In August 1936, after a failed coup against the Second Spanish Republic, Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces seized the city of Badajoz in the western region of Extremadura. The siege was swift, brutal, and indiscriminate. Thousands were executed, soldiers and civilians alike, their bodies stacked and set ablaze. Unbothered by cartographer’s lines, the smoke rose in thick, dark columns and drifted across the Caya river, clinging to clothes, hair, and memory.

From Elvas, just across the border, Portuguese civilians and foreign journalists watched the flames and breathed in the evidence of atrocity. The city that once hosted imperialism’s genteel mapmakers now served as a front-row seat to mechanized butchery. It was here, in these borderlands, that Chicago Tribune correspondent Jay Allen found himself documenting what would become one of the most horrific episodes of the Spanish Civil War.

“This is the most painful story it has ever been my lot to handle,” he dispatched in late August. Just days before, Allen had managed to secure an interview with the rebel general himself in Tétouan, Morocco. When asked, “How long, now that your coup has failed in its objectives, is the massacre to go on?” the dictator-in-waiting answered, “There can be no compromise, no truce. . . . I shall save Spain from Marxism at whatever cost.”

Allen sought clarification. “That means that you will have to shoot half Spain?” To which Franco replied, “I repeat, at whatever cost.”

More than a massacre, Badajoz was a preview. Advancing north, the Nationalist forces became what one historian calls a “column of death,” carving a path of blood and fire as they traveled up the Vía de la Plata toward Madrid. During three years of civil war, the province became both graveyard and laboratory—a proving ground for industrialized brutality, which Franco’s Nazi allies would later export across Europe.

Victory for the Nationalists came in 1939 and would last for thirty-six years. But the ghosts of Francoism—and of its victims—outlived the regime’s apparent passing. Today a low-level war still rages on this terrain, but with a much less visible target: the consciousness and soul of Spain itself. The fire this time burns through memory, as a new generation of Spain’s leaders seeks to master what the people are allowed to remember—mirroring far-right movements across Europe and beyond.

Unlike countless atrocities buried by silence, Badajoz had witnesses. The brutality in Extremadura almost certainly would have vanished into historical footnotes were it not for the foreign correspondents who crossed the border to report beyond the reach of censors.

Alongside colleagues from French and British publications, Allen and the New York Herald Tribune’s John T. Whitaker documented the horrors in real time. Their dispatches, splashed across front pages from Lisbon to Paris and London to New York, converted rumor into documented fact. António Salazar’s fledgling regime in Portugal also sent correspondents—with clear instructions to favor the rebel cause—but no spin could soften the horror. Even the sanctioned pens of a compliant press could not suppress the sensory weight of what journalists saw.

Franco and his commanders learned quickly from the PR disaster. While abstract slogans about purging Reds and disciplining strikers still resounded in the corridors of power, the photographs and reports transformed local atrocity into global indignation, briefly tilting global opinion toward Madrid’s democratically elected government. But only for a moment. Over the ensuing three years of war, the world’s great democracies—Britain, France, the United States—chose a posture of strategic indifference, eyes wide shut as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy helped the Nationalists modernize terror against civilian populations. Their only real concern? That no one challenge Capital. “We English hate fascism,” British prime minister Stanley Baldwin reportedly told a colleague in 1936, “but we loathe Bolshevism as much.”

Meanwhile, to ensure there would be no more journalists bearing witness from across the Caya, Franco unleashed a brutal campaign of censorship and propaganda that blanketed Spain in silence for decades. The border became not just a line between nations but a fault line between truth and control, the reek of reality and the mask of ideology.

Of course, the world would soon have other evidence of where fascist ideologies lead: genocide, world war, the mechanized annihilation of entire peoples. But this terror was both exposed and over by 1945. Franco died thirty years later, and he did so peacefully in his bed clutching the mummified hand of Saint Teresa—not at the end of a rope or before a tribunal, but swaddled in power to the very last breath. Fascism in Spain was not defeated. It simply ran out of time.

