Hoy, cuando sobrevolamos España, descubrimos que el franquismo ha cultivado su propia memoria de la guerra civil. Una guerra que duró casi tres años - desde julio de 1936 hasta abril de 1939 - y cobró más de 600.000 víctimas civiles y militares.
Pero el régimen dictatorial, que dominó el país desde la guerra civil hasta la muerte de Franco en 1975, no pudo borrar todo rastro de sus abusos ni confiscar por completo el significado de estos trágicos hechos.
Pero el régimen dictatorial, que dominó el país desde la guerra civil hasta la muerte de Franco en 1975, no pudo borrar todo rastro de sus abusos ni confiscar por completo el significado de estos trágicos hechos.
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00:00Spain from the air, its history.
00:18At the beginning of the 20th century and weakened by the rise of nationalism, Europe entered one of the most violent periods in its history.
00:34Although Spain escaped the atrocities of the First World War, at the beginning of the 1930s the tension increased between the Popular Left Front, the Republicans and an alliance of nationalist parties.
00:48In February 1936, the nationalists lost the elections against the Republicans and the military organized a coup that would inaugurate one of the darkest times in Spanish history.
01:02In April 1939, the nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, were victorious in a civil war that would end with a balance of half a million victims.
01:13The dictator imposed on his country an authoritarian regime that would rule exclusively until his death in 1975.
01:19Flying over Spain today, we will analyze to what extent the wounds of the Civil War are still open and to what extent the influence that Franco exerted on his people is still present in the country.
01:33The legacy of the Civil War
01:47The geographer and historian José Luis Ledesma has spent most of his career between Sorbonne, Yale and the Complutense University of Madrid.
01:55I have been studying the Spanish Civil War for almost 20 years and I had never seen it this way.
02:06From the sky it looks very different than in the libraries, than in the archives, than even talking to those who lived it and are still alive.
02:16From Morocco to Spain
02:19From Morocco to Spain, on July 17, 1936, Franco and a group of generals unleashed their coup d'état, claiming to defend Catholic Spain from the evils of Atheist communism.
02:31The nationalist troops landed in the south. Soon, numerous garrisons of the country supported the rebellion.
02:38In three days, Franco and his coup d'état triumphed in Seville and took over much of the north of the country, from Galicia to Navarra.
02:48Divided, the country plunged into civil war.
02:51The Nazi party of Hitler and Mussolini's fascist regime soon signed an agreement with Franco, while the USSR sent more developed military equipment to the Republican forces.
03:10Franco unified his troops under an authoritarian ideology and founded an organization that would be called the Spanish Traditionalist Falange and the National Syndicalist Offensive Juntas, FED and the Jons.
03:24He advanced in Republican territory, but at the end of April 1937, he came across resistance in northwestern Spain.
03:31Decided to take the strategic city of Bilbao, he asked for reinforcements from his new allies and a small Basque population was the scene of one of the darkest events of the Civil War.
04:01The Basque city was bombed by Franco's troops. The number of victims of that terrible bombing is not yet known, it is estimated at hundreds.
04:11From here, from the air, we can clearly see that Gernika's strategic value was very reduced. It was only one of the possible ways to access Bilbao in the framework of the Francoist offensive.
04:24Gernika's value was above all historical, cultural, and identity, because of how important it was for the Basque identity.
04:32In five waves of fury, German and Italian bombs destroyed the city.
04:39When the dust finished falling, Gernika was nothing more than a pile of ruins.
04:46Two valuable symbols remain there, the old Basque parliament and the tree of Gernika, in the shadow of which generations of Spanish kings and leaders have sworn to respect the laws of the region.
05:01The city of Bilbao is a symbol of the Basque people.
05:10Yes, well, it was a city. It is not that as a resistance it was important. What happens is that they took it because it was a very important town within the Basque country.
05:24Luis Iriondo Aurtenechea is 95 years old.
05:28At that time he worked as a delivery boy for the local bank when the bombs devastated the city. He was 14 years old.
05:36I worked there. The bank where I was was down there. And from there, with the man who accompanied me, we came that way.
05:48We went up those stairs and entered the square. And when we were there, the first bombs were heard.
