Lisa Abend | The Nation

This article focuses on the desire of Spanish citizens to access information about Spain's Civil War. The barricades went up in Salamanca on December 30. In this city where Franco set up his first military headquarters, Spain's Civil War is again being revived, though the struggle now is over several hundred cartons of documents. The boxes are stuffed with papers detailing the activities of leftist political parties and individual Republican supporters--information collected by Franco's troops and deposited in the country's official Civil War archive. Their contents of these boxes were taken from the independent province of Catalonia, and the Catalans want them back. Salamanca's mayor refuses to consider the request--despite the recommendation last year from Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's appointed commission of academic, legal and archival experts that the documents be returned. After Franco's regime spent decades enforcing a national amnesia about what happened between 1936 and 1939 and in the years of dictatorship that followed, a public wish to confront Spain's recent history is now awakening with a fury.