The Pact of Forgetting (Spanish: Pacto del Olvido) is the political decision by both leftist and rightist parties of Spain to avoid confronting directly the legacy of Francoism after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975.
[2] In making a smooth transition from autocracy and totalitarianism to democracy, the Pact ensured that there were no prosecutions for persons responsible for human rights violations or similar crimes committed during the Francoist period.
Paul Preston takes the view that Franco had time to impose his own version of history, which still prevents contemporary Spain from "looking upon its recent violent past in an open and honest way".
Especially during 1936–1939, Nationalist Forces seized control of cities and towns in the Franco-led military coup and would hunt down any protesters or those who were labeled as a threat to the government and believed to sympathize with the Republican cause.
[10] "Waves of these individuals were condemned on mere hearsay without trial, loaded onto trucks, taken to deserted areas outside city boundaries, summarily shot, and buried in mass, shallow graves that began dotting the Spanish countryside in the wake of the advancing Nationalist.
The year 2000 saw the foundation of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory which grew out of the quest by a sociologist, Emilio Silva-Barrera, to locate and identify the remains of his grandfather, who was shot by Franco's forces in 1936.
[14] Under Mariano Rajoy, the government was not willing to spend public money on exhumations in Spain,[15] although the Partido Popular supported the repatriation of the remains of Spanish soldiers who fought in the Blue Division for Hitler.
They investigated the judge for alleged abuse of power, knowingly violating the amnesty law, following a complaint from Miguel Bernard, the secretary general of a far-right group in Spain called "Manos Limpias".
He thought that, by prosecuting Francoism, he could become the head of the International Criminal Court and even win the Nobel Peace Prize.Although Garzón was eventually cleared of abuse of power in this instance, the Spanish judiciary upheld the Amnesty Law, discontinuing his investigations into Francoist crimes.
[25] Later, the policies of prime minister Zapatero were viewed as dangerous "playing with fire",[26] and pundits ridiculed him as the one who was "rattling with skeletons pulled from cupboards" and "winning the civil war lost years ago"; they compared him to Jarosław Kaczyński[27] and leaders of allegedly sectarian, fanatically anti-communist, nationalistic, Catholic groupings.
[30] With the threat of "lustration" now gone, progressist authors have effectively made a U-turn; currently they are rather skeptical about the alleged "pact of forgetting"[31] and advocate the need to make further legislative steps advanced by the Sánchez government on the path towards "democratic memory".