From Fudro Media and pr X it's Latino USA. I'm Mariano Rosa Today. How a lawsuit filed in Argentina brings closure to victims of the Franco dictatorship.
In Spain El Pole.
On April twenty eighth, twenty nineteen, Spain held elections to choose the National Parliament, which in turn voted to select a.
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Japerio in Passao, the winning Socialist party has pledged to exhume the remains of Francisco Franco, Spain's former dictator, who died in nineteen sen seventy five and is buried under a massive mausoleum. They say Franco doesn't deserve the honor
of having a major monument to his life. But this pledge has caused some controversy with people on the right who supported the dictator, and mixed into all of this, there are also demands from victims of the Spanish dictatorship to find and recover the remains of those who were killed and were buried in mass graves during Franco's forty year rule.
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The issue of victim's remains has been a major feature of the national conversation in Spain recently and is now the topic of a documentary film. Over six years, Emmy Award winning filmmakers On Mudena Carraseo and Robert Bahar have been following a movement for justice that began with a kitchen table conversation and has evolved into a groundbreaking international lawsuit that brought together he hundreds of survivors of the dictatorship Keggio Framarza Tolousi laos ken.
Francismo.
The result is a touching documentary, Elilenzio DeRos or The Silence of Others, which follows the development of this lawsuit as it pieces together the stories of some of the victims of Franco's unbridled violence and connects this with the country's recent history.
Implemento Nolvido Una mistia de toros paratos unlvidos paratos Nalai.
The film, which was executive produced by acclaimed director Pedrol Modovar, won the twenty nineteen Goya Award, which is the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars. In twenty nineteen, directors al Mudena Carraselo and Robert Bahar join me to talk about their film all the way from Madrid. We're really happy to bring you this conversation once again today and welcome to Latino USA. Al Mudena and Robert oh Law, thank you so much, thank you, and right now the both of you are in Madrid. Am I right?
Yes?
Correct, yes, I wish I was there is all I can say. Madrid is one of my all time favorite cities.
I love it.
I'm wonderful.
But you know, when people think now of Spain, they think of Madrid there like fabulous cosmopolitan city that's like up all night. They think of Barcelona, this really bohemian place. But a lot of people right now are not thinking about the fact that for almost forty years Spain lived under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
It's great that you bring it out because very often we think of the Franco dictatorship, if anyone knows about it, you know, we think of beaches and nice weather. We don't realize that a lot of the tourists that came to Spain during that time were coming too a country where people were being tortured, people were being murdered, so there was a complete lack of freedom of you know,
freend of a press, freenom of expression. Obviously, for a lot of people who fought against it, it was a very deadly dictatorship.
Now, in nineteen seventy five, Francisco Franco, the dictator dies, and I mean, I just can't imagine what that is like to suddenly the dictator has died, and now it's time to move into a democratic system.
What's really fascinating is that in the case of sping, Franco died while he was still in power, and part of what that meant was that his regime had tremendous power and control in the process of shaping what democracy would look like in Spain, and that these two models has transition through rupture. Where there's a revolution is just to break with the past. This is transitioned through transaction
where they negotiate with the outgoing regime. And so many of the ministers and the powers that be in the Franco regime helped shape the democracy. There ended up being a tremendous continuity between especially judges, the judiciary, the security forces, police, military, many of the same families and the same officials continued.
So as part of this there's a discussion about amnesty right, how to deal with the crimes, you know, human rights violations that occurred under the dictatorship. And then there's a decision to create what is known in English as a pact of forgetting and Espanol.
Is el Pacto de lolo.
El Pacto del olvido, which.
Is as if you could create a pact for that, and.
It basically says, we as a country are basically going to say what's done is done. Forty years of dictatorship done, and we're going to make a pact to forget.
Yes, And its main purpose was originally to free from the left political prisoners, but they added a clause to the amnesty law that said none of the crimes of the dictatorship would ever be prosecuted.
The big problem with that, obviously, is that you're crafting a transition into democracy at the expense of hundreds of thousands of people who will not get justice or even truth or even reparations. We're talking about thousands and thousands of people whose family members were killed, murdered and buried in mass graves still unknown mass graves all over the country. One hundred and forty thousand people are still buried in mass graves, and it's very important to remember the film
is about the present. What is the legacy of that packed into the present day today in a democracy that it's now forty years old.
But in your film, actually when you go and you're asking Spaniards, hey, do you know about you know, the pact of forgetting? Do you know about this amnesty? You know in terms of the crimes that were committed under Franco, And it turns out that a lot of Spaniards don't even know. So how is that possible?
