This series weighed the effects of violent repression during forty years of Franco’s dictatorship, even as we even today assess the persistence of official silence and a crisis of national memory through the last forty years of Spanish democracy. This series of conversations considered how instruments of remembering and reparation have emerged beyond state sectors, and in the absence of government policies, opening important breaches of recovery and reclamation for victims and their descendants.

In Spain the systematic violation of human rights during decades of the Franco Dictatorship remains an untreated social wound. Mass graves, assassinations, torture, kidnapping, child slavery, and state terror of those decades remain a difficult legacy for Spanish democracy and collective memory.

Though these violations have been recognized and denounced by international organizations such as the UN and Amnesty International, the state’s failure to create mechanisms for truth, reconciliation, or reparation, has forced extraordinary interventions by civil society. Journalists, civic organizations, voluntary associations, academic researchers, documentarians and filmmakers have helped to collect material evidence, historical records, personal testimonies that reveal the cost of this long period of dictatorship.

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Organized by Montse Armengou, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization - Spring 2017

~This endowed Chair was established thanks to a gift from Carroll and Milton Petrie._

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Panel 3 | Imperfect Transition and Challenges of the Present. Victims, Terrorism, and the State

* Vicenç Navarro | Professor of Political and Social Sciences, University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) and professor of Public Politics in The Johns Hopkins University. Director of the Observatorio Social de España.

*Ludger Mees | Professor of Contemporary History, University of Basque Country (UPV/EHU)

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