Spain begins to confront its past

Vicente Moriera was 11 when his mother was shot in the back of the head and dumped into a hole in the ground.

It was an August evening in 1936, at the start of the Spanish civil war. That summer also marked the start of the young Vicente's 17-year exile to the Soviet Union - and the beginning of his lifelong quest for justice and remembrance.

Last spring, six decades after his mother's death, Mr. Moriera's painful odyssey reached a turning point. He watched as volunteer archeologists dug up one of thousands of mass graves throughout Spain, mostly the remains of opponents killed by General Francisco Franco's forces during the civil war and the nearly four decades of dictatorship that ensued.

"How can I describe it? It was liberation," Mr. Moriera says, holding back tears. "I had been waiting my whole life for this."

Like thousands of others throughout the country, he has begun to break the silence that has surrounded the brutalities committed during the Franco years, demanding that mass graves be located and the stories of the victims be told.

Now one of the groups leading the effort - which is seeking the establishment of an independent truth commission - wants an apology from the Roman Catholic Church, which backed Franco.

"The church played an atrocious role in the persecution of dissidents, but it plays a fundamental role in the lives of many who remember the war," says Emilio Silva, a cofounder of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. "In order for fear to dissipate, we need a political as well as a religious commitment to tell the other side of the story."

The association plans to send a formal letter this month to the Vatican Embassy in Spain, and to bishops and archbishops throughout the country.

The civil war was preceded by the proclamation of a Republic in Spain, which, among other things, curtailed the church's power and secularized education. In the Soviet-backed Republic, monasteries, convents, and churches were raided and profaned, priests and lay workers murdered, and nuns raped. In 2001 Pope John Paul II beatified 233 Catholics as martyrs murdered by Republicans in the war.

Spain's silence surrounding the civil war and the Franco era was part of the blueprint for the transition to democracy after the dictator's death in 1975. The fathers of the new government believed that forgetting was essential to moving on, and in 1977 granted amnesty to all collaborators in the war.

The silence since Franco's death has left Spain with an uneven historical memory.

While Franco's troops were celebrated for dying for country and altar, more than 30,000 Republicans officially "disappeared" and remain missing. The colossal Valley of the Fallen outside of Madrid is a stark example of the discrepancy. It is promoted as a memorial to some 350,000 people who died during the war, but, built by the dictator's prisoners of war in the early 1940s, the memorial is an obvious shrine to Franco and his followers.

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