This series weighs the effects of violent repression during forty years of Franco’s dictatorship, even as we assess the persistence of official silence and a crisis of national memory through the last forty years of Spanish democracy. This series of conversations consider 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.

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

Schedule

»Monday, April 24, 6:30pm - 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)

BIO

_Vicenç Navarro _has been Professor of Applied Economics in the University of Barcelona. He is currently Professor of Political and Social Sciences, University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). He is also professor of Public Politics in The Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, U.S.) where he has been teaching during 40 years. He directs the Program in Public and Social Policy sponsored jointly by the University Pompeu Fabra and The Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of the Observatorio Social de España.

Ludger Mees is PhD in History at the University of Bielefeld, Germany and Professor for Contemporary History at the University of the Basque Country (Bilbao, Spain), where between 2004 and 2009 he was Vice-Chancellor. He has been author, co-author or editor of 15 books and about 80 articles and book chapters on nationalism, social movements, historiography and agrarian history. Some of his publications are “Nationalism, Violence and Democracy. The Basque Clash of Identities” (2003), “Nationalist politics at the crossroads. The Basque Nationalist Party and the challenge of sovereignty (1998-2014)” in “Contesting Spain? The Dynamics of Nationalist Movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country” (2015).

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Next Panel

_»Tuesday, May 2, 6:30pm - _Panel 4

a) Amnesty International Spain: When crime is at home

*Esteban Beltrán | President of Amnesty International Spain

b) Journalism and compromise: Denouncing a past that persists. From the Valle de los Caídos [Valley of the Fallen] to the rise of the far-right

*Jon Lee Anderson | Journalist, The New Yorker

*Miquel Ramos | Journalist, specialist in far-right movements. Directa, La Marea (Spain)