06:01All the people who were here in the market ran to the shelters. I was small and they pushed me and put me in one of them.
06:10Here they had the earth bags to enter the shelters. And there I was, behind these bags, when the bombing.
06:27I did not see what was happening. I saw the explosions, I heard the noise, the heat of the explosions.
06:35The planes came, they launched the bombs, they came back, they crossed with others who came. And so we were three and a half hours.
06:42It made me eternal. They had told us in the church that in case of danger of death, that we prayed a certain prayer.
06:50I started, I don't know, a hundred, two hundred times, but the explosions cut me off and I started again.
06:59And when I left behind those bags, I saw that the whole town was burning.
07:08Hitting the heart of the Basque Country, Franco wanted to sow terror and double the will of his enemies.
07:14Guernica, in peacetime, had more than 5,000 inhabitants. That is, they threw us almost one at a time, one at a time.
07:27The stories about the horrors inflicted on Luis and his fellow citizens soon spread throughout Spain, and then throughout the rest of the world, triggering indignation.
07:38Guernica became the international symbol of the suffering of civilians and inspired Pablo Picasso to create one of his most famous works.
07:53And then they threw us a rain of fire, blood and death, but they didn't see us as we were, because they were up and we were down.
08:06And if they had been down, they would have seen that we were children, like the children of their town, their children or their little brothers.
08:15But they didn't see us like that. They saw us from above as ants running terrified. And of course, ants and men cannot speak.
08:27Today, Luis has found the strength and the words to forgive those responsible for the violence he suffered during his childhood.
08:36In 1937, the destruction of Guernica represented for Franco a victory both symbolic and psychological in his search for power.
08:51In June, the Franco troops took Bilbao.
08:56Now that the entire Basque Country was under their control, the nationalists concentrated their efforts in the Far East.
09:06Looking at it from here, you can understand perfectly what some of the testimonies that lived in the war in the Aragon front said.
09:14It is a fundamentally arid area and it was really difficult to maintain defenses that covered about 300 kilometers.
09:24The descriptions, for example, of George Orwell, the British writer, author of 1984, who writes a book of testimonies about his experience in the Aragon front and who describes it in those terms.
09:35Dirt, mud, heat in summer, cold in winter, shit, boredom, misery.
09:46At the end of the summer of 1937, the republicans launched a series of counter-offensives and recovered small towns and land without occupying.
09:55But they faced a fierce resistance during a battle that marked an important milestone in Franco's campaign.
10:05In the summer of 1937, this area is crossed, and Belchite in particular, by a republican offensive that tried to reach Zaragoza and that had its most cruel battle here.
10:19On August 24, the republicans were determined to go on the offensive.
10:24Two weeks later, they recovered the city, but Belchite was nothing more than a mass of stones, beams and corpses.
10:36Well, here we are in the ruins of the old town of Belchite.
10:42What we saw from above, from the sky, now we have to imagine what it was like in reality.
10:48Full of people, buying, selling, carrying out their agricultural activities, exploiting the land, the olives.
11:06Inside this church, the church of San Agustín, or walking through the ruins, one might think that we are in the ruins of prehistory or of distant times.
11:17However, these are buildings where people lived until only two generations ago.
11:23There are still people who live today in Belchite, in the new town of Belchite, who were born, who got married, who were baptized in this church, or who walked or played in all the streets that we are crossing.
11:36The republicans occupied Belchite for seven months, but Franco knew that the city was a strategic place to control the entire northeast.
11:54Benefiting from the support of Germany and Italy, on March 7, 1938, Franco launched attacks all over Aragon and recovered Belchite three days later.
12:05A key town in the advance was Belchite, and insurgents occupied its ruins. Once again, the civil war appears to be reaching a decisive stage.
12:15What makes Belchite unique and unique is not only the ferocity of the battle.
12:22It is the fact that Franco's dictatorship, within a strategy of propaganda and policy of memory, chose not to rebuild the ruins of this town,
12:31but chose to leave the ruins, to build a new town next to it, from there that hug between the new and the old, which was achieved with it.
12:40In some way, Franco's regime achieved with it the same thing that he tried to do with other of his policies of memory.
