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The Guardian
15-06-2025
- The Guardian
‘It's not a genuine apology': Spanish women reject Catholic attempt to redress Franco incarceration
As the members of the Catholic organisation wrapped up their speech with an appeal for forgiveness, the auditorium in Madrid exploded in rage. For decades, many in the audience had grappled with the scars left by their time in Catholic-run institutions; now they were on their feet chanting: 'Truth, justice and reparations' and – laying bare their rejection of any apology – 'Neither forget, nor forgive'. It was an unprecedented response to an unprecedented moment in Spain, hinting at the deep fissures that linger over one of the longest-running and least-known institutions of Francisco Franco's dictatorship: the Catholic-run centres that incarcerated thousands of women and girls as young as eight, subjecting them to barbaric punishments, forced labour and religious indoctrination. The centres operated under the direction of the Women's Protection Board, a state-run institution revived in 1941 and helmed by Franco's wife, Carmen Polo. They aimed to rehabilitate 'fallen women', aged 15 to 25, as well as others deemed to be at risk of deviating from the narrow path marked out for women during the dictatorship. Survivors, however, describe a reality that was far more brutal. 'It was the greatest atrocity Spain has committed against women,' said Consuelo García del Cid, who was drugged by a doctor at her home in Barcelona and taken to a centre in Madrid at the age of 16. In her case, her family had branded her rebellious after she attended rallies against the dictatorship. 'In Franco's Spain, a fallen woman could be anyone. If you were poor, an orphan, if your family faced hardship, if you were a bad student or wore a miniskirt or kissed your boyfriend in a cinema or danced too close – anything was enough.' Many women were hauled into the centres in handcuffs after being singled out by priests, neighbours or relatives. Others were reported by state employees known as the 'guardians of morality', who patrolled the streets and venues such as movie theatres, swimming pools and gardens, calling the police any time they spotted a woman they believed to be in moral danger, said García del Cid, who has written five books on the centres. 'It was a covert prison system for minors,' she said. 'You couldn't go out, your mail was censored, visits were supervised by a nun. They had us working all the time, scrubbing and praying. We worked for free; sewing, embroidery, knitting, doll-making. We weren't allowed to speak freely to each other, we couldn't have friends. They were watching us all the time.' The centres, which are believed to have held more than 40,000 young women and girls at their peak, were not closed until 1985 – 10 years after Franco's death. Amid pressure from survivors and after more than a year investigating their claims, Confer, a Catholic body representing more than 400 congregations, including many with ties to the centres, said it was ready to seek forgiveness for what had happened. The ceremony, the first of its kind in Spain, got under way on Monday with the chair of Confer explaining that the organisation was ready to break its decades of silence over what had happened. 'We acknowledge this page in our history,' said Jesús Díaz Sariego. 'This is an exercise in moral and historical responsibility, an opportunity to acknowledge what we did not do well in the past and express our empathy and deep sorrow to all these women.' He contextualised the centres within the narrow norms of a dictatorship that had rolled back the rights of women, requiring them to obtain the permission of male guardians to work, travel or open a bank account. It was a 'time of severe educational, social, political, and religious restrictions', he said. His remarks were followed by an audio compilation of survivors' testimonies. Some spoke of wrestling with abuse by nuns when they were just eight or 11 years old, others told of punishments that ranged from rubbing nettles on the vulvas of those who wet the bed, to forcing people to eat their own vomit or draw crosses on the floor with their tongues. 'In the name of what God was this done?' one woman asked. 'What kind of religious women could carry out such evil against children who had committed no crime?' Most remembered the centres as places of beatings, verbal abuse, gnawing hunger and cold. Some spoke of the decades it had taken them to learn to live with their experience, while others hinted at those who had been consumed by the trauma and had turned to drugs or suicide. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion By the time the three members of Confer stood up to ask formally for forgiveness, emotions were high. As many survivors, flanked by their families and historical memory campaigners, began chanting, brandishing signs that read 'No' and raising their voices as organisers tried to drown them out with music, Confer suspended the event. Survivors were swift to explain their reaction. 'It's not a genuine apology,' said Dolores Gómez, who was sent to a centre at 13 after she told a psychiatrist her father was sexually abusing her. 'This is just a facelift.' The audio that had played during the ceremony had been edited to omit some claims, including those of women who said they had been pressured to give up their babies for adoption, said Gómez. 'They're not asking forgiveness for all that happened, they're only asking forgiveness for the actions they are willing to recognise.' After a few months at the centre, Gómez escaped, choosing to return home and risk her father's abuse over the nuns' treatment. At 15 she was sent back after her father raped her, leaving her pregnant. The following year, the nuns granted her father permission to take her out during the Easter holidays, allowing him to again rape and impregnate her. It took Gómez years to track down her children and start the painstaking process of building a relationship with them. While Confer had been clear in asking the women for forgiveness, there was little sign they had delved into their own consciences and how they had allowed this to happen, said Paca Blanco, whose conservative family institutionalised her at 15 after she returned home from a party. 'They need to ask forgiveness of themselves first,' she said. 'How do you apologise to teenage girls that you have tortured, mistreated, disrespected and exploited for labour? You've stolen their babies. How do you apologise for that?' Some survivors, however, disagreed. 'I would have liked if we could have made it to the end of the event,' said Mariaje López who was eight when she was sent to live with the nuns. 'I think so many women needed to hear this apology to understand that the shame is on the other side. Particularly the tens of thousands of women who remain silent and ashamed over what happened.' What was clear to everyone, however, was that Monday's apology – accepted or not – was the tepid beginning of a much longer journey. 'This is one step forward in the ongoing battle,' said García del Cid. She had requested a meeting with Spain's minister of justice, hoping to have survivors formally recognised as victims of the dictatorship and potentially paving the way for a response along the lines of Ireland's 2013 apology and reparations for the abuses that took place in its Magdalene Laundries. In Spain, there has been little fallout from the role that church and state played in operating the centres; the congregations had never faced any kind of reckoning, with many of them continuing to receive public funding, said García del Cid. Hovering over all of this was the question of just how these centres were able to continue operating after the death of Franco, leaving young women incarcerated even as Spain transitioned to a democracy. 'They forgot about us, we didn't matter,' said García del Cid. 'They need to explain a lot to us. Democracy owes us 10 years of life.'
Reuters
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
Women who survived Spain's Franco-era centres disrupt Catholic apology
MADRID, June 10 (Reuters) - Spanish women who were forced into rehabilitation centres during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco broke up a Catholic meeting held to offer them a apology and demanded more concrete reparation from the church and state. Protesters - including survivors in their 60s and 70s, activists and relatives - held up banners marked "No" during the event on Monday night, threw the signs into the audience and forced organisers to suspend the meeting. Thousands of girls and young women who were accused of perceived moral failings - from pregnancies outside marriage to left-wing activism - were put into state-run Catholic rehabilitation institutions for periods during Franco's rule, from the 1940s up to a decade after his death into the 1980s. A Catholic body that includes most of the communities of nuns that helped operate some of the centres held a ceremony to ask the women for forgiveness in the Pablo VI Foundation auditorium in Madrid, the first event of its kind in Spain. The President of the Spanish Confederation of Religious Entities (CONFER) read out an apology then invited survivors to come to the stage as a video of them describing their experiences was shown. After the film, which was often drowned out by cheers and cries of "Yes, we can", people in the crowd jumped to their feet and started shouting "truth, justice and reparation," and "neither forget nor forgive". CONFER officials turned on the lights, abruptly ended the event and later said they may issue a statement in response on Tuesday. The confrontation underlined the depth of feeling over the Patronato de Proteccion a la Mujer (Board for the Protection of Women) institutes - part of the legacy of Franco's rule that is still haunting Spain almost 50 years after his death in November 1975. Campaigners, including individual survivors and organisations such as the Banished Daughters of Eve, are demanding a response from the state, along the lines of Ireland's 2013 apology and reparations for the abuses in its Magdalene Laundries. Some are also asking for financial compensation to cover costs, including psychological support, and the work that they say they were made to do without pay in the centres. At the event, before it was disrupted, CONFER chairman Jesus Diaz Sariego described the statement as one step towards a broader process of recognition and that the organisation would collaborate in the search for the truth. "We are here to do what we consider necessary and right: to ask for forgiveness ... because this act is not just a formality, but a necessary act of justice. It is an exercise in historical and moral responsibility," he said. After the event, Consuelo Garcia del Cid, 66, a survivor, dismissed that apology as a "facelift" and accused CONFER of removing some of the recorded testimonies and stopping women talking about babies that campaigners say were taken from unwed mothers at the centres. Garcia del Cid, who championed the cause with several books and founded Banished Daughters of Eve, had earlier told the audience the Spanish government owed them, particularly for the 10 years the boards were kept running after Franco. Spain's Democratic Memory Ministry - set up to tackle the legacy of Spain's civil war and Franco's regime - said last week it applauded CONFER's action and planned to hold its own ceremony later this year. It declined to comment further on Monday. Equality minister Ana Redondo attended the event but did not make any comment.