Well, I think what's so fascinating about the fact that people don't know is that the pact of forgetting worked, and the pact of forgetting in a sense comes from Franco's discourse during forty years. If you look at many people, if you look at almotin his parents, for example, people spent their entire lives, they're born under dictatorship and lived under dictatorship, and so the discourse was we shouldn't talk
about that. It's dangerous to talk about that. And as you reach the transition this idea to forget, the only way we can ave forward as a society is to put this behind us. Turn the page and move on was very convincing to a lot of people.
The film starts with this really beautiful sequence of a quite elderly woman who's kind of wrapping her hair, and then she's getting her little walker, and she's in a small, little Spanish village, and then she gets to the side of a two lane highway and you know, she just lays flowers down and says, this is where her mother was murdered by the Franco regime.
Know that this was a very powerful scene for us because it represented a lot of well, it's happened in Spain, and it has happened in Spain right, the fact that you could pave over a mass grave, tried to bury the past, try to do as though it didn't exist, this modern day democracy where the past has been buried, but where there are people, thousands and thousands of people who cannot forget and who go every day to the side of the roads to put flowers.
So I think that something that a lot of people will remember is that it actually turns out that in Spain there is a judge who ends up indicting a former dictator happens to be the former dictator of Chile Agusto Pinochet, and that sets a precedent.
In Spain. There's a judge who for more than a decade has been chasing drug lords and dictators, terrorists and corrupt politicians from across the globe. His name Baltasar Garzon. He is arrest warrant for the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, set an international president.
What's so fascinating is that Judge Garson was a pioneer and the Spanish courts were actually pioneers in using this principle called universal jurisdiction to pursue human rights crimes in Chile, in Argentina, and actually in many places around the world. And this put Spain at the forefront of seeking justice
after dictatorial regimes. And after indicting former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Garson started an investigation into the crimes of the Franco dictatorship and he really started to open this and he was put on trial in Spain for violating space means amnesty law, and that opened the way for victims of these crimes to go to Argentina to open the case there using that same principle universal jurisdiction to investigate the crimes of Francoism.
You know, once the doors close in Spain, that's when the doors of justice can open somewhere else, and the case falls under Maria Levini the Kurria, which is a judge that has been following very closely. She's known to be the judge for the stolen children in Argentina. Between nineteen seventy six and nineteen eighty three, during the dictatorship in Argentina, five hundred babies were stolen from their parents
who were opponents of the regime. It's a curious thing because, as you were saying, you know, Spain became a model of how to do a transition, and in fact, many many years later in Spain we look to Latin American democracies to give us a lesson about memory.
Coming up on Latino USA, the lawsuit moves forward and hundreds of victims join the cause. Stay with us. Yes, hey, we're back, and we're going to continue our conversation now with Almudena Carrasselo and Robert Bahar. They're the directors of the documentary The Silence of Others, which follows the development of a lawsuit filed in Argentina to address crimes committed during this Spanish dictatorship. So it turns out that it's actually went over six years that you were working on
the film. There's an older gentleman who was tortured by members of the Franco regime, and he speaks very specifically about the kind of torture that he experienced. And the thing is is that he remembers who it was who was torturing him. And many years later, it turns out that this man ends up living blocks away from his torture.
That was absolutely shocking to us. I think, for me, as someone who grew up in the United States, just as you said earlier, I don't think of Spain as a country where someone could be living a few hundred meters from his torturer. From a policeman nicknamed Billy the Kid, who actually everyone in Madrid knows the name Billy the Kid.
There have been newspaper articles about Billy the Kid since nineteen seventy nine or nineteen eighty, and recently it was even discovered that in the days ear days of democracy, Billy the Kid was actually awarded various medals for excellent meritorious conduct, and thus the state pension that he receives
has a fifty percent bump. And then there was even even more recent issue where there was a party held at a police station in the center of Madrid and someone took a photograph and they saw that Billy the kid was real named as Antonio Gonzales Pacheco, had been invited to that party, and so the present day National Police Force was still communicating with him and had welcomed him at an event.
One of the things that you uncover in your film is kind of the crimes of the dictatorship of Franco really live on. Of course, there's legacy, there's impact, there's trauma, but then you talk about something that my jaw just dropped because it's a story that we know so well from Argentina and it's tatorship, which was the stolen children, right, children who were taken when their parents were disappeared and murdered, and it turns out that the same thing exists in Spain.
