The Politics of Forgetting

Can a country move forward without confronting its past?

Spain has been a democracy since 1978.

There are still at least 114,266 people in unmarked graves across the country. For most of those years, looking for them was not something the state was willing to do. When a judge finally tried, the courts put him on trial.

That gap is what I want to write about. Not whether Spain is a democracy, which it is, but what a country can leave unfinished while being one.

The deal

Francisco Franco ruled Spain from 1939 until he died in 1975. The usual description of that period is political repression and the persecution of opponents. That is accurate and it tells you almost nothing.

The number is better. In October 2008, Judge Baltasar Garzón's court at Spain's Audiencia Nacional counted 114,266 people who had been forcibly disappeared during the Civil War and the dictatorship. Before he looked, the accepted estimate was around 30,000. Most of those people are still where they were put.

After Franco died, Spain built a democracy fast. The Constitution came in 1978. Getting there meant negotiating between people who had been on opposite sides of a civil war and who remembered it very differently. Everyone involved was afraid the violence would start again. Compromise is what made it work.

Compromise also decided what Spain would be allowed to ask about itself.

In 1977, Spain passed an Amnesty Law. It released political prisoners. It also extended amnesty to crimes committed by the authorities. That was part of the deal.

What came out of it is sometimes called the pact of forgetting: an understanding that stability depended on keeping the hardest questions about the Civil War and the dictatorship out of public life. Carolyn P. Boyd's research traces how that consensus shaped every argument Spain had about its own history afterward (133–48).

I should be careful with that phrase. Nobody forgot. Families knew where their relatives had gone. The pact wasn't about private memory. It was about what the state would investigate, and the answer was nothing.

What happened when somebody tried

In October 2008, Garzón decided his court could investigate those disappearances. His reasoning was that they were crimes against humanity under international law, and that the 1977 amnesty could not cover them.

The Spanish judiciary responded by charging him. He went on trial for exceeding his authority as a judge. He was acquitted in February 2012, more than three years later.

I keep coming back to this. The argument I was making- that forgetting can be a failure to act rather than a destruction of evidence- turns out to be too gentle. In Spain, somebody did act. The system did not simply decline to follow him. It prosecuted him for trying.

United Nations human rights bodies have pushed Spain on this repeatedly, including a 2013 call for a national plan to search for the disappeared.

The laws that came late

Eventually the pressure told.

In 2007, Spain passed the Law of Historical Memory, recognizing people who had suffered persecution during the war and the dictatorship. In 2022, the Law of Democratic Memory went further, expanding the state's role in investigating abuses, recovering remains, and preserving public memory of the regime.

Those dates are the finding. Thirty and forty years after the transition. Building a democracy did not answer the question of historical responsibility. It postponed it, and a generation that had not been born during the dictatorship brought it back.

Julia López Fuentes argues that even official commemoration can end up protecting national unity at the expense of victims. Andrea Hepworth, writing in the International Journal of Transitional Justice, looks at how memory activists still run into legal and institutional walls when families try to get exhumations and answers. Both land in the same place. Admitting something happened is not the same as ending impunity.

Who decides?

Nobody assembles a country's memory alone.

Governments decide which records survive and which sites get marked. Schools decide how a period gets taught. Public institutions decide which version becomes the one a country tells about itself.

None of that changes what actually happened. Evidence still settles that. But it decides which documented experiences get attention and which stay at the edges.

So forgetting does not require burning anything. It can be done by not investigating, not recognizing, not digging. A country can keep every fact about its history and decline to act on any of them.

That matters because quiet looks like peace. A country that has stopped arguing about its past might have made peace with it. It might also never have let certain people into the argument. From outside, those look identical.

What I am not saying

Remembering is not automatically justice.

Memory gets used. Governments and movements invoke historical suffering to justify what they want now, and they minimize it to protect the story they prefer. Commemoration is cheap compared to accountability, and sometimes it substitutes for it. A country can build monuments and still refuse to open a grave.

Spain's transition was also a real achievement, made by people with real reasons to fear what came next. Nothing here says the compromises of the 1970s were made in bad faith.

The narrower claim is this: a transition can succeed politically and stay unfinished legally, and the second part can last fifty years without anyone deciding it should.

Inherited guilt, inherited responsibility

So what does a country owe people who suffered under a government that no longer exists?

Not guilt. Nobody is culpable for decisions made before they were born.

But you inherit more than guilt. You inherit institutions, public stories, and arrangements built by those decisions. You inherit the question of whether those arrangements are still hiding something. Time changes who has to deal with the past. It does not cancel the job.

That is the difference between inherited guilt and inherited responsibility. A country does not have to condemn its grandparents to acknowledge the people they buried. It does not have to stay defined by its history to look into it. It can credit the transition and still ask what the transition cost, and who paid for it.

The hard part is that stability and justice do not arrive together. Compromise can be what makes a democracy possible. It should not become a permanent reason not to look.

Spain is not a formula. But it shows what silence can hide. A peaceful transition and an honest reckoning are two different achievements, and the first one does not produce the second.

A country cannot change what happened, and remembering will not make anyone agree. What it can decide is whether its institutions investigate honestly, whether victims get a chance at recognition, and whether evidence survives when it contradicts the story the country prefers about itself.

The question is not whether a society should stay stuck in its history or move past it.

It is whether moving forward requires looking back first.

Maybe the measure of a democracy is not how well it leaves its past behind. Maybe it is whether it can look at that past without giving up the principles it says it learned from it.

Works Cited

Boyd, Carolyn P. "The Politics of History and Memory in Democratic Spain." The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 617, no. 1, 2008, pp. 133–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716207312760.

European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. "Trial of Spanish Judge Garzón." ECCHR, https://www.ecchr.eu/en/case/trial-of-spanish-judge-garzon/. Accessed 23 Oct. 2026.

Hepworth, Andrea. "Memory Activism as Advocacy for Transitional Justice: Memory Laws, Mass Graves and Impunity in Spain." International Journal of Transitional Justice, vol. 17, no. 2, 2023, pp. 268–85. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijad017.

López Fuentes, Julia. "'A Forgetting for Everyone, by Everyone'? Spain's Memory Laws and the Rise of the European Community of Memory, 1977–2007." The Journal of Modern History, vol. 94, no. 1, 2022, pp. 127–62. https://doi.org/10.1086/718121.

Spain. Law 20/2022 of 19 October on Democratic Memory. Boletín Oficial del Estado, 20 Oct. 2022, https://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-2022-17099.

Spain. Law 52/2007 of 26 December, Recognising and Extending Rights and Establishing Measures in Favour of Those Who Suffered Persecution or Violence during the Civil War and the Dictatorship. 26 Dec. 2007. Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, https://mptmd.gob.es/en/portal/memoria-democratica/normativa/ley-de-la-memoria-historica.