12:47Underlining the idea of how far the reds, the republicans, had been ferocious, cruel, murderers.
12:56From there, this town was considered, and was called for decades by the Franco publicist, Pueblo Mártir.
13:07Enraged by their victories in Belchite and Aragon, the Franco troops continued their campaign and took Barcelona, and then the rest of Catalonia.
13:17On April 1, 1939, the nationalists took control of Madrid and officially put an end to the civil war.
13:30Franco settled in the Palacio del Pardo, in Madrid. He called himself Caudillo, and declared that the Falange was from now on the only authorized party in Spain.
13:47On September 4, 1939, the war broke out again in Europe, but Franco maintained the neutrality of Spain. It was time to rebuild the country.
14:03Imposing his definition of Spanish culture, the dictator censored the languages and some regional traditions, and promoted others such as flamenco arbitrarily.
14:16From Seville to Madrid, even the bullfights were instrumentalized by Franco.
14:23The dictator consecrated them as a national party, hoping without a doubt that the violence of the spectacle would numb the population and erase from his memory the horrors perpetrated by his regime.
14:33A year after the end of the civil war, in order to leave a trace of his power in the Spanish landscape, Franco ordered the construction of a commemorative pharaonic monument.
15:03They needed 20 years of labor work, mostly political prisoners, to build this imposing monument.
15:17The cross, 150 meters high, is held by four apostles and four other characters who represent the virtues ennobled by the Franco regime.
15:27Strength, justice, prudence and temperance.
15:34And the goal was clear, a great mausoleum in memory of the fallen, of the fallen by God and by Spain.
15:41The first meaning was that, more than 33,000 corpses of the dead of the war that rest there, some of them without the consent of the relatives.
15:52After its inauguration, it was tried to resignify so that it was a place of integration of the memory of all, of the two sides, but it never got it.
16:07Within its borders, Franco imposed his domination.
16:12But he was worried about the threat posed by the conflict in the rest of the world.
16:16In 1944, the dictator ordered the creation of a large defense system along the northern border.
16:24In the greater secret, the soldiers spent three years building thousands of bunkers and tunnels from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean.
16:35It represents a pharaonic and colossal waste of resources.
16:39You have to think about the situation of the country of Spain at that time.
16:43A country ruined after three years of bloody civil war.
16:47With these conditions, it was necessary to build, it was necessary to put aside many other issues much more urgent,
16:54to be able to carry out this pharaonic work of building a fortification line.
17:10Anna López has been interested since childhood by the strange buildings hidden in the relief of her hometown.
17:18She currently coordinates the bunker park of Montellà Martínez.
17:25It has been considered that it is a line of invasion psychosis.
17:30As the Second World War progresses, it is proposed that there may be a Nazi Germany,
17:35although there were sympathies with Franco already defined in Endaia when Hitler and Franco meet.
17:43But we see that later, at the end of the Second World War,
17:48we already see that Nazi Germany disappears from that enemy and then also becomes allies.
17:56So there is still a secret that surrounds these fortresses.
18:01And it is that we see that this line, when it began to be built in November 1944,
18:07it was built under military secrecy.
18:12It is a line more typical of a First World War, of a trench war, more body-to-body fighting,
18:18than one of the ends of the Second World War.
18:21Because if at any time that enemy had been raised to enter because it was never used,
18:30surely they would have saved it by going through the air or the sea.
18:37At the end of the Second World War, the victorious allies focused their attention
18:42on the growing communist threat that the USSR represented for them.
18:47Franco's fears dissipated and he abandoned the construction of the bunkers.
18:53From then on, he firmly kept the Spaniards at his mercy.
18:58At the beginning of the 1950s, the dictator decided that it was time to open Spain to the rest of the world
19:05and stabilize its economy.
19:09Convinced that one of the keys to the economic prosperity of Spain
19:13resided in its tourist potential, Franco began several construction of embankments.
19:20We now fly over the Mediterranean coast.
19:23Above all, the coast of the community of Valencia and Catalonia
19:27are the scene of one of the greatest social and economic changes that occurred during Francoism.
