Adiós: Gone but not forgotten

Adolfo Suárez
The challenge of leading and effecting major political change has been faced by only a select group of individuals. To place Adolfo Suárez on the same pedestal as, say, Mandela or Gorbachev, would be stretching things, but consider the challenge he faced in leading the transition to post-Franco democracy. He himself was not a natural visionary. As the minister secretary-general of the Movimiento Nacional, the only political party that had been permitted, he was steeped in the Francoist tradition. His selection as prime minister by King Juan Carlos was unexpected. Indeed, for those hopeful of reform, it seemed like a retrograde step. But Suárez had the advantages of being relatively young (43) and so open to change and of having been close to the Franco apparatus. He knew, therefore, how to dismantle it. And he did so remarkably quickly.

The transition was anything but straightforward, though. Economic problems, union unrest, ETA violence, discontent among the military, they all played their part (as did his own tiredness of internal squabbles within his coalition UCD) in his eventual resignation in 1981 and in the failed coup attempt which coincided with the vote on his successor. Perhaps Suárez had not been firm enough. Lieutentant Colonel Antonio Tejero, the Guardia Civil officer who led the assault on Congress, had received only a few months' sentence for his part in the Operación Galaixa coup plot three years earlier. Dramatic though change was, there needed to also be a softly-softly approach; hence why the Amnesty Law of 1976 effectively ruled out retribution for crimes during the Franco era.

Hard it was, but the transition succeeded, and this was Suárez's great achievement. Among moves he made that angered the Francoists was to bring Felipe González back from exile. González's PSOE performed credibly in the first elections and it won in 1982 (another coup attempt having been uncovered and stopped just before the election). It was González who was to transform Spain, but he couldn't have done so without the transition under Adolfo Suárez.

Alfredo Di Stefano
Was he one of the greatest footballers ever? Quite probably so. He was from a time when footballers with strange, foreign names were heard of but never seen. There is no doubting his contribution to Spanish football and to Real Madrid's reputation, though where in the pantheon of sporting legends who have lent their names to advertising would one place this gem? "Alfredo Di Stefano dice ... Lucky Strike es mi cigarillo. Irresistible." Much more recently, he appeared in an Estrella Damm advert with Fernando Torres, then the wunderkind of Spanish football, the new Di Stefano. Whatever happened to him, do you suppose?

Gabriel García Márquez
When García Márquez died in April, the response in Spain was one of great grief tempered with great pride. Here was a writer to be placed in the same Spanish literary stratosphere as Miguel de Cervantes. But there was one great difference between the two. García Márquez wrote in Spanish but he wasn't Spanish. He was Colombian. This didn't seem to matter, though. Language had made him one of Spain's own as had his "magical realism", the way in which he weaved a Daliesque surrealism into his stories, the greatest of which and, in my opinion, one of the great novels of the twentieth century was the epic "One Hundred Years Of Solitude". 

Luis Aragonés
For someone whose surname translates as Aragonese, Luis Aragonés should - on account of the historical connection between Mallorca and Aragon - have an affiliation with Mallorca and be held with some affection. He did have and was. Aragonés took Real Mallorca to third place in La Liga in the 2000-2001 season. Oh for those days to return. A second spell as Mallorca's coach three years later was cut short when he was chosen as coach of the national side. In 2008 the great underachievers of world football finally achieved. Aragonés had led Spain to European Championship victory. He did have his moments, though. Like the time he was filmed calling Thierry Henry a "black shit". He was fined 3,000 euros. Had he been an England coach, he would have been sacked.

Paco de Lucia
Someone else with a Mallorcan connection, if mainly by residence and a brief period as a face of tourism promotion, de Lucia was one of Spain's greatest ever musicians. His guitar playing alone was sufficient to have afforded him such an accolade, but it was his innovation which elevated him to the heights of national and international acclaim. He broke down barriers between flamenco, pop, rock and jazz, most notably through his fusion work with the jazz guitarists John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola. De Lucia was thus a prime mover in making flamenco more widely accessible and appreciated and in inspiring the flamenco fusions that have followed his lead.

Forget Me Not: Historical memory

Adolfo Suárez's death last week ushered forth a generally positive appraisal of his premiership. As is often the case when a major political figure passes away, there was some selective memory being applied. Though Suárez is now remembered for his achievements in helping to found democracy in Spain, his time as prime minister came to an end because of a lack of consensus, something which conflicts with how the obituary revisionists have portrayed his prime ministership (even if this consensus was evident with the Moncloa Pact of 1977 that was important in the immediate post-Franco period). But his Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD) was a shaky coalition and it fell apart, he having already gone down with it by the time it was dissolved. One faction within it had criticised Suárez for not being democratic enough and for showing uninspired leadership.

That period in Spain's history was volatile for different reasons. One was industrial relations strife. Symbolically perhaps, what had promised to be a stormy UCD congress in Palma was cancelled because of an air-controllers' strike. Suárez, who had faced the prospect of a hostile gathering, didn't need the meeting to tell him that the writing was on the wall. He resigned anyway, less than a month before the coup attempt in February 1981.

The nonetheless successful transition to democracy obscured what arguably was Suárez's greatest failure. Though a reformer and moderniser, he was a product of Francoism. It took the coup attempt to bring home to the new democrats this failure: one which had not looked Francoism straight in the eye and dealt with it square on. The period from 1977 to 1981 was dubbed the politics of amnesia, and these were politics which were produced by the "pacto de olvido" (the pact of forgetting).

It is too easy to argue with hindsight that Suárez should have taken a different course and that there shouldn't have been this forgetfulness. The course that was taken was essentially pragmatic. Francoism most certainly did not die along with the Generalísimo. The coup attempt confirmed this, and indeed pressures from the military are sometimes cited as a reason why Suárez resigned.

I stated above that there was some selective memory with the tributes for Suárez, and memory - or its absence - has been a key factor in Spain since the Civil War. The politics of transition demanded that there was amnesia, but in applying this forgetfulness, Suárez and the rest of the political class were adopting a similar course to that which the Franco regime had. It airbrushed Republicanism from the memory and from the physical landscape of Spain. Its symbols were torn down and destroyed. It never existed.

The amnesia is often said to have lasted well into this century, but that isn't strictly accurate. Events of 23 February, 1981 heralded two decades of the "accommodation period". Acknowledgement of the past was made but without anything officially being done to reverse the forgetfulness pact or the Amnesty Law which had in effect pardoned repression and those who had committed offences during the Franco era. As these two decades went on, though, the pressure grew for some form of official recognition of the past and for official abandonment of the forgetfulness.

It wasn't until the Zapatero PSOE administration introduced the Law of Historical Memory that this recognition was made official. The law included the removal of Francoist symbols from public places, a condemnation of the repression, and state aid to exhume graves. As a process of reconciliation, it has been praised, even if it had taken 30 years for it to occur.

Between 2006 and 2010, almost 20 million euros were made available in the form of government grants for reconciliation funding. With the change of national government, these grants came to a halt. They may not have been necessary in any event (or affordable in a time of austerity), but reconciliation has proved to be shortlived. The law has not been the success that some would suggest it has been, and the politics of right versus left have conspired to undermine whatever success it might have achieved.

Like the Franco regime removed symbols of Republicanism, symbols of Francoism have also been removed, but not in the destructive manner with which the fascists attacked the Republican symbols. The removal of the symbols has been a physical sign of the implementation of the historical memory law, but there has not been consistency. In Llucmajor, for example, the mayor is under pressure to insist that the parish church removes a Francoist shield replete with the legend "fallen for God and for Spain". It is a small reminder of a past that some would like to cling to, a testimony to the strength of memory not to the weakness of officially induced forgetfulness. What would Suárez have made of such a little symbol? We'll never know.


Index for March 2014

Berlin travel fair politicians' no-show - 8 March 2014
Bono seeks support for Spain - 9 March 2014
Capdepera tourism - 6 March 2014
Carnival - 1 March 2014
Catalan book week - 4 March 2014
Council of Mallorca: Bauzá - 3 March 2014
Cycling tourism - 28 March 2014
Emigration and crisis - 23 March 2014
Eurovision and English - 12 March 2014
Farm bill - 5 March 2014
Farm reform and tourism - 24 March 2014
Law of Historical Memory - 31 March 2014
Mining law - 13 March 2014
Pollensa and university: landscape improvements - 2 March 2014
Rafael Nadal honorary doctorate - 29 March 2014
Sa Pobla's bell - 24 March 2014
SICTED quality - 21 March 2014
Sleep and Spanish kids' education - 26 March 2014
Son Real - 11 March 2014
Spring in Mallorca 1936 - 22 March 2014
Threat to certainty of Mallorca's tourism - 7 March 2014
Touristic zones in Mallorca - 27 March 2014
Tramuntana website - 30 March 2014
Women in Spain - 10 March 2014