As Spain rouses from its collective amnesia about its civil war, the government is attempting to recover millions of documents on the conflict and the Republican exile that followed, dispersed throughout 12 countries including Britain, France, Mexico and the US.
The archives, many of them private, contain everything from letters from prisoners and diplomatic correspondence to an odd Russian documentary apparently showing Pablo Picasso and the Communist Party secretary general digging a trench in a Madrid park, according to an article in yesterday's El Pais.
The ministry of culture plans to unify these fragments of history at a future Center of Historic Memory in the university city of Salamanca, which may potentially prompt a new wave of Spanish research.
"It's going to complete part of the puzzle and allow us to know what really happened here,'' said Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory.
Until recently, silence about the military uprising from 1936-1939 that led to Franco's 40-year dictatorship has been part of a "pact of forgetting,'' considered a necessary evil to help accommodate Spain's peaceful transition to democracy.
But a new generation is demanding official recognition for victims of the Franco regime, compensation for exiled Republicans and the overturning of sentences by Franco's military tribunals. Silva's association has led a drive to identify the victims of Franco's death squads buried in unmarked graves.
Bringing foreign archives to Spain will make it easier for family members to discover the fate of relatives in exile, Silva said.
Last month the ministry of culture signed an agreement with the Red Cross to acquire copies of 80,000 documents held in Geneva, including letters from wounded soldiers and lists of prisoners in Franco's jails, accumulated during the agency's work on both sides of the war.
Historians are especially interested in documents from Russia, which include files on the International Brigades and a plan for Soviet aid to the Second Spanish Republic that could shed light on the extent of Soviet involvement in the war.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion