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Late in 2009, I travelled over four thousand kilometres through the Spanish territory to get the testimony of the few living ex-guerrillas. Despite their advanced age, they continue to denounce the crimes of the Franco’s regime, a controversial subject that will lead judge Baltasar Garzón to the dock for daring to investigate them.
For the first time in the history of the Spanish democracy, Franco’s crimes are matter of legal debate, a subject banned by Spanish justice Amnesty Act of 1977 that the so-called “super-judge” Baltasar Garzón has decided to investigate, based on international law considering that those crimes do not prescribe since they fit in the frame of crimes against humanity.
During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the dictator Francisco Franco warned that "the balance of the contest should not be done the liberal way, with monstrous and disastrous amnesties which are rather a deception than a gesture of forgiveness." Two months before the end of the war, the threat came true: the new regime passed the Law of Political Responsibilities, with retroactive effects, hoping to erase any legacy of the democratic period of the Second Republic, proclaimed on 14 April 1931.
In those early months of 1939, the war already being lost, half a million of Spaniards fled the repression crossing the Pyrenees to France towards an uncertain future. In Spain, the number of the called "moles" increased: republicans who took refuge at home or any kind of hiding place, for years. Many others chose to "put out into the hills," hiding in the forest or the mountain, to escape from imprisonment, interrogation and executions of the totalitarian Franco regime. These ambushed "runaways" would be the precursors of the future Spanish guerrilla cells, consolidated as armed and political structures after 1942. The anti-Franco “guerrillas”, also called "maquis" - from "maquisards", the French Resistance fighters against the Nazis - disappeared as a widespread movement in 1952, extinguished itself completely in the 60’s.
Between five and seven thousand of Spaniards, took up arms against Franco, especially from the last years of World War II (1939-45) on, encouraged by the imminent defeat of Hitler and Mussolini. They believed the Allies would also intervene in Spain to put an end to fascism, but with the onset of the Cold War (1945-47) the two world powers stopped being a threat to Franco.
The survival of the guerrila largely depended on the thousands of "connections" - family, friends and comrades - who supported the anti-Franco resistance. Many of them did pay with their own lives for the collaboration with the guerrillas, and at least about 20,000 were arrested.
Only in 2001, a group of ex-guerrillas of the Asociación Archivo Guerra y Exílio (Association Archive, War and Exile) got the Congress of Deputies to recognize for the first time and unanimously, even if only “morally”, the role of the anti-Franco resistance. The Law of Historical Memory, approved in 2007 by the Socialist government of Zapatero, neither cleared the way for legal recognition of the victims of the Franco regime.
This report brings together ten testimonies of the few “guerrilleros” still alive who, they say, feel disappointed with the democracy that still does not rescue from oblivion this chapter of the History of Spain, when thousands of Spaniards preferred to face death to surrendering fascism.