Martín Villa’s Dirty War

Part of why the charges against Martín Villa are so politically explosive is that they bring into focus the organised campaign of state violence which accompanied the country’s democratic transition (1975-’83). Unlike Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, where an army mutiny against the dictatorship swung the balance of forces in favour of the democratic opposition, in Spain the coercive apparatus of the Francoist state remained intact throughout the transition period. Amidst a wave of trade union militancy and mass social unrest, “public order was a determining factor” in how the reform process played out, claims writer Mariano Sánchez, and in particular “served to halt the left.”

In 1977, the year of Spain’s first democratic elections, the police (under the direction of Martín Villa) broke up 788 demonstrations with violence. As Sánchez argues in his book La Transición Sangrienta “Every time a decisive moment for political change arrived, political violence in the street also escalated. The goal was to ensure the street was not in the hands of the left and the [reform] process could be controlled [from above] without inflicting losses on the Francoists or capitalist class.” 

Indeed on various occasions in the key years between 1976 and 1978, the police resorted to using live ammunition against anti-Francoist demonstrations and strikes. In the case of the 1976 Vitoria massacre, police surrounded a local church at the height of the general strike in the city and tear-gassed the approximately 4,000 trade unionists who were meeting inside. As the workers were forced out of the church’s exits to escape the fumes, the police opened fire. Besides the five people who were killed, 50 more received bullet wounds. 

“It was premediated,” asserts José Luis Martínez, one of the survivors. “The police knew the time of the assembly and could have cordoned off the church and blocked people from entering. But instead they let everyone in so as to set an example.”

As Labour Relations Minister at the time, Martín Villa was one of the officials overseeing security operations in the city that day. After taking up the interior portfolio the following year, a series of further deadly police engagements occurred on his watch – centred primarily in the Basque Country and Navarra. 

Probably the most notorious of these incidents occurred during the Sanfermines festival in Pamplona in 1978 when police attacked protesters within the bullring after a banner in favour of an amnesty for Basque prisoners was displayed. More than a 150 were injured, including seven with gunshot wounds, and one student died as a result of a bullet to the head. A recording of the radio order issued to the police has survived: “Load your firearms and shoot with full force – as hard as you can. It does not matter if you kill.”

Martín Villa is also under investigation for the murder Arturo Ruiz who was shot dead by a right-wing vigilante working alongside the police at a protest in Madrid in January 1978. Though not forming part of the Argentinian case, suspicions still also hang over his involvement in the fire at the Scala theatre in Barcelona in 1978 that killed four people and was used as cover to crack down on the anarchist CNT union. The attack was most likely orchestrated by the notorious Franco-era torturer Roberto Conesa, head of the Interior Ministry’s Political Brigade. 

The Spanish Anomaly

Judge Servini now has a ten day period to decide whether the case against Martín Villa should proceed to trial. Such a ruling would represent a major victory for Spain’s historical memory movement and, in particular, the group of lawyers and activists who spearheaded the legal action ten years ago. These included the tireless campaigner Chato Galante, who died of coronavirus earlier this year, and the late Argentinean human rights lawyer, and torture victim, Carlos Slepoy – who often noted with irony how Spain’s Supreme Court was willing to investigate the crimes of South American dictatorships but not those of the Franco regime.

This was a sentiment echoed by the group of Spanish, Basque and Catalan MEPs that make up the Historical Memory Group in the European Parliament. In their statement released in response to Borrell’s intervention they underlined Spain’s exceptionalism on historical justice:

Different European countries that suffered authoritarian and fascist regimes comparable to Spain’s have been able to prosecute their respective dictatorships and those officials responsible for its crimes, alongside developing an active policy of recognition for victims. This is true of all countries except the Spanish State – an anomaly that has contributed to Spain remaining one of the countries in the world with the highest number of disappeared people.

There are various reasons for this anomaly. First, the continuity of class power secured during the transition – which saw no significant expropriations, nationalisations or legal inquiries into the past. In a process of democratisation led from above primarily by members of the former dictatorial regime “even those oligarchs and families closest to the dictatorship landed in the new democracy with total normality,” writes journalist Alberto Lardiés, “not losing one of their privileges.” In subsequent decades, a zero-tolerance policy has ultimately been necessary for such Francoist elites because any move towards historical redress – such as the Argentinian lawsuit – has the potential to develop into a broader threat to its wealth and power. 

Martín Villa is a prime example of such class continuity. After being incorporated into the Partido Popular in the 1980s and serving on its national executive, he went on to become the director of semi-state energy company Endesa in 1997 where he oversaw its full privatisation. From there he took up a role heading the television arm of the Prisa media group before being named President of the state’s “bad bank” Sareb in 2012.

A second factor informing such resistance is the broader political culture of the Spanish right, which unlike in Germany was never subject to a process of “denazification.” With historical denialism around the crimes of the fascist regime remaining unchecked in the mainstream right, even minimal moves, such as the removal of street names associated with Francoism or public funds to exhume Republican mass graves, are met with hostility. 

Third, and crucial for securing broader political consensus, is the degree to which the PSOE leadership was incorporated into the dominant circuits of power and patronage in the wake Felipe Gonzalez’s electoral victory in 1983. As sociologist Ruben Juste explains in his book IBEX 35, PSOE and sectors of the old Francoist elites converged in the 1980s around a project of “modernisation” for the Spanish economy – which saw a wave of privatisations, mergers and the liberalisation of markets – in anticipation of the country’s incorporation into the European single market. 

In this context there was little incentive for the PSOE leadership to look backwards and revisit the amnesty law and the wider “pact of forgetting” it had signed up to during the transition.

A Tainted Democratic System

Yet as Miguel Urbán insists, this was never simply a question of looking back and “opening up old wounds” but rather the impunity of the Francoist elites has impacted on the quality of contemporary Spanish democracy. Spain is the country which self-identifies as further to the Left than any other in Europe and has a clear progressive social majority but its democratic institutions were infected from the beginning with the corruption and cronyism of the old dictatorship. Ex-King Juan Carlos I’s decision to flee the country last month rather than face his legal difficulties is just the latest example of this. 

But more than that, the quality of Spanish democracy has been tainted by the fact that more than 115,000 victims of genocide remain lying in unmarked graves and roadside ditches across the country while, at the same time, the final members of the regime which committed such crimes are left to retire with dignity. 

The current left-wing coalition has promised a new historical memory law, which will likely outlaw the Francisco Franco foundation, see some form of symbolic reparations and include a major program for the recovery of remains of the disappeared. Yet repealing the amnesty law remains off the table. In this respect the judgement on whether to bring Martín Villa to trial, and the reaction of the PSOE-Unidas Podemos coalition to this ruling, will be the next step in the ongoing struggle for justice and historical recognition in Spain.