In its aftermath, the so-called transition to democracy was framed as a triumph of moderation, a masterclass in political compromise. In reality, it was more like negotiated amnesia. King Juan Carlos, handpicked by Franco himself, inherited not just the throne but the delicate machinery of authoritarian rule. He opened the country to the world, yes—but held tight to his lifetime mandate. To move forward, Spain decided not to look back. Instead of reckoning with the dictatorship’s crimes, the government signed a contract with silence. The Pacto del Olvido—the Pact of Forgetting—was agreed upon by both the left and the right. No trials. No truth commissions. No accountability. It was a political ceasefire disguised as healing.

Entire generations of Spaniards thus grew up with no real understanding of what happened between 1936 and 1975. Schools more or less skirted the subject. Textbooks tiptoed around atrocity or simply omitted it. In many homes, the only history available came from aging fascist grandparents who romanticized the regime and recited myths polished by decades of propaganda. The Pact didn’t just suppress the past; it created a breeding ground where lies could flourish.

But forgetting is not the same as forgiving, and silence is not peace. The truth was not gone—it was being forced to whisper.

One morning in 1978, someone left a bit of folk poetry on the wall outside the house of Felisa Casatejada. She ran the butcher’s shop in a small village tucked into the scorched plains of Badajoz. The message, daubed in paint with the subtlety of a brick, read: “En casa de la carnicera se venden huesos rojos para el cocido.” At the butcher’s house, red bones are sold for stew.

The villagers had done the unthinkable. For the first time since the civil war, a mass grave of Republican soldiers was exhumed. Bones had surfaced; history had spoken. Like all good truths, this one started in the dirt and spread. But with political leaders so reluctant to confront the past, the movement it spawned would take time.

The Ley de Memoria Histórica, passed in 2007, marked a turning point. It acknowledged the victims of Franco’s regime, allocated funding for exhumations, and ordered the removal of fascist symbols from public spaces. The children and grandchildren of the silenced started to dig—sometimes with spades, sometimes with subpoenas. Across Spain, quiet hills and fallow fields began to give up their secrets: mass graves hidden under olive groves, along roadside ditches, behind crumbling walls. Bodies stacked like firewood, wrapped in remnants of uniforms or Sunday clothes. Toothbrushes and wedding rings. Rosaries. According to official figures from the Ministry of Justice, there are 2,567 mass graves throughout the country and more than 114,000 missing persons waiting to be identified.

With these exhumations comes the smell. Not literal anymore, not always. But something unmistakable—the whiff of old violence, of unfinished business. The air carries a moral weight, an atmosphere thick with the recognition of justice long denied. It began to cling again—to national identity, to civic memory. In newspaper headlines about unearthed graves. In classrooms where students ask why they never learned about the war and turn to twisted YouTubers to fill the void left by silence. In bitter debates over statues, street names, and the mausoleum at the Valley of the Fallen, which Franco had built as a memorial to all who died in the civil war and where the dictator himself was interred.

Even cinema caught the scent. Pedro Almodóvar’s 2021 film Parallel Mothers ends not with a kiss or twist but with the slow, methodical exhumation of a Civil War mass grave. No dialogue, no fanfare: just dirt, bones, and the dignity of those who had waited eighty years to be counted. In a country still allergic to the word “dictatorship,” it was a more radical act than any speech. The scene does what the state long wouldn’t: it looks. It listens. It kneels.

Almodóvar didn’t just tell a story—he staged a reckoning. The following year, the Ley de Memoria Democrática was passed, taking a more assertive approach to dealing with the legacy of the Franco regime. While the earlier law left much of the heavy lifting to families and volunteer associations, the new law finally put the state in charge of locating the disappeared—something it had been politely avoiding for decades. The legislation went further by declaring the Franco regime illegal, annulling its political convictions, and introducing penalties for glorifying the dictatorship. The message was clear: Spain had decided, democratically, that the best way to move on is to actually confront its past. And since then the soil has continued to shift. The provincial government of Cáceres, together with the Asociación Memorial en el Cementerio de Cáceres, recently announced a bold plan: to exhume the estimated three hundred victims from a mass grave in the town’s cemetery by 2026—just shy of a century after their deaths.

All this was a start, but it was also deeply contested. Today, half a century after the return of democracy, efforts to name the nameless and rebury the forgotten meet growing resistance. Opening graves opens wounds, it is said. The grandchildren of the vanquished search for the dead while the genealogical and ideological heirs of the executioners memorialize the old regime and seek to rehabilitate Franco’s legacy. Instead of uniforms, they are dressed in suits and seated in parliaments. Their ideas are vintage—hierarchy, purity, obedience—but their delivery has gotten an upgrade: polished videos, algorithmic outrage, history by rigged news feed. What was once declared by firing squad is now spoken into microphones and retweeted into relevance.

That’s just what happened last month when MP Sergio Rodríguez, speaking in the Balearic Parliament as a member of the far-right, ultra-nationalist Vox party, invoked April 1, 1939—the day Franco declared the Civil War over—not as a solemn end to a national tragedy, but as a triumph. He stood at the people’s podium and called it Victory Day.

Born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and midwifed by generational denial, Vox has seized on this buried legacy, positioning itself as guardian of the country’s “true history.” Through leverage in parliamentary coalitions, its members have dragged the traditional right—the Partido Popular (PP), founded by ex-Francoist ministers but traditionally wary of outright revisionism—ever closer to its roots. In regions where Vox has gained power, it has made it its mission to roll back memory laws, strip away funding for disinterments, and reconsecrate silence.

When exhumations at the Valley of the Fallen were announced in 2019, Vox sued to stop them, decrying political “vengeance.” The sentiment is that “the civilized thing to do is not to disturb the repose of the dead,” as one party member later put it. When allies in Andalusia erased memorials to Franco’s victims, another Vox leader explained, “We won’t pay to spread lies.” Plaques honoring Republicans executed by Franco’s forces were removed in Madrid after a conservative-led city council halted a memorial project, arguing that victims from both sides of the Civil War should be honored and QR codes should be used in place of names.

In these erasures, Old Testament rhetoric has become a weapon of choice. Vox president Santiago Abascal frames the nation as a divinely ordained Promised Land needing salvation from “invaders” (immigrants, secularists, feminists). At rallies he speaks of the sacred fatherland while evoking Santiago Matamoros—St. James the Moor-slayer—and a new Reconquista, the Christian holy war that expelled Muslims and culminated in Catholic monarchy.

And so the cycle threatens to begin again—not with tanks in the streets, but with language in the legislature. Not with mass graves freshly dug, but with old ones left sealed in the name of “reconciliation” and letting sleeping dogs lie, as long as they are on one side.

Far-right manifestos to this effect proliferate. The latest, published in March, begins “We, Spaniards grateful to Franco, want to raise our voice.” It was signed by more than 1,200 people, among them 1981 coup leader Antonio Tejero, Manos Limpias (Clean Hands) chief Miguel Bernad Remón, retired judges, and military officers. Praising the “prosperity” of the dictatorship while blithely ignoring its repression, it is part of a larger effort—Platform 2025—to protest the government’s plans to commemorate the transition to democracy on the semicentennial of Franco’s death later this year.

In Extremadura in particular, the regional president, PP member María Guardiola, initially made strong statements against the extreme right. In June 2023, after regional elections, she declared, “I cannot let into government those who deny sexist violence, those who are dehumanizing immigrants, and those who throw the LGTBI flag in the trash.” Pressed by a journalist, she insisted: “I am a woman of my word. . . . I will not govern with Vox.” But her word didn’t last a news cycle. By July, under Madrid’s orders, she had promptly signed a coalition agreement. The chance to steal away a traditionally socialist fiefdom was too important to squander.

Now, the regional government has sought to repeal the Ley de Memoria Democrática. In its place, leaders have drafted a “Concordia Law” that erases distinctions between victims and perpetrators, halts exhumations, purges uncomfortable words, and promotes a sanitized narrative of Spain’s past. “Dictatorship” has been disappeared and would no longer appear in official language. “Repression” has vanished. Even the word “Francoism” is gone. The effect is not just revisionism but ritual erasure: a kind of political dry cleaning, laundering history until it smells like nothing at all.

The move reflects a national pattern. From Castilla y León to Valencia, Vox has successfully pressured the PP to dismantle historical memory policies. With these new lords, the word “memory” itself becomes suspect. In textbooks, in museums, on public plaques, reality is bleached, the past reduced to neutral nouns and fuzzy abstractions. A massacre becomes a “conflict.” A coup against a democratically elected government and an ensuing war against it becomes a “difference of opinion.”

These patterns of institutional forgetting—the control of language, the reframing of history, the bureaucratic scrubbing of uncomfortable truths—travel with alarming ease. In the United States, built on its own mass graves and selective amnesia, the same techniques are being deployed under Trump—and likewise in concert with people who once condemned him. “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc.” J. D. Vance wrote in 2016. “Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.” On Facebook, he worried to a friend that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

Now, with Vance’s blessing, the Trump administration has deemed hundreds of words and phrases off-limits, from “accessible” and “diversity” to “LGBT” and “vulnerable populations.” The full list amounts to a thesaurus of evasion, each edit a tiny shovel of dirt over the graves of truth. In a stealth act of jingoism, the Department of Defense recently sanitized a page dedicated to Ira Hayes, a Native American Marine immortalized in one of the most iconic images in American history: the flag raising at Iwo Jima. “Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military,” the Pentagon’s press secretary explained.

Meanwhile, the Department of Education is to be closed entirely. The head of the National Archives was fired, replaced for now by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Pentagon is halting extremism training aimed at rooting out white nationalism in the military. The U.S. Naval Academy removed Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from its library—while Mein Kampf, of course, remains. Even the Department of Agriculture now polices its lexicon, stripping “equity” from grant programs. All in the name of “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” as one executive order puts it, railing against “divisive narratives.”

And that’s just at the federal level. In red states, the erasure has been less red tape and more chainsaw. In Florida, students are told that slavery “developed skills” among the enslaved. The state’s Stop WOKE Act bans lessons that might cause “psychological distress,” particularly for those most comforted by history in its heavily edited form. A Texas school district insists we teach “both sides” of the Holocaust, while Oklahoma mandates the Ten Commandments.

In all this, the past isn’t just contested. It’s being actively dismantled, manipulated, weaponized—hollowed out and repackaged as a white nationalist fable in which oppression is at best a footnote, and fascism just another policy preference.

The Pacto del Olvido had its American counterpart in the Lost Cause myth—the decades of Confederate memorials framing traitors as heroes and slavery as a “states’ rights” dispute. Now, the GOP accelerates the lie. The same party that bans books now lauds Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy,” a phrase also used to describe Franco’s black-and-white Spain. In April, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared Confederate Heritage Month—indulging, for the thirty-second time, an annual request from the Sons of Confederate Veterans to memorialize their legacy.

Never reckoning with its own past, America, it seems, is now sharing Spain’s fate. No truth commissions, no reparations. Instead, fierce backlash to memory—“It appears the purpose of the 1619 Project is to delegitimize America,” a Federalist writer contended—and narratives of a nation invaded.

To say nothing of the flames. Last year, a fervent Trump supporter running for office in Missouri filmed herself setting two books ablaze. Three months later, Christian nationalist podcaster Stew Peters implored his hundreds of thousands of followers “to go into these public schools and rip the filth off of these shelves and destroy it. To remove it from the face of the planet for all of eternity, to turn it to ash.” Asked by Newsweek for a statement, he replied: “Kill it with fire.”

But the air remembers what the textbooks omit and the strongmen burn. The unmarked graves in Tulsa, chain gangs in Alabama, caged children at the border—their history will outlast the censors, as have the truth about Francoism and the course of fascism. The smoke is a sign, and if history doesn’t repeat, it does, at the very least, leave a smell. Faint at first. Then lingering. Then impossible to ignore.

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