From Invisibility to Power: Spanish Victims and the Manipulation of their Symbolic Capital

Abstract

This paper will explore the historical construction and negotiation of Spanish political victimhood, particularly the victims of the Francoist repression framed by the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, the victims of the Basque terrorist organisation ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) and those who died in the attacks perpetrated by Islamic terrorists on 11 March 2004 in Madrid. At the time of their victimisation, personal and social ‘logics’ were constructed to explain the events that culminated in the death of members of the social body, as the logic of the everyday was subverted by acts of extreme violence. Today, the victims, whose voices were silenced by death, have acquired the capacity to speak from a privileged space of integration and national ‘reconciliation’ premised on their inclusion, after having been ‘othered’ by extreme fanaticisms of religious and/or political creed. As the relatives of the deceased — themselves victims — and diverse political organisations vie for the representation of the victims and of the meanings that they embody, they engage in an exercise in memory and power amid a society still divided along lines reminiscent of those that led to the eruption of the civil war 70 years ago.

Notes

1. Julián Casanova, “Una dictadura de cuarenta años,” in Julián Casanova (coord.), Morir, matar, sobrevivir: La violencia en la dictadura de Franco (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002), pp.8 and 19 and 20. Julián Casanova, “Rebelión y revolución,” in Santos Juliá (coord.), Víctimas de la guerra civil (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1999); Julián Casanova, “La historia que nos cuenta TVE,” El País, 3 April 2005.

2. Stanley Payne, in Los militares y la política en la España contemporánea (Madrid: Sarpe, 1986), pp.438–9, describes some claims for the unjustified assassinations of these lower‐class people.

3. Emilio Mola Vidal, Obras completas (Valladolid: Librería Santarem, 1940).

4. See the books of Stanley Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967); Spain's First Democracy. The Second Republic, 1931–1936 (Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 1993); The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933–1936: Origins of the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

5. Ignacio Fernández de Mata, “The “Logics” of Violence and Franco's Mass Graves. An Ethnohistorical Approach”, International Journal of the Humanities, 2/3 (2006), pp.2527–35.

6. Emilio Silva and Santiago Macías, Las fosas de Franco. Los republicanos que el dictador dejó en las cunetas (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2003). The ARMH is not the only association concern with historic memory. Other organizations include: Archivo Guerra Civil y Exilio, AGE; Asociación de Familiares y Amigos de Represaliados de la II República por el Franquismo; Asociación de Amigos de la Fosa de Oviedo; and Foro por la Memoria. However, the impact of the ARMH in the Spanish society has made it the main protagonist of the present process.

7. Iñaki Gabilondo, “Prólogo. Generosidad,” in Carlos Elordi (ed.) Los años difíciles (Madrid: Suma de Letras, 2003).

8. Julián Casanova (coord.), Francisco Espinosa, Conxita Mir and Francisco Moreno Gómez, Morir, matar, sobrevivir. La violencia en la dictadura de Franco (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002). Francisco Espinosa, La columna de la muerte: el avance del ejército franquista de Sevilla a Badajoz (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003); Francisco Espinosa, Contra el olvido: historia y memoria de la guerra civil (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006).

9. 15 March 2003.

10. 15 December 2004.

11. Walter Benjamín, “Tesis de filosofía de la historia,” in Walter Benjamin, Ensayos escogidos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sur, 1967). See Thesis 9.

12. Philippe Bourgois, “The Continuum of Violence in War and Peace: Post‐Cold War Lessons from El Salvador,” Ethnography, 2/1 (2001), pp.5–34; Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphele Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (eds), Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); Nancy Scheper‐Hughes, “Coming to Our Senses. Anthropology and Genocide,” in Alexander Laban Hinton (ed.), Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), pp.348–81; Nancy Scheper‐Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence”, in Nancy Scheper‐Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (eds.) Violence in War and Peace. An Anthology (Malden: Blackwell, 2004).