Antonio Buero Vallejo

Francoist Propaganda after the Civil War

While historical memory has resurfaced as a divisive issue in Spain since the turn of the century, contentious politics surrounding memory of the Spanish Civil War came into being well before the conflict had even ended, as each side aimed to influence the portrayal of the struggle to the Spanish people, the international community, and in the history books. The cover of this volume, picturing the destruction of the town of Belchite in Zaragoza, Spain, stands as a symbol of the decades of shifting debate about how the horrors of the Spanish Civil War would be remembered. Initially held by the Nationalists at the beginning of the coup, Belchite was the site of a fierce and lengthy battle. Republicans regained control of the town for a brief period before it was recaptured again by Nationalist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, in 1938. The struggle left the town in ruins. As with many conflicts, the official history of the war was written by the victors. Franco, who was highly attuned to the power of propaganda and self-promotion, ordered that Belchite be abandoned instead of rebuilding it as he had initially promised so that it might stand as a monument to the leftist violence that he had gloriously suppressed. The Francoist version of events was not contested in any meaningful way during the four decades he remained in power. After Franco’s death, however, the ruins of Belchite evolved to symbolize the cruelty of war more generally. Most recently, since the remains of ninety missing Republicans have been unearthed in Belchite’s mass graves, which are estimated to contain nearly 350 of the town’s 3,000 residents who were executed during the Nationalists’ initial repression at the start of the war (“Belchite”), the town has come to symbolize Francoist lies and Nationalist barbarity.

After the war, Franco set out to eradicate all sympathy with the Republican cause through tight control of the media, oppression, exile, imprisonment, torture, and mass execution. Helen Graham describes the conditions Buero would have faced in a Nationalist prison after the war, referring to the “startling uniformity” of the degradation and objectification of prisoners, all of whom were subjected to a mixture of physical and psychological punishment, which served the “underlying rebels’ project: to build […] a homogeneous, monolithic and hierarchized society” (319–20). When Buero left prison, he entered a new Spain dominated by Nationalist propaganda, which created a false myth about the war in which he and his Republican comrades were dehumanized. Paul Preston analyzes the deliberate construction of Francoist collective memory in three stages: before, during, and after the Civil War. This construction was “based on the need to justify the military coup against the democratically elected government and the planned slaughter that the coup was to entail” (519). The first stage involved the de-legitimization of the Popular Front with the assertion that Spain needed to be saved from the demonic “Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy” behind it. The second stage occurred during the war and was achieved through strict control of rebel media, with collaboration from the Catholic church, to exaggerate Republican atrocities committed against the Nationalists and their supporters.