The Guardian
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘People were repressed into silence': the Spanish artist creating a visual memory of fascism's horrors
The map of Paco Roca's mind, a landscape of memory and loss, unfolds across the walls of an exhibition hall in Madrid, inviting visitors to acquaint themselves with the bittersweet geographies that have shaped the work of one of Spain's best-known graphic artists. Roca, whose comics have explored such varied themes as Francoist reprisals, the exiled Spanish republicans who helped liberate Paris from the Nazis, family histories and the depredations of Alzheimer's, is the subject of a new show called Memory: An Emotional Journey Through the Comics of Paco Roca. Staged as part of a year-long programme of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Franco and Spain's subsequent return to democracy, the exhibition looks at how the 56-year-old artist has recovered, preserved and shared memories and testimonies. 'The idea was to make it all look like an encyclopaedia or a set of Victorian maps because, as the end of the day, it's an atlas – a collection of maps that chronicle the journey of creating a comic,' said Roca. 'There are three panels about memory: historical memory; memory and identity; and family memory. The maps try to show what's involved in the creation of any artistic work, whether it's a comic or a film or a novel.' Given the subject matter and Roca's own approach to trekking after the past, the peripatetic, cartographical and non-linear nature of the exhibition seemed only fitting. Its four murals, 19 annotated strips and dozens of sketches, photos and reference points – from lighthouses and hot-air balloons to Jules Verne, Gustave Doré and Hergé – form part of a meandering trail. 'The author never goes in a straight line from the initial idea to the final result, trying to do things as efficiently as possible,' he said. 'That's what AI might do. The author is after an emotional tour.' Although memory is the thread that runs through all Roca's work, some of his most famous journeys have led him into the still controversial realms of historical memory. His most recent book, The Abyss of Forgetting, co-written with the journalist Rodrigo Terrasa, is about a woman's struggle to find remains of her father, who was murdered after the Spanish civil war ended. 'Reconstructing the testimonies of people who couldn't talk about things when they were happening – for different reasons – is a creative and personal challenge,' he said. 'People were repressed into silence during the dictatorship and they couldn't talk about the tragedies in their lives for 40 years. And it's even complicated in democracy because as soon as somebody talks about something that happened, you get these voices saying: 'Come on! What do you want to remember all that for?'' Roca is also driven to use those testimonies to create a visual memory where none exist. 'Unlike what happened after the second world war in Europe, where there were visual records of the horror – the first thing the allies did after liberating the extermination camps was take photos of them and film them, so that only a handful of idiots can deny the horrors of fascism – there wasn't a visual memory in Spain,' he said. 'We don't have photos of the prisons and the executions and the repression and the mass graves. It can be really hard to draw because you often don't get a lot of detail from the testimonies because they're inherited memories, passed from parents to their children. But trying to contribute to the creation of this visual memory of that horror is really important to me. Hearing a testimony isn't the same as seeing it drawn.' Elsewhere in the exhibition, Roca reflects on how he has used his own family history to delve into Spain's past – and on how those stories have ended up becoming something more universal. 'The thing that really interested me about my family and its past is that they're totally normal people whose early lives were marked by the misery and the hunger of the postwar period,' he said. 'But the books I've written about them have been published in a lot of countries, and that makes you realise that they're not just everyday stories about Spain; they're also stories about grief and memory and nostalgia.' Questions about how memory shapes us recur in the section that examines recollection and identity. As well as looking at how age and disease 'can wipe both our memories and our identities', it features Marjane Satrapi, whose Woman, Life, Freedom – a collective work by 17 Iranian and international comic book artists, including Roca – showed how women have defended their identities amid the repression of the Iranian regime. Roca is well aware that sections of the Spanish right are unhappy with the notion of a year of celebrations to mark the end of the dictator. He also knows that some have accused Spain's socialist-led government – whose democratic memory ministry is organising the exhibition at the Instituto Cervantes – of playing politics with the past. But then political polarisation, he added, was hardly a problem unique to Spain. 'In Germany, you have parties that are questioning things that everyone had thought had been settled and you have these nationalist movements erupting in Europe and the US and you have [Javier] Milei attacking historical memory in Argentina,' said Roca. 'It's a bad time for society, but it allows authors to reflect on this and to find stories that had been consigned to oblivion.' And that, said the artist, was what it was all about: the odd individual trying to give the voices of the past a decent, if belated, hearing. It can sometimes be a lonely business – and solitude is another of the exhibition's themes. Roca pointed to a glass-topped cabinet that held an old pencil drawing of a boy in jeans and a T-shirt crouching over a desk. 'I found this sketch that my drawing teacher did of me in 1980,' he said. 'I'm still in that same position, alone and hunched over a piece of paper.'