You have the stolen children of Spain.
Well, the story of the stolen children in Spain goes back to the very end of the Spanish Civil War.
Laya mammos La Espanola Piro Comentho.
And it started with a psychiatrist who was the head of military psychiatry under Franco and his name was Bijonahara, and he had written books and he had said eugenics theories under the Nazis, and he believed that by separating children of the Reds, children of Republican families, that you could cleanse the children of those ideas and a sort
of a eugenics kind of idea. And so the idea of stealing children started by taking children from Republican mothers who were in jail, possibly about to be executed at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and giving those children to families that were loyal to the regime, in
some cases perhaps military families. That was in the early years, and as you moved past the nineteen forties, the patterns seemed to change and instead of taking children from politically unfit or unacceptable families, they start to target morally unfit families to single mothers, families are very poor families with eleven children, and there are stories of deathbed confessions where parents have said, I must tell you you are not actually our child. We bought you, or every summer when
we went, we had to actually make installment payments. And it is a terrible scandal. It's very difficult to know the scale. In Garson's investigation, he estimated that there have been thirty thousand potential cases up to about nineteen fifty five. There are some people who estimate into the hundreds of thousands through today.
So I'm watching the movie at my desk in the middle of the day, you know, prepping for the interview, and then I'm getting to the end of the film and I got to be honest with you, I mean, the tears just start streaming down my face because what ends up happening is that thanks to the Argentinian judge, one of the older women survivors, her name is Asencion, she's told that her father's remains are going to be exhumed.
And there's this moment when you are there when they find the remains of Asencion's father, along with the remains of twenty one other people, and all we're seeing is a skull. But for us, since you know, who hasn't seen her father, who has disappeared and put into this mass grave. The moment when she sees this skull and we know that it's her father. She says, Oh, it was so dramatic.
Your pay can do I right, she says, ay a whole life underground. That was one of the sort of most emotionally powerful moments for us as filmmakers. When the viewers crying, you really need to picture us crying there too.
Where do things stand now? Where is the lawsuit? Does the story end with the lawsuit? What is the next chapter of Spain?
In terms of what's happening in the Argentine lawsuit, the lawsuit continues. Despite many kind words from the government. There is still this amnesty law. There is still this impunity and it's actually fascinating. The lawyers told us that after watching the film there were some people who had been scared to become plaintiffs and to join the Argentine lawsuit, and they have now joined the lawsuit and have sent
their stories to Judge Cervini in Buenos Aires. In terms of the impact that the film is having, just couple of weeks ago, the film was seen by more than a million people here that night. Ten minutes after the broadcast ended, many of the plaintiffs in the suit launched a petition asking that the government modify that amnesty laws so that it cannot be applied to crimes against humanity.
There are now more than one hundred and fifty thousand signatures on that petition, and so there's a hope that the more visibility that this has, the more that through cultural means as well as through legal means, this pact of forgetting is broken and there is remembering that there can be change.
We just launched actually something called our less Cone Memoria, so that every school and high school in the country can screen the film for free Our Les Memoria, meaning Classrooms with Memory, and it really is very beautiful and very powerful what films can do in terms of helping people understand, helping people empathize, helping people take action. And so their journey continues.
But there was also just an election in Spain on Sunday, and on the one hand, spain Socialist Party won the most number of votes and will probably be able to
lead the coalition government. But something very concerning also happened, which is that for the first time there's an ultra right party that has emerged in Spain, and twenty three or twenty four representatives in the Congress are now going to come from an ultra right, ultra nationalist, anti immigrant, anti abortion, anti women's rights party.
I'm Mudena and Robert. Thank you so much for your work and thank you so much for joining us on Latino USA.
Thank you so much for having us.
This episode was produced by Miguel Marzias. It was edited by Marlon Bishop. It was mixed by Julia Caruso with engineering support from Jjkrubin. The Latino USA team also includes Jessica Ellis, Victoria Strada, Renaldo Leanoz Junior, Stephanie Lebou, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Luis Luna, Glodi mad Marquez, Martin Martinez, Nor Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Pile Ramidez is our co executive producer. I'm your host and also co executive producer. Join us
again on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on all of your social media. That's where I'll see you, not Te bayas Baye.
Latino USA is made possible in part by Skyline Foundation, the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide.
Perestan Locos, Burquees Madrid, Viamen de Las and pis La. Of course, boy, they're crazy to be doing an interviewed. Okay, here we go. Ready,