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.

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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.~**__

Schedule

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)

BIO

Esteban Beltrán is director of the Spanish Section of Amnesty International since 1997. He has also worked for the International Secretariat of Amnesty International (from 1992 to 1996). In 1997, he worked as investigator for Human Rights violations in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panamá. He has a degree in Development in Birbeck College, University of London (from 1993 to 1995).

Jon Lee Anderson is a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. He has covered numerous conflicts for the magazine, including those in Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, and Liberia. He has also reported frequently from Latin America and the Caribbean, writing about Rio de Janeiro’s gangs, the Panama Canal, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and a Caracas slum, among other subjects, and has written Profiles of Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Gabriel García Márquez. He is the author of several books, including “ The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan ,” “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life ,” “Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World ,” and “The Fall of Baghdad .”

Miquel Ramos is a journalist specialized on far-right movements and hate crimes. He writes in the Catalonian newspaper Directa and other outlets. He is co-author of the Project crimenesdeodio.info and author of the investigation “La extrema derecha española durante la crisis económica 2008-2015” (Universitat de València 2015) (“The extreme Spanish right wing Turing the economical crisis 2008-2015”).

Photo: Francesc Torres