I summoned as witnesses to tell their stories in court,” he says. “That has been the only time [they have been able to do that]. But if there is one thing I have learned over the course of my lengthy professional life is that the hearts of the victims never forget. This need to let the truth be known does not dim with time.”
From El Pais
NATALIA JUNQUERA

Madrid 1 JUL 2019 
English version by Heather Galloway.
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by Vicente Navarro on 1st July 2019


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The April general election in Spain was certainly a step forward for the Socialist Party. But that was only a recovery from its ‘third way’ step back.

In the elections to the Spanish Parliament on April 28th, the Socialist Party (PSOE) obtained the largest number of votes. This was interpreted by most of the European media as a ‘revival’ of the social-democratic tradition in Spain (as part of a broader revival of social democracy in Europe). But this vein of reporting was misleading.

Actually, the PSOE obtained practically the same number of votes—nearly seven and a half million—as in the general election of 2011, when it was considered to have suffered a big defeat. Indeed, that was the lowest number of votes obtained by the party since 1979. Why, then, the good news this time?

Major force
The PSOE had been the major party within the left in Spain and had governed the country for the majority of the democratic period, beginning in 1978. It had been the major force behind the establishment of the welfare state, with the jewel in the crown the establishment of the Spanish National Health Service. Social expenditures expanded quite considerably under the party’s governance between 1982 and 1996, as did the percentage of national income derived from labour rather than ownership of capital.

Progress however slowed towards the end of this golden era of social democracy, due to the application of policies—encouraged by the establishment of the European Union—which affected the quality and stability of the labour market. These precipitated two general strikes in the country, something unprecedented in the history of European social democracy.

This decline in the party’s support from the labour force manifested itself in an increase in working-class abstention in the elections of 1993, losing the PSOE its parliamentary majority for the first time. To continue governing, the party formed an alliance with right-wing Catalan nationalism (today a pro-independence party), rather than a coalition of left-wing parties (Izquierda Unida).

This meant a strengthening of those policies which the government considered necessary to meet the Maastricht criteria of reducing the public deficit and so accede to the euro. The continuation of these austerity measures caused the Socialists’ defeat in 1996 along with the victory of the conservative Popular Party (PP), which had been founded by ministers in the Franco dictatorship.

‘Third way’
This initiated a period of sustained growth (1996-2004), based on cheap labour and limited social protection, which ended with the victory of José Luis Zapatero of the PSOE in 2004. Zapatero embodied the Spanish version of the ‘third way’. A major promise of his electoral campaign had been a cut in taxes, which was responsible for 72 per cent of the €27,223 million (equivalent to €27.2 billion in England and the US) reduction in public revenues between 2007 and 2008, according to official figures. The other 28 per cent was a result of the decline in growth with the beginning of the Great Recession.

The budget deficit created by these shortfalls forced major cuts in public expenditure. Also Zapatero introduced labour-market ‘reforms’ which further weakened labour and strengthened employers. And the Spanish constitution was changed, following an agreement between the PSOE and the PP, to prioritise repayment of the public debt over any other expenditure (clause 135).

These interventions became very unpopular, causing the emergence of the indignados movement, or 15M.This protested against the application of neoliberal policies and denounced the ‘political class’ for not representing the people’s interests, but rather those of the financial and economic forces considered to have excessive influence over the ‘representative democratic institutions’—including the leadership and apparatus of the PSOE.

The indignados rebellion was a call for democracy: its slogan, ‘They—the political class—do not represent us, the people’, rapidly spread across the territory.

Podemos
The protests caused the PSOE to lose the elections in 2011, with a further increase in abstention among its base. The PP won again, imposing another labour-market ‘reform’, which weakened labour even more, and more cuts in social expenditures. These interventions caused an explosion of an anti-establishment mood, which led to the creation of a new left-wing party, Podemos (‘we can’). In under three years it became the third largest in the country, at one point almost surpassing the PSOE.

Podemos had enormous influence and significant consequences—from the resignation of King Juan Carlos I (appointed by Franco as his successor as head of state) to the change in the leadership of the PSOE. The party grassroots of the PSOE forced out the old leadership and elected Pedro Sanchez, who had run against the apparatus in the primaries with a programme to the left, inspired in many parts by Podemos.

Sanchez spoke then of the excessive power of economic and financial lobbies in the PSOE itself. Due to pressure from the party rank-and-file, he even made a pact with Podemos (which had established an alliance with Izquierda Unida).

Through this the PSOE approved an economic and social programme which included a 20 per cent rise in the minimum wage, an increase in pensions to reflect inflation, regulation of the price of rented housing and other popular measures, many borrowed from Podemos. These were the major cause of the growth in the party’s electoral support from 22 per cent in 2015 to 28.7 per cent in 2019.

This was even more significant in terms of parliamentary seats, due to the bias of the electoral law towards the larger parties. The right-wing vote meanwhile divided—a consequence of the establishment of a new party, Vox. A split from the PP, Vox is the truest Spanish version of the right—ultra-liberal in the extreme.

Coalition choice
The increase in its seats was not however enough to give the PSOE a majority, so it needs to form a coalition to govern. The choice is between Ciudadanos, a major neoliberal party in Spain (the preference of much of the party apparatus and the major banking and business associations) or Unidos Podemos (the preference of the base of the party). We will see who wins in the coming days.

In any event, the lesson for social democracy in Europe is that the adoption of neoliberalism can bring electoral disaster, which can only be reversed by moving to the left. This is what happened in Spain, influenced by Unidas Podemos.​

About Vicente Navarro
Vicente Navarro is professor of political science and public health, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain and professor of public policy, the Johns Hopkins University, United States of America.​