“Who is Franco?” It is the first question posed as the title of chapter one by the book that José A. Martínez Soler and Erik Martínez Westley have written to try to bring Francoism closer to the younger population, who suffer from the shortcomings of an educational system that still provides a residual role to the contents about the dictatorship. With accessible language and a pedagogical tone, Franco for young people (Catarata) addresses this historical period marked by repression with the aim of dismantling the myths still rooted and avoiding the trivialization of what it meant.
The book, which will hit bookstores on November 4, continues with the questions: “What do I have to do with Franco? Why remove history? Why now?” asks Erik Martínez in the introduction, as if wanting to anticipate the usual questions that try to justify the more or less generalized belief that these issues should be left aside. “It is often argued a lot that there is no need to talk about something that is part of the past, but enough time has passed, 50 years since the death of the dictator, for us to look at the facts objectively,” says Martínez Westley.
There are four hands behind Franco for young people, two authors who, not by chance, share a last name: they are father and son. A father, José A. Martínez Soler, who is a renowned journalist in Spain who has worked in various media outlets – and founded some, such as 20 minutes– and who suffered the ravages of Franco’s regime on his own skin. And a son, Erik, director and scriptwriter of documentaries, who recognizes that, if it weren’t for that, he would know almost nothing about the dictatorship: “It’s not the same now, but the people of my generation (1978) were not taught anything of the horrors of Francoism.”
Erik grew up knowing that his father grew up the son of a Republican at a time when to be red was to be singled out and relegated to social ostracism. Also that he was arrested several times and that at the age of 29 he was kidnapped and tortured for having published an article in the weekly Doubloon about the purge of moderates that Ángel Campano, appointed general director of the Civil Guard in Franco’s last Council of Ministers and of Falangist ideology, was promoting. What those who always suspected that they were a commando of the Franco wing of the body were looking for was for the journalist to reveal his sources, but Martínez had been able to write the piece by diving into the Official State Gazette following an anonymous tip.
Franco “happened a long time ago”, but he didn’t stay there
The story, which he tells in a chapter of the book called My kidnapping. I think I’m going to dieserves Erik to question the widespread idea that “Franco passed away a long time ago” and there is nothing to say about him today. “My father, like so many others, is alive. His generation laid the foundations on which we walk,” he explains. The screenwriter also alludes to the “tens of thousands of murdered people” who remain in graves – “What is their family’s fault? Let’s allow this wound to close,” he tells readers – and the amnesty of the Transition. “There was no need to ask for forgiveness, return what was stolen or respond to the crimes. “This includes my father’s tormentors.”
Both, in addition, aim to make young people understand how the effects of Franco’s regime “still endure.” José A. Martínez Soler not only refers to the lack of unanimous condemnation of Francoism socially and politically speaking or to the survival of symbols or acts of exaltation, but he speaks of something more invisible but very latent. “I believe that fear still exists and lives among us. Let’s be careful, the elders are silent, they don’t want to talk about it and theor you mean is still valid. Every time an issue related to the dictatorship comes up, sparks fly and we have a party, Vox, that somehow vindicates it.”
The kidnapping is not the only personal experience that can be read in Franco for young peoplewhich is full of private anecdotes from Martínez Soler. This is, he says, a concession that he has made to his son, who insisted on the value of “talking about experiences that hit the heart and are not theory but reality,” Martínez Westley justifies. Thus, the journalist tells, for example, how when Franco went to Almería – he was nine years old – they put up temporary plaster fences so that “he wouldn’t see the misery of my neighborhood” or how, already in the weekly Change 16was subject to censorship and could not use the word “strike” in its news at a time of enormous labor unrest.
Gaps in classrooms
The advances of recent decades in the classrooms are palpable, but the gaps persist in the educational system, according to several recently published studies, which point to a “minimization” of Franco’s repression, a “little extension” regarding the subject in books of text or a lack of references to dimensions such as concentration camps, the collaborationist role played by the Church – Franco was leader of Spain by the grace of Godthe Martínez family remember in the book – or economic repression. Furthermore, he draws a second “sweetened” Franco regime, almost tolerable, thanks to which development ended up reaching Spain.
This is precisely one of the questions addressed Franco for young peoplewhich seeks among other things to “break with the false legends and misinformation” that exists around his figure, explains Martínez Soler. “There is a lot that, yes, Franco was very bad at the beginning but then he brought in the middle class and in the 60s and 70s he improved the economy, but the reality is that it was despite him. We were starting from two decades of hunger and misery that sank the country even though before the Civil War it was among the most advanced, but he never wanted to change the autarkic system he defended. However, he was forced because there was no foreign currency even for gasoline,” describes the economist.
Martínez Soler is especially concerned about some beliefs he hears, such as the one that states that “with Franco there was more order and peace.” “This is not true, there was the peace of cemeteries, of sepulchral silence,” illustrates the journalist, who considers it dangerous how many of these messages can end up penetrating youth if there is not “a vaccine” in the classrooms against misinformation. “They have studied the Middle Ages perfectly but they do not know what the dictatorship meant or how cruel and dark it was. “It makes me very sad to see young people in Ferraz with their arms raised and singing facing the sun when what Franco did was a brutal investment in terror.”
If there is something that characterizes the book, it is the measure and the attempt to transmit the information “in the most objective way possible.” This also involves explaining how the Civil War “was horrible on both sides”, that there were executions by both the Republicans – about 55,000 people – and the Francoists – 150,000 – or admitting that among the rebels “there were surely honest people.” who kept silent out of fear,” exemplifies Martínez Soler. But not all of this “is comparable” with the persecution, violence and attempted extermination displayed during the dictatorship in what the Francoists called “times of peace.”
“In the same way that I do not justify left-wing dictatorships or the excesses of the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, no reasonable person should feel obliged to defend Franco’s dictatorship today,” says Erik Martínez. For Martínez Soler, the key is also “not to be equidistant” because “there is no possible equidistance between the aggressor and the attacked.” For the journalist, now retired, the most important lesson that youth (and not only) could glean from the pages of the book is one about freedom. And that is why he tells them: “You inherit this democracy of half a century. It is good that you know what foundations it is built on because freedom is like oxygen, you don’t know how valuable it is until you lack it.”
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