Word: francoed
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...repressive atmosphere of the Franco regime, public discussion of the atrocity - and thousands of others - was prohibited. "Even within my family - my father, my grandparents, the grandparents who went into exile in New York and came back - it was never spoken about," says Laura García Lorca, the poet's niece and president of the Madrid-based García Lorca Foundation. Even after Franco's death in 1975, a so-called pact of silence suppressed any kind of open debate about the crimes committed during his rule while the country peacefully transformed itself into a democracy...
...people on both sides of the Civil War to the plight of the "lost" children sent into protective exile in the Soviet Union. In 2007, the Spanish parliament passed the Law of Historical Memory, providing pensions to soldiers who fought in the Republican army, denying the legitimacy of Franco's political trials and requiring the removal of all symbols of the Franco regime from public spaces. (Read "Franco Lives Again - on Spanish...
...also telling that each of these efforts - from the removal of Franco statues to the exhumations of graves - has met with vociferous resistance. "There's a right-wing backlash against this huge 'recovery of memory' movement," says prominent Spanish historian Paul Preston. "You're dealing with a really complicated social phenomenon here - the families of the beneficiaries of Franco's victory. All they've ever been told by their parents and grandparents was about how they did the right thing, smashing communism and all that, and now they're being told that these people were little better than Hitler...
...exhumation of Lorca's remains has hardly been free of controversy. Last year, National Court Judge Baltasar Garzón indicted Franco and his officers retroactively for crimes against humanity and ordered the disinterment of the site to gather evidence. Faced with opposition from other judges who felt he was overstepping his jurisdiction, Garzón was later forced to reverse his decision and recuse himself from the case. The ARMH has also criticized the amount of public money being spent on one highly publicized exhumation. "There are thousands of others buried in mass graves in the same area...
...think of him as a sort of guardian, ensuring the remains of all the others won't be disturbed or forgotten either." Earlier this month, the town of Alfácar granted that wish by declaring the site a cemetery. (Read "At Last, Spain Faces Up to Franco's Guilt...