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, April 4, 6:30pm - Panel 2

a) The UN reproves Spain: Forty Years of Democracy without Reparation

*Pablo de Greiff | Director of the Transitional Justice Program, CHRGJ, NYU.

b) The Forgotten among The Forgotten: 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.

Bio

Pablo de Greiff was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to serve as the first Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence in 2012. He is currently Senior Fellow and Director of the Transitional Justice Program at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the School of Law at NYU. Prior to joining NYU he was the Director of Research at the International Center for Transitional Justice from 2001 to 2014. Born in Colombia, De Greiff is the editor or coeditor of ten books related to transitions to democracy, democratic theory, and the relationship between morality, politics, and the law. As Special Rapporteur, he has presented country visit reports on Tunisia, Spain, Uruguay, and Burundi.

Aránzazu Borrachero Mendívil is a Professor at Queensborough Community College (CUNY). Her areas of interest include Critical Pedagogy, and Spanish Cultural and Gender Studies. During the last four years, she has been developing a web-based archive –Mujer y Memoria–_ to house oral history projects on gender aspects of the Francoist dictatorship and democratic transition in Spain. The first of these projects, Mothers and Daughters of the Spanish Transition to Democracy, gathers, preserves and divulges the testimonies of Spanish women who became adults and mothers during the thirty-six year Francoist dictatorship. She has recently begun a second oral history project to be incorporated into Mujer y Memoria: Stolen Motherhoods. Traffic in Minors during the Francoist Dictatorship and the Democratic Transition in Spain._

Soledad Luque Delgado is the President of the Association «Todos los niños robados también son mis niños» (All robbed children are also my children). She is a member of the Coordinadora Estatal de Apoyo a la Querella Argentina (CeAqua) (Public Coordinator of Support for the Argentine Lawsuit) against Francoist crimes. She is currently a contributor for the radio program «La hora de la República» (Radio Vallekas). She is a researcher at the Instituto de Estudios de Género (Institute of Gender Studies) at the Universidad Carlos III, in Madrid (Spain). There, she directs the Seminario Permanente de Derechos Humanos : Mujer y Franquismo (Permanent Seminar on Human Rights: Women and Franquismo) to be developed during 2017 Fall semester.

Next Panels

»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 Beltran | 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)