Bodies in Transition during the Post-franco Period: Revealing Buried Truths in Spain

This chapter is chronologically focused on Spain’s democratic “Transition”, the first decade of the post-Franco period, and purports to serve also as a structural transition in the narrative of this book. The years 1974–1976 marked Ramón J. Sender’s first and last return trips to Spain, where he spoke publicly of civil war loss and sorrow. My objective is to lay the groundwork for the final chapter of “Part One” about the 1980s investigation into the death of Amparo Barayón conducted by her and Ramón J. Sender’s son, Ramón Sender Barayón. In order to contextualize the story that the son will tell—and to more fully explain the reception of his early 1980s inquiries about his mother’s death, as well as the response in Spain to his published account in English and Spanish—I review the nature of the historical memory texts that were made public during this same time period. I examine the documents that directly reference the murder of civilians during the dictatorship, written from the point of view of the repressed communities themselves. The appearance of these texts in the public sphere, accounts that had never freely circulated in Spain, begin to sow the seeds for the much more robust twenty-first-century memory movement. But these early media publications never fully competed with the official narrative of the Transition that the best approach to past crimes of the State’s human rights abuses, was to just turn the page.