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.

Schedule

»Tuesday, March 7, 6:30pm - **Panel 1| **Sites of memory and voices of the past: why visit them, why listen to them

*Jordi Guixé | Founder director of the European Observatory on Memories of the University of Barcelona. ~With the support of Ramon Llull Institut.~

*Luis Martín Cabrera | Director of the Spanish Civil War Memory Project. University of California, San Diego.

_»Tuesday, April 4, 6:30pm - _Panel 2

a) The UN reproves Spain: Unrepaired victims after forty years of democracy

*Pablo de Greiff|United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of non-recurrence. Senior Fellow Adjunct Professor of Law NYU.

b) Women among the forgotten: the Francoist violence against women and children

*Aránzazu Borrachero | Director of Mujer y Memoria, CUNY

*Soledad Luque | President of “Todos los niños robados son también mis niños” and spokeswoman of the Coordinadora Estatal de apoyo a la Querella Argentina contra Crímenes del Franquismo.

_»Monday, April 24, 6:30pm - _Panel 3| Imperfect transition and challenge of the present. Victims of Francoism, 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)

_»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)