Letter From Spain

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 instead of Toledo or Teruel, the struggle now is over several hundred cartons of documents. Like thousands of other archival containers in Salamanca's renovated palacio, the boxes are stuffed with papers detailing the activities of leftist political parties and individual Republican supporters--information collected (some would say "stolen") by Franco's troops and deposited in what today is the country's official Civil War archive. But these boxes are a bit different from the rest, for their contents were taken from the famously independent province of Catalonia, and the Catalans want them back.

Salamanca's mayor, aggressively supported by the opposition Popular Party (PP), 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--and he vows that the papers will never leave his city. Although the mayor asserts that the metal fences were erected in order to perform renovations on the building, the barricades went up around the archive the day after the commission announced its findings.

For nearly seventy years, Spain has suffered a peculiar version of the eternal return, as its Civil War, finished on the battlefield in April 1939, periodically erupts to be fought again on new fronts--without bloodshed, perhaps, but still with great anguish. 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. Indeed, the so-called Pact of Silence, which effectively curbed open discussion of the past in order to secure the country's move toward democracy, has over the past few years given way to a chorus of demands to confront that past. The archive debate--which provokes anxieties both about how Franco repressed all Catalan forms of expression and about the broader legacy of his dictatorship--has become one more arena in which to reignite the war.

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