19:36On the Mediterranean coast, the pro-Franco mayor of Benidorm, Pedro Zaragoza,
19:41decided to transform a modest fishing village into a small economic miracle.
19:46In 1956, a first plan of urbanism was launched that would expand roads and build hotels.
19:54German, Dutch and French tourists rushed to invest in this new coastal tourist center.
20:01In 1963, a new legislation allowed to build without a height limit.
20:07Benidorm became a real little Manhattan, without a roof.
20:11Benidorm became a real little Manhattan,
20:15a symbol of a prosperous tourism in the entire Spanish coast.
20:19In those approximately 20 years, the number of foreign tourists
20:23goes from 1 million to almost 30.
20:27But it was not gold all that shone.
20:29That economic development that generated, that aroused tourism,
20:33accentuated the inequalities, the imbalances between some regions of the country and others.
20:41The economic miracle was stopped a decade later.
20:45On November 20, 1975, Franco died,
20:49and was buried in his mausoleum in the Valle de los Cayos.
20:55The new government began multiple reforms in order to modernize society.
21:00But war criminals would never be judged,
21:03and the transition to democracy came accompanied by an unfulfilled deliberation of historical memory.
21:12With the passing of the years, the secularization of the country,
21:16and the adhesion to the European community,
21:19the Spaniards slowly broke the silence of the pro-Franco era.
21:26In November 2002, the Spanish Parliament officially condemned the Franco dictatorship.
21:33Five years later, the historical memory law was approved,
21:36which facilitates private initiatives intended to locate and exhume the victims of the civil war and the Franco regime.
21:47We have seen some of the traces left by the civil war and its post-war from the air.
21:52There are many more, but perhaps the most significant is all those traces that are not visible.
21:58The Spanish geography is sown with anonymous mausoleums.
22:03It is estimated that Spain is the second country, after Cambodia,
22:07with more common graves and more people buried in unknown places.
22:14The Ministry of Justice has identified 120,000 missing people,
22:18buried in 2,591 common graves.
22:24Today, more than 70 associations and thousands of volunteers throughout Spain
22:29are dedicated to the exhumation of the tragic past of the country.
22:33In the small town of Villarraso, in the northwest of Spain,
22:37one of these common graves has recently come to light.
22:44Santiago Acarcas is the president of one of the associations
22:48that actively militates in search of the missing people in the civil war.
22:52Like many volunteers, these excavations have an enormously personal dimension for him.
22:58I am a victim of Francoism. I am missing 16 relatives.
23:02We do not know where they are. Therefore, I do not know if one day we can discuss it.
23:07It is very difficult. It is very complicated.
23:10And it helps me, right? It helps my family, right?
23:13And I help other people now. That is why I am here.
23:18The excavations began several weeks ago with the help of the French Medical Association.
23:23Ángela Piñeiro Acción.
23:26Today, the discoveries are very concrete.
23:30Right femur, remains of the pelvis,
23:34a belt, apparently of leather, with a metal center,
23:39remains of textile.
23:42According to the documentation we have found,
23:46there are 37 reports of missing people.
23:49According to the documentation we have found,
23:5237 reprisals of the Spanish Civil War,
23:55who were murdered between 1936 and 1949.
24:14When the Conservative People's Party took power in 2011,
24:18it eliminated all government subsidies intended for the exhumation of victims.
24:25It is regrettable, it is shameful. The government does not participate,
24:29it does not promote these things.
24:32They have been discovered 5%, or maybe less.
24:38And as we go, we will need another 100 or 200 years to open them all.
24:42Well, when they are all opened in 100 years, they will not exist,
24:44because the bodies are so degraded that there will be nothing.
24:48We can not even know what relatives there are,
24:51because no DNA can be made.
24:54Therefore, we continue with the Franco regime.
25:04The legacy of the former dictator continues to divide Spain today.
25:09There are many who think it is too soon to open the wounds.
25:15However, in an act of courage never seen before,
25:20the government organized a vote in September 2018
25:23to remove the remains of the dictator from the mausoleum.
25:30This symbolic decision is a victory for those who believe that,
25:34to face the future, the Spanish people must make peace with